Rob Edwards
Nicholas Cummins - “The Famine In Skibbereen”
By the fall of 1846, the south and west of Ireland was in a horrible famine
Skibbereen, a town the remote southwest, didn't have enough suitable people to form a relief committee, and without this committee it was ineligible for government support
Public Works was the only employment, and it didn't pay enough to support one person, let alone a family
Nicholas Cummins, a magistrate from Cork, visited this area and was horrified. He wrote to the Duke of Wellington and to The Times, and influential London newspaper.
He describes one moment of his visit, when he went into an apparently deserted house to find 6 decrepit family members huddling in a corner, as pale and skinny as skeletons and barely hanging onto the last bit of life
After running into this one family, in only a few minutes he was surrounded by at least 200 other people like these who looked like “phantoms” who were screaming with “demonaic yells”
He also describes an instance where he was mobbed like this, and the clothes were nearly torn off of his body as he tried to escape the people clawing at him
Walks into another house and finds a mother who had literally just given birth, but her only possession was a sack across her loins
There are other horrible scenes like this that he describes, but the gist is that he is writing these letters with vivid descriptions of the horrors he saw in hopes of getting relief brought to these horribly unfortunate people
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