The latter part of the answer means just this:  that the landlords were already turning the public works to their private gain, by getting numbers of their well-to-do tenants, often with their carts and horses, upon those works, in order to obtain their own rents more securely; a practice of which they were repeatedly accused by the Board of Works’ people; and that, therefore, if townland boundaries were conceded, the landlords would have increased power, and a still greater amount of the same kind of jobbing would be the inevitable result.

It is not surprising that at this period society in Ireland was shaken to its foundations.  Terror and dismay pervaded every class; the starving poor suffered so intensely, and in such a variety of ways, that it becomes a hard task either to narrate or listen to the piteous story; it sickens and wrings the heart, whilst it fills the eyes with the testimony of irrepressible sorrow.  To say the people were dying by the thousand of sheer starvation conveys no idea of their sufferings; the expression is too general to move our feelings.  To think that even one human creature should, in a rich and a Christian land, die for want of a little bread, is a dreadful reflection; and yet, writes an English traveller in Ireland, the thing is happening before my eyes every day, within a few hours of London, the Capital of the Empire, and the richest city in the world.

O’Brien’s Bridge is a small town on the borders of Limerick, but in the County Clare.  The accounts received from this place during the first half of October were, that nothing could restrain the people from rising en masse but an immediate supply of food.  On one of the admission days, one hundred and thirty persons were taken into the Scariff Workhouse, out of six thousand applicants!  Scariff is the union in which O’Brien’s Bridge and Killaloe are situate.  Of Killaloe, the Rev. Dr. Vaughan, afterwards Bishop of the Diocese, wrote, about the same time, that there was some promise of fifty or sixty being employed out of six hundred.  The Relief Committee, of which he was a member, had to borrow money on the stones broken by the poor labourers for macadamizing the roads, in order to pay them their wages.  Being paid, they were dismissed, as the Committee could not, in any way, get funds to employ them further.  “We are a pretty Relief Committee,” exclaims the reverend gentleman, “not having a quart of meal, or the price of it, at our disposal.”  He adds, with somewhat of sorrow and vexation of spirit:  “When those starving creatures ask us for bread, we could give them stones, if they were not already mortgaged.”