But capitalists having been alarmed, meal was not imported in sufficient quantities, with the result that Indian corn rose to eighteen pounds a ton, when it might have been laid in at the rate of eight pounds a ton.

Had Lord John Russell’s policy come first, and that of Sir Robert Peel subsequently, the result would have been very different.

The fight over the Corn Law question in England at the time was decidedly an injury to Ireland, because the Protectionists minimised the danger of famine in the winter of 1845 for fear of the calamity being made a pretext for Free Trade.

Dealing with an unforeseen calamity of such stupendous magnitude at long range from Downing Street entailed delay; and public relief, waiting until official investigation had tardily reported the hardships, suffered in the truly distressful country.

The state of things round Bantry, of which I had accurate knowledge, was appalling.  I knew of twenty-three deaths in the poorhouse in twenty-four hours.  Again, on a relief road, two hours after I had passed, on my ride home I saw three of the poor fellows stretched corpses on the stones they had been breaking.

The Registrar-General for Ireland, Mr. William Donelly, officially stated that five hundred thousand one-roomed cabins had disappeared between the census before the famine and the one after it.

Whole families used to starve in their cabins without their plight being discovered until the stench of their decaying corpses attracted notice.

Some superstition also prevented even the children from eating the myriads of blackberries which ripened on the bushes.

Directly the calamity was comprehended, the English poured money into the country with unbounded generosity, but the management was bad.

The relief works organised by the Government took the form of draining and road-making.  This entailed delay, owing to the preliminary surveying, and when employment could be given, the people were too emaciated and feeble to work.  All over Ireland unfinished roads leading half way to places of no consequence are to-day grass-grown memorials of that ghastly effort of State assistance.

Almost the earliest of the private soup-kitchens for the relief of the sufferers was that opened at Dingle under the joint initiative of Lady Ventry, Mrs. Hickson, my future mother-in-law, and Mrs. Hussey, my mother.  So as not to pauperise the people, subscriptions of one penny a week were asked from every house in the town.  At ten in the morning those who wanted it could get a pint per head of really excellent soup for themselves and their families.  Those who were known to be able to pay had to contribute a penny; the really destitute had gratuitous relief.

So bad was the famine that people coming in from the country fell in the street never to rise again.  One woman was found lying on the outskirts of the town almost dead from starvation, her three children having succumbed beside her, and had she not been carried to the soup-kitchen she would not have survived them many hours.