School: Tráigh Omna (roll number 13092)
- Location:
- An Driseán Mór, Co. Chorcaí
- Teacher: Mícheál Ó Dálaigh
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0298, Page 068
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- XML School: Tráigh Omna
- XML Page 068
- XML “The Famine of 1847”
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
- My great grandfather at the time lived in Lettertinlish two miles east of the town of Skibbereen. He and his family were fairly comfortable, but other farmers had to boil "swedes" and "praiseach bhuidhe" when the potatoes had failed. This man Cormac MacCarthaigh had 15 bags of wheat in his barn which he sold in November for 30/- a bag, and in the following year in February it had risen to £3 a bag.
One day as the dinner was being prepared a poor starving woman came into the kitchen and asked for food. The woman of the house had a pot of potatoes boiled, and she gave her the contents of the pot in an apron, and then turned round to boil another pot. So not everyone ate donkeys around Skibbereen (as this nick-name lives to the present day)
The corpses in the Skibbereen district were all buried in one large plot in the Abbey grave yard.
When Queen Victoria paid a visit to Cobh on stepping ashore a large inscription met her gaze-"Arise Ye Dead from Skibbereen,
And Come to Cork to welcome your Queen.Turning on her heel, she boarded the vessel and never fulfilled her engagements in Cork City. So Cobh became Queenstown to the Gaill
