The Misery of the Potato Famine

WILLIAM STEUART TRENCH, Realities of Irish Life (1847)

As an Irish land agent, William Steuart Trench (1808–1872) was a firsthand witness to the ravages of the potato famine. A fungus, the potato blight, attacked the crop repeatedly during the years 1845–1848. The British government’s limited efforts to provide help for the Irish were wholly inadequate. The Irish poor, whose diets consisted of little other than potatoes, were the victims of a Malthusian demographic disaster; between 1841 and 1851 Ireland’s population fell between 20 and 25 percent. Estimates of the death toll range from around 750,000 to double that figure. Hundreds of thousands of the more fortunate Irish emigrated.

I did not see a child playing in the streets or on the roads; no children are to be seen outside the doors but a few sick and dying children. . . . In the districts which are now being depopulated by starvation, coffins are only used for the more wealthy. The majority were taken to the grave without any coffin, and buried in their rags: in some instances even the rags are taken from the corpse to cover some still living body. . . .

I then proceeded to Cappagh, which is a coast-guard station, in the midst of a starving population, which had been collected round mines which are not now worked. . . . On the evening before, I had heard of a boy living on the road to Cappagh, who had seen a dog tearing the head, and neck, and ribs of a man. I wished to learn the truth of this from the boy himself. He told me that the fact was so, and that his little brother had on another occasion seen another dog tearing the head of a man. The younger boy remarked that he had seen the remains of the head the day before in an adjoining field. I asked him to lead me to the spot, which he did, and I there found a part of the human head and under-jaw, gnawed, but marked with blood. I placed it under ground. . . .

On arriving at Cappagh, in the first house I saw a dead child lying in a corner of the house, and two children, pale as death, with their heads hanging down upon their breasts sitting by a small fire. The father had died on the road coming home from work. One of the children, a lad seventeen years of age, had been found, in the absence of his mother, who was looking for food, lying dead, with his legs held out of the fire by the little child which I then saw lying dead. Two other children had also died. The mother and the two children still alive had lived on one dish of barley for the last four days. On entering another house the doctor said, “Look there, Sir, you can’t tell whether they are boys or girls.” Taking up a skeleton child, he said, “Here is the way it is with them all; their legs swing and rock like the legs of a doll, they have the smell of mice.”

From William Steuart Trench, Realities of Irish Life (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), pp. 394-398.