The Cork Workhouse was crowded to excess, and the number of deaths in it, at this time, was simply frightful:  they were one hundred and seventy-four in a single week—­more than one death in every hour.[214] In one day, in the beginning of February, there were forty-four corpses in the house; and on the 10th of that month one hundred bodies were conveyed for interment to a small suburban burial place near Cork.  Several persons were found dead in the streets; numbers of bodies were left unburied for want of coffins.  Under a shed at the Shandon guard-house lay some thirty-eight human beings; old and young, men, women, and infants of tenderest age, huddled together like so many pigs or dogs, on the ground, without any covering but the rags on their persons.[215]

The Limerick Examiner, in giving an account of the state of the poor in that city, publishes a day’s experience of one of the Catholic priests in the Parish of St. John.  In one day he was called to officiate at the death-beds of seven persons who were dying of starvation, the families of which they were members comprising, in all, twenty-three souls.  The wretched abodes in which he found them were much of the same character—­no beds, scarcely any clothing, no food, the children quite naked.  In one of those miserable dwellings he could not procure a light, to be used whilst administering the Sacraments to a dying woman; and such was the general poverty around, that the loan of a candle could not be obtained in the neighbourhood.  His last visit was to a girl in fever, who had had three relapses.  He found her father and mother tottering on their limbs from want.  The father said he had a dimness in his eyes, and he thought he would become mad from hunger before night.

Dublin, notwithstanding its many advantages, did not escape the all-pervading scourge.  In the month of December, 1846, there were seven hundred persons under treatment for dysentery in the South Union Workhouse, besides convalescents.  The disease proved more fatal than cholera.  Parochial meetings were held, and committees appointed to collect funds for the relief of the starving people; besides which a meeting of the citizens was convened at the Music Hall, on the 23rd of December, to form a general committee for the whole city.  In the unavoidable absence of the Lord Mayor, it was presided over by Alderman Staunton, Lord Mayor elect.  The meeting was very numerously attended by leading citizens and clergymen of various denominations.  Amongst the latter were the Most Rev. Dr. Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, and the Provost of Trinity College.  A committee was formed, whose duties were to raise funds, and, “by a due disbursement thereof,” for the relief of the necessitous, to endeavour to mitigate “the alarming and unparalleled distress of the poor of the city,” and so arrest the progress of “a train of evils that must otherwise follow in the track of famine.”