School: St John of God Convent, Rathdowney (roll number 16203)
- Location:
- Rathdowney, Co. Laois
- Teacher: The Sisters
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0828, Page 234
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- (continued from previous page)Famine '47 '48
Ireland was described as "A garden and a grave".
Mr Michael Peters Harristown told me that there was a Boiler in the Square Rathdowney from which the poor people were fed on Indian Meal. Mr Barber Ballybuggy also dispensed meal from a huge boiler in an out-house.
Another public boiler was installed in the Barrack of Mrs Carroll. The mark is still to be seen in a wall. Mr Peters said that there was a family named Reads of Harristown. Five of them died, the eldest and youngest lived.
A feature about it was that no sooner had they eaten, than they were hungry again, it seemed as if there was hunger in the atmosphere. One man was so weak, that he died after eating a loaf. They ate Aberdeen turnips and they used to cut the eyes out of the seed potatoes and ate the rest.
Another man, told me that the few years previous the crop was so plentiful(continues on next page)
- Collector
- Sadie Costigan
- Gender
- Female
- Age
- 17
