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Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
“Not a county in Ireland wholly escaped the potato disease, and many of the south- ern and western counties were soon in actual famine. A peculiar form of fever- famine fever it was called-began to show itself everywhere. A terrible dysentery set in as well. In some districts the people died in hundreds daily from fever, dysentery, or sheer starvation.”
(Justin McCarthy)
To compound the existing miseries, in 1846, the English Parliament passed a Coercion Act, one provision of which was that anyone found out of his abode between sunset and sunrise was liable to fourteen years transportation. As a result, countless numbers of those wretches who had been evicted and who were unable, for whatever reason, to obtain admis- sion to the already overflowing workhouses, were seized by both the police and military for “being abroad” and transported. Thousands more were arrested and imprisoned under the Vagrancy Act for wandering without having any visible means of support.
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