In 1896, nearly fifty years after the Great Famine

In 1896, nearly fifty years after the Great  Famine, Emily Lawless wrote of Connemara and neighbouring Co. Mayo:

"Only last summer, at Ballinahinch in Connemara, the present writer was told by an old man that he remembered being sent by his master on a message to Clifden, the nearest town, and seeing the people crawling along the road, and that, returning the same way a few hours later, many of the same people were lying dead under the walls or upon the grass at the roadside. 

That this is no fancy picture is clear from local statistics. 

No part of Ireland suffered worse than Galway and Mayo, both far more densely populated then than at present. 

In this very region of Connemara an inspector has left on record, having to give orders for the burying of over a hundred and thirty bodies found along the roads within his own district.

Mr. W.E. Forster has left terrible descriptions of the scenes of which he was himself an eye-witness.

"The town of Westport," he tells us in one of his reports, "was itself a strange and fearful sight, like what we read of in beleaguered cities.

Its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers, sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-struck look--a mob of starved, almost naked women around the poor-house clamouring for soup tickets. 

The survivors were like walking skeletons--the men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand. 

When there before I had seen cows at almost every cabin, and there were besides many sheep and pigs owned in the village. 

But now the sheep were all gone--all the cows, all the poultry killed--only one pig left; the very dogs which had barked at me before had disappeared--no potatoes; no oats.

As we went along our wonder was not that the people died, but that they lived.

I have no doubt whatever that in any other country the mortality would have been far greater; that many lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the long apprenticeship to want in which the Irish peasant had been trained, and by that lovely touching charity which prompts him to share his scanty meal with his starving neighbour."

Picture from "The Death Census of Black ’47: Eyewitness Accounts of Ireland’s Great Famine."