Turning over the public journals during this period is the saddest of sad duties.  It is like picking one’s way over a battle-field strewn with the dead and dying.  “Starvation and death in Dingle;” “Deaths at Castlehaven;” “Death of a labourer on his way to the Workhouse;” “Coroner’s inquests in Mayo;” “Four more deaths on the roads at Skibbereen.”  Such are specimens of the ghastly headings that lie before us.  One of those deaths at Skibbereen calls for more than a passing word; it is that of Jeremiah Hegarty.  As in M’Kennedy’s case we have here what is seldom attainable, an account of the evidence given at the inquest upon his remains.  He was a widower and lived with his married daughter, Mary Driscoll, at Licknafon.  Driscoll, his son-in-law, was a small farmer.  He had a little barley in his haggard, some of which he was from time to time taking privately out of the stack to keep himself and his family from dying of starvation, although Curley Buckley, his landlord’s driver,[184] had put a cross and keepers on it.

Mary Driscoll, daughter of the deceased, being examined, deposed that her father eat a little barley stirabout on Saturday morning, but had not enough; “none of us,” she said, “had enough.  We all lived together—­nine in family, not including the infant at my breast.  My father went to work; my husband worked with him; three pints of barley meal was the only thing we had from Thursday before. I had no drink for the infant,” she said; by which, I suppose, the wretched being meant the nourishment which nature supplies to infants whose mothers are not in a state of starvation; “it ate nothing.  On Thursday we had nothing but a quarter weight of Croshanes.[185] We had but a little barley—­about a barrel, and, God help us, we could not eat any more of that same, as the landlord put a cross on it, I mean it was marked for the rent.”  She here gave the name of the landlord, on being asked to do so.  He wanted, she said, to keep the barley for the last rent, L2 17s.  She simply and frankly acknowledged they had been taking some of it, but their condition was such that it melted the heart of the landlord’s driver, Curley Buckley, who told them “to be taking a little of it until the landlord would come.”  The poor Driscolls were not bad tenants, they owed their landlord the last rent only, but they were responsible for another debt.  “We owed,” Mary Driscoll said, “ten shillings for the seed of the barley; we would sooner die, all of us, than not to pay.  Since a fortnight,” continued this wretched woman, in her rude but expressive English; “since a fortnight past, there was not one of us eat enough any day.”

Driscoll, the husband of the last witness, was examined.  He said:  “If he” (meaning the deceased) “was paid the wages due to him for working on the road, it would have relieved him, and he might be now alive; but,” he added, “even if we had received the money, it would be hardly sufficient to keep us alive.”  Referring to his own case, he said he was but one day working on the road, and that he was six weeks looking for that same.