School: Cill Cholmáin, Shanagolden (roll number 4014)

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1. Famine Times

   

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   Famine Times
   (Another version)

   Stories of Famine Times.

   Many queer tales the workhouse of Rathkeale could tell, about the carryings on around there during the black and hungry years of the forties agone by, when the ditches along the roadside were plastered with creatures dying and dead from hunger or, God between us and all harm, maybe turned as black as your boot with the plague. It's often I heard my grand-father, aye and my father telling how the people dropped dead around those gate-posts, trying, the creatures, to crawl up to the steaming pot of 'yella buck', that they used to keep on the boil up there in the big building. Aye indeed, and how some had to be bet back from thrusting their naked hands into the pot, and glauming out fistfuls of the piping hot "inja male".

   I heard it said, too that there used be bonfires lighted on the avenue, and around the building there to purify the air, and every few hours, a doctor used come round to inspect junks of meat that had been run up on poles, and may St. Rock protect us, pulled down crawling with germs of the plague.

   Times were a fright then, and

   (continues on next page)

   

   Transcribed by a member of our volunteer transcription project.

   History Edit

   Topics

   1. time
      1. historical periods by name (~25)
         1. the great famine (~4,013)

   Language

   English

   Informant

   Patrick Cregan

   Gender

   Male

   Age

   Over 75

   Address

   Knockbweeheen, Co. Limerick