The Famine, The Great  Irish Lie

As with so many things these days, history is being revisited and revised. The latest is that the Great Hunger was not as bad as we were lead to believe.

For many things, the rewriters of history are able to place a new spin on accounts because there is not verifiable information to prevent such occurrences. Unfortunately for the people of Ireland, this is not the case here. There are hundreds of accounts from journalists who were in Ireland and wrote of the horrors they were seeing with their own eyes. Here are a few excerpts from journalists at the time.

February 10, 1846
The Times
IRELAND. (From Our Own Correspondent.) DUBLIN
 

THE DISTRESS I regret to say that there is not the slightest mitigation in the accounts of the destitution received today. We are now in the midst of a second winter, the frost and snow of Christmas having apparently reset in with equal if not increased severity, so that any prospect of amelioration is just now as remote as ever. The progress of distress in the county of Cork may be learned from the Southern Reporter of Saturday: "The duty of publishing reports of the inquests held on persons who have 'died by starvation' has now become so frequent, and such numbers are daily reaching us from every part of the county, that the limits of our space to not admit of their publication. Our reporter sends particulars of 15 of such cases from Bantry yesterday, and mentions that 20 more had occurred during the week, but inquests could not be held; and we received this morning from Mallow reports of 11 inquests held by Mr. Richard Jones on persons who had died from want of food. Communications pour in from every district, a tithe of which we could not find room for, stating similar appalling facts. Our reporters are daily occupied in attending meetings throughout the county, and there are as many applications to that effect as would require a corps equal to the Times, and a sheet of equal size, to present a daily record of."

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January 10, 1847
Cork Examiner

"SKIBBEREEN. In the parish of Kilmore 14 died on Sunday; 3 of these wer buried in coffins, 11 were buried without other covering than the rages they wore when alive. And on gentleman, a good and charitable man, speaking of this case, says 'The distress is so appalling, that we must throw away all feelings of delicacy;' and another says, 'I would rather give 1s. to a starving man than 4s.6d. for a coffin.' "140 died in the Skibbereen Workhouse in one way; 3 have died in one day! And Mr. M'Carthy Downing states that 'they came into the house merely and solely for the purpose of getting a coffin.' "The Rev. Mr. Clancy visits a farm, and there, in one house, 'he administered the last rites of religion to six persons.' On a subsequent occasion, he 'prepared for death a father and daughter lying in the same bed.' "The Rev. Mr. Caulfield sees '13 members of one family lying down in fever.'

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November 1851
Historic Notes on the Irish Census

We are now in 1851; another decade has passed; another periodical enumeration has taken place; the returns have been received by the authorities; and the world has learned the appalling fact, that Ireland has lost, in actual numbers, in somewhat less than five years, 1,649,340 of her inhabitants. Up to the year 1845 nothing had occurred to justify a doubt but that the ordinary rate of increase would have been maintained. In the latter end of that year, the island, then in a state of comparative prosperity, was visited with a famine, which, in its direct devastating effect, and in the consequences which followed from it, has no parallel in history. To that famine, thousands upon thousands yielded their lives; to the pestilence that followed it, thousands more; while, to avoid the horrors of both, myriads of panic-struck inhabitants sailed from our shores.

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