School: Cluain Meacan (roll number 11451)
- Location:
- Cloonmackon, Co. Kerry
- Teacher: Liam Ó Catháin
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0407, Page 106
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: Cluain Meacan
- XML Page 106
- XML “The Famine”
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
- The famine was known as Black forty seven. People ate potatoes three times a day. They also ate turnips and boiled turnips. There was a landlord in Derry named George Sandes. He used to set fields of turnips. Poor people used to work for four pences a day. When the time came to pull the turnips they used only get two pence a day and a stone for for the other two pence. Men and women used to go long distances to work in the fields and they had no dinner. They would eat potaotoes before they would go and eat more potatoes for their supper. Some poor people had goats and those that had not had to drink water with them. There was yellow meal selling in Tarbert and you would get nothing less than five stone at the time and it used be the women that used go for it in their turn and wet it with water and make bread and bake it near the fire.
- Informant
- Mrs Bridget Barry
- Gender
- Female
- Age
- 40
- Address
- Kylebwee, Co. Kerry
