From the archives: Wretched woman had to carry her son’s coffin to Turlough

PART ONE

By Tom Gillespie

IN February 1847, The Telegraph or Connaught Ranger published harrowing accounts of deaths from starvation during the Great Famine.

The newspaper reported as follows:

We are daily witnessing horrid sights in Castlebar from starvation. A few days ago a poor young man died in Staball, for want of food. After much time had been consumed in procuring a coffin, which was effected in three days after his death, we were horrified to behold the poor mother of the deceased carrying on her back the dead body by means of straw ropes at either end of the coffin, her only companion being an old woman.

In this manner did the wretched parent convey the remains of her son to the burial place at Turlough, a distance of nearly four miles. HORRIBLE.

Some days since a poor woman, a near relative, we hear, of a certain agent in this county, a ‘J.P.’ and Grand Juror by courtesy, died in Chapel Street, from starvation.

For want of a coffin her remains lay exposed for four or five days. At that the police, we learn, procured a shell and had her interred. The deceased was till recently an inmate of the far famed poorhouse of Castlebar.

Another wretched woman died in Staball last week, and for want of a coffin she lay on the damp floor of a hut for some days. A plate was laid on her face to keep the soot drops from it.

In Gallowshill another poor woman died from want; she remained from Sunday morning until Wednesday evening unburied, for want of a coffin, which was at length procured by the subscriptions of a few individuals.

Last week a female mendicant died at Coursepark, near Rathbane, in a house where she got shelter for the night. All efforts to procure a coffin for her proved fruitless, and a few days after her decease, far gone in decomposition, the body was laid on some wattles, tied with hay ropes, and in this horrible state it was borne through the streets of our town to the old church yard for interment.

It is not necessary for us to continue the soul-harrowing catalogue of deaths which daily and hourly occur in this town and neighbourhood from actual starvation, and upon which no inquests are held.

Meanwhile on June 12, 1850, the following correspondence, addressed to the editor, Frederick Cavendish, was published in The Telegraph or Connaught Ranger, and dated Ballinrobe, June 6, 1850:

My dear Mr. Cavendish - I beg you will allow me to publish in your excellent journal, for the information of the Irish and British public, that destitution and all its horrors are as rife in this country at present as any of the preceding years. I can no longer forbear calling public attention to the conduct of those who have the people’s lives in their hands.

On yesterday, June 5, having heard in the town (Ballinrobe), that the paupers in the principal workhouse were in a deplorable state, I thought it was my duty to visit the establishment, having called the master and porter to accompany me. I visited the probationary wards, and never have I felt more shocked than to find the wretched occupants in scores heaped upon each other in the most hideous disorder, particularly in the female ward, where there were whole families, including male and female children, huddled closely and in such numbers that I could not enter.

They lay in their rags upon the earthen floor, amidst stench intolerable; nights and days they eat on cold floors, without bed or covering of any kind. This shocking fact I have felt constrained, by a sense of duty, to register upon the records of the house.

A few days previously I found about 300 children crammed into one room at mid-day without a person to instruct them, or guide them. While this state of things exist within the house, the poor are denied out-door relief. They drop daily on our streets and highways, exhausted and inanimate, until, forced by a terrible necessity, they are compelled, when recovery is hopeless, to seek despairingly, its fatal precinct, as a climax for their misery.

Yours with great respect,

P. Conway, C.C.

Note: Sir Frederick Cavendish was founder, proprietor and editor of The Telegraph and Connaught Ranger.

Meanwhile, in their edition of November 25, 1846, the newspaper reported on fever in Castlebar, stating: Some time ago we predicted that want and starvation would bring other evils upon the poor; alas, we were right.

Fever, to an alarming extent, has broken out in the cabins of the starving poor in this town and neighbourhood.

Daily and hourly are the doors of the Roman Catholic Clergy beset with ‘sick calls’ to have the sacred rights of the Church administered to the sick and dying.

What is to become of the people under this second visitation? There is no fever hospital - no receptacle where the afflicted might be sheltered and the epidemic checked.

To all acquainted with the sooty, low and almost dilapidated cabins on the purlieus of Staball and Gallowshill, in the town of Castlebar, the capital of Mayo, it is needless for us to make any remarks, or offer a suggestion further than to say that in some of these piggeries on Gallowshill, the poor who were lately turned out of their cabins by Joseph Grey, the bailiff (the roofless walls of which now stand on that classic hill), have been sheltered by the merciful occupies of those which have not undergone the levelling process and where many of the ejected wretches are now lying in fever - some convalescent, others lying a second time, not being able to obtain nourishment sufficient to protect them from a renewed attack.

But what renders the case more distressing is that one family who acted as Samaritans to the homeless are now laying ill of fever, taken from those whom they had sheltered.

We have seen the matron of this family on Thursday last (November 19, 1846), trembling with cold, standing at the door of the Roman Catholic Curates, the Rev. Messers. Geraghty and Curley, waiting their arrival from country duty, to anoint some of her family sick of fever contracted as above stated.

Again we ask what is to become of the poor? Nay, what is to become of the inhabitants of filthy, neglected, and dilapidated Castlebar?