School: Raharney (B.)
- Location:
- Raharney, Co. Westmeath
- Teacher: S. Ó Conmhidhe
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0727, Page 084
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: Raharney (B.)
- XML Page 084
- XML “Famine Times - Wages and Food”
- XML “Famine Times - Wages and Food”
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 wages were very low and the food poor.
- My father told me he saw gangs of men working down in the river - up to the waist in mud and water for 4 pence a day. He saw them at dinner time each eating a slice of turnip raw. Those that had a grain of Indian meal to spread on the turnip were envied by the others. They worked from dark to darl.
=
People started roving around the country eating anything they could leave their hands on, it is believed that some even ate the grass as they found the dead with grass in their mouths. At night people went out to the big farmers and rounded up sheep and cows and took the milk from the ewes and cows.
Then came '48 when the first(continues on next page) - Informant
- James Dargan
- Gender
- Male
- Address
- Craddanstown, Co. Westmeath
