"[224] And then the starving people are blamed for finding
fault, and for being suspicious. What else, he asks, can they be? How
can a man dying of starvation have patience?
The chief places he visited were Balla, Claremorris, Ballyhaunis, and
Hollymount. The scenes he witnessed were, he says, scarcely if at all
less harrowing than those which had been reported from the locality of
Skibbereen. This writer, a Protestant, conversed, amongst others, with
the priests of the districts which he visited, and of them he says: "The
Catholic clergy are the only persons who can form a tolerably correct
estimate of the numbers of persons who are now dying of starvation. The
Catholic clergy know all the people of their respective parishes--_no
one else does_; the Catholic priest knows them as the shepherd does his
sheep; he knows them individually; he knows not only every lineament of
every individual face, but he knows, too, every ailment of body--every
care of mind--every necessity of circumstance from which he is
suffering. The Catholic clergy of the West attend every death-bed: the
poor there are all Catholics. The Catholic clergy know, then, to what it
is that the extraordinary mortality now prevalent is owing--_and they
set it down as the immediate consequence of want and starvation_.
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