School: An Clochar, Neidín

Location:
Kenmare, Co. Kerry
Teacher:
Brighid Ní Lochlainn
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The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0461, Page 355

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The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0461, Page 355

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  1. XML School: An Clochar, Neidín
  2. XML Page 355
  3. XML “A True Experience of the Famine Years”

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  1. The following is a true story which happened to my mother in one of the famine years. She had baked griddle cakes of wheat in flour mixed with a little oatmeal and they were cooling on the kitchen table for the workmen's dinner.
    A poor starved woman and three children equally famished and aged about 12, 10 and 8 years respectively came into the kitchen and asked her for the love of God to give them something to eat; that they had eaten nothing for ten days. Mother cut up the yel' warm griddle cakes and having filled bowls of milk she told them sit down and eat enough. They ate ravenously- one cake soon disappeared and she cut up a second. When they were quite satisfied they went their way calling down blessings from Heaven on her.
    That evening about five o'clock the mother and three children were found huddled together and dead together, and dead, on the roadside two miles distant from my mother's home. They had eaten too freely after such a long fast.
    Transcribed by a member of our volunteer transcription project.
    Topics
    1. time
      1. historical periods by name (~25)
        1. the great famine (~4,013)
    Language
    English