As soon as
their committee was in working order, they sent members of their body to
various parts of the country--more especially to the West--to make
inquiries, and to see things with their own eyes. Their reports, made in
a quiet, unexaggerated form, are amongst the most valuable testimonies
extant, as to the effects and extent of the Famine. The delegate who was
the first to explore portions of the West writes that, at Boyle (a
prosperous and important town), the persons who sought admission to the
Workhouse were in a most emaciated state, many of them declaring that
they had not tasted food of any kind for forty-eight hours; and he
learned that numbers of them had been living upon turnips and
cabbage-leaves for weeks. The truth of these statements was but too well
supported by the dreadfully reduced state in which they presented
themselves, the children especially being emaciated with starvation, and
ravenous with hunger. At Carrick-on-Shannon he witnessed what he calls a
most painful and heartrending scene--poor wretches in the last stage of
famine begging to be received into the house; women, who had six or
seven children, imploring that even two or three of them might be taken
in, _as their husbands were earning but 8d.
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