Page 337 - Demo

Chapter NiNe 337
A report by a member of the Society of Friends, and organization who never ceased in their eforts to help the people in those awful years states:
“Out of a population of two hundred and forty I found thirteen already dead from want. The survivors were like walking skeletons-the men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger, the children crying with pain, the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand. All the sheep were gone-all the cows-all the poultry killed-only one pig left-the very dogs which had barked at me before had disappeared. No potatoes-no oats.”
“.one of the tenants evicted died on the roadside. His wife and children were sent to the workhouse, where they died shortly afterwards.a tenant of another townland was evicted by the same agent. He died on the roadside. His wife had died previous to the eviction; his ten children were sent into the workhouse and there died. Another evicted at the same time, was dragged out of bed to the roadside, where he died the next day. His wife died of want previous to the eviction, and his children, eight in number, died in a few years in the workhouse.”
(John Mitchell)
So thickly did the people die of famine and the fever which accompanied it that on many occasions the dead were thrown uncoined into trenches. Other times they lay abandoned and uninterred simply because there was nobody around to bury them, or even if there was, then they were probably too weak for the task.