School: Ballyhaise
- Location:
- Ballyhaise, Co. Cavan
- Teacher: Thos. Plunkett
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0973, Page 336
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: Ballyhaise
- XML Page 336
- XML “Famine Times”
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
- Famine Times
The famine year was in 1846 and 1847. In 1845 the potatoes were so plentiful that the people threw them out behind the ditches to let anybody who liked take them. The blight came at night on the potatoes in the month of July the following year. The crops decayed in the ground. They grew but at the digging of them there were no roots in them. The English Government supplied the whole country with seed potatoes for the following year. It was in 1846 that the Indian meal was introduced and this was the food the people had instead of potatoes. The first Indian meal that was introduced in this county was ground in a mill in Bultersbridge. The Indian meal was the first Government relief and then workhouses were established through the district and in theses workhouses there was big boilers of porridge and everybody went to get this porridge. After the public works in 1848 and 1849, hundreds of people died with starvation and then the cholera broke out at that time also. The people who died with this epidemic were sewn up in(continues on next page)
- Collector
- Josephine Farrell
- Gender
- Female
- Age
- 14
- Informant
- Mrs Palligan
- Gender
- Female
- Age
- 70
