At a meeting of the Killarney Relief Committee, the Earl of Kenmare being in the chair, the parish priest, the Rev. B. O’Connor, made a statement, which, except as an illustration of the unprecedented misery to which the people had sunk, I would hesitate to reproduce.  He said:  “A man employed on the public works became sick.  His wife had an infant at her breast.  His son, who was fifteen years of age, was put in his place upon the works.  The infant at the mother’s breast,” said the rev. gentleman, amid the sensation of the meeting, “had to be removed, in order that this boy might receive sustenance from his mother, to enable him to remain at work.”  Another poor woman, the mother of eight children, when dying of want, was attended by the Rev. Mr. O’Connor.  She made her last request to him in these words:  “O Father O’Connor, won’t you interfere to have my husband get work, before the children die.”

“In December, 1846, matters seemed to have come to a climax, and on the evening of the 24th [Christmas Eve] I witnessed a scene which scarcely admits of description.  On that day a board was held at the Workhouse, for the admittance of paupers.  The claims of the applicants were, in many cases, inquired into, but after some time the applicants became so numerous, that any attempt to investigate the different cases was quite useless, and an order was then given by the members of the Board present, to admit all paupers, and at least to give them shelter, as but little food was to be had.  I shall never forget the scene which I that night witnessed:  mothers striving, by the heat of their own persons, to preserve the lives of their little ones; women stretching out their fleshless arms, imploring for food and shelter; old men tottering to the destination where they were to receive shelter.  The odour from the clothes and persons of those poor people was dreadfully offensive, and the absence of active complaints clearly showed that in many the hope of restoration was not to be expected.  On my visiting this scene next morning, eleven human beings were dead."[191]

Some twenty years after the famine-scourge had passed away, and over two millions of the Irish people with it, I visited Skibbereen.  Approaching the town from the Cork side, it looks rather an important place.  It is the seat of the Catholic bishop of Ross, and attention is immediately arrested by a group of fine ecclesiastical buildings, on an elevated plateau to the left, just beside the road, or street, I should rather say, for those buildings are the beginning of the town; they consist of a cathedral and a convent, with very commodious schools, and a pretty gothic chapel.  On the other side of the way is the schoolhouse, in shade of which the military were concealed on the day the Caharagh labourers invaded Skibbereen.  A short distance beyond the town, the wooded hill of Knockomagh, rising to a considerable height, overhangs Lough Hyne, one of the most beautiful spots in Ireland.