The winter and spring of 1822 continued very wet, and it was extremely difficult to perform any agricultural work.  Seed potatoes were excessively scarce, and the first relief that reached the country was a prudent and timely one; it consisted of fourteen hundred tons of seed potatoes, bought by the Government in England and Scotland.  Charitable persons at home also gave seed potatoes, cut into sets, to prevent their being used for food; yet, in many instances, those sets were taken out of the ground by the starving people and eaten.  Cork, Limerick, Kerry, Clare, Mayo, and Galway were the counties most severely visited.  These, according to the accounts given in the public journals of the time, were in a state of actual famine.  Potatoes were eight pence a stone in districts where they usually sold from one penny to two pence.  But although the potato had failed, food from the cereal crops was abundant and cheap enough if the people had money to buy it.  “There was no want of food of another description for the support of human life; on the contrary, the crops of grain had been far from deficient, and the prices of corn and oatmeal were very moderate.  The calamities of 1822 may, therefore, be said to have proceeded less from the want of food itself, than from the want of adequate means of purchasing it; or, in other words, from the want of profitable employment."[36] Poor Skibbereen, that got such a melancholy notoriety in the later and far more terrible Famine of ’47, was reported, in May, 1822, to be in a state of distress “horrible beyond description.”  Potatoes were not merely dear, they were inferior, not having ripened for want of sufficient heat; and, furthermore, they soured in the pits.  The use of such unwholesome food soon brought typhus fever and dysentery upon the scene, which slaughtered their thousands.  In parts of the West the living were unable to bury the dead, more especially in Achill, where, in many cases, the famine-stricken people were found dead on the roadside.  A Committee appointed by the House of Commons to investigate this calamity reported, amongst other things, that the Famine was spread over districts representing half the superficies of the country, and containing a population of 2,907,000 souls.

There are no statistics to give an accurate knowledge of the numbers that died of want in this Famine, and of the dysentery and fever which followed.  If the Census of 1821 can be relied on, which I much doubt, the famine and pestilence of the succeeding year did not in the least check the growth of the population, as it increased in the ten years from 1821 to 1831, fifteen per cent.; an increase above the average, even in the absence of any disturbing cause.