School: Court (roll number 13335)
- Location:
- Courtballyedmond, Co. Wexford
- Teachers: Criostóir Ó Cuanáin Liam de Noraidh
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0890, Page 040
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: Court
- XML Page 040
- XML “The Famine Days”
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 Days. June 23rd, 1938.The famine of 1846 was not as bad around here as in other parts of the country. Not many people died with it. The potatoes blackened in the ground and if there were any of them good, they were not as big as marbles. The potato crop was the chief food upon which the people depended in those years. When the famine came, the people had nothing to eat. The wheat crop was good around here and the English bought it from them for very little money and brought it over to England. The people around here lived most on herring soup and it killed a great many of them. When the herrings got scarce, they used to gather docks and boil them and thicken them with the worst sort of meal. When the famine was over, the English Government gave the poor people relief money. The Government would appoint someone in each district to make porridge for the people. A man and woman used to make it in Ballinastraw and the poor people used [to] come for a can full in the evenings and bring it home to their children.Mary Dempsey, Ballinastraw, Gorey.
- Collector
- May Dempsey
- Gender
- Female
- Address
- Ballinastraw Upper, Co. Wexford
