School: Portlaoighse (Convent) (roll number 13386)
- Location:
- Port Laoise, Co. Laoise
- Teacher: Sr Treasa
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0835, Page 033
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: Portlaoighse (Convent)
- XML Page 033
- 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
- (continued from previous page)time the townland was thickly populated until the potatoes failed in the ground and many of the people that did not die of starvation were evicted and their houses pulled down by the Landlord. The people people got a pint of gruel each in the old prison of Portlaoighise and it was so thin that it was hard to carry it in a gallon.
Then a fever set in which swept the whole countryside some died in the ditches and were buried without coffins.
The poor people had to work for one penny and twopence a day and one meal of porridge. Any people that did not die in Ireland were sent to America and some of them died on the way across and were thrown into the ocean.
Some were left to die on small islands in the ocean and more were transported to Van Diemen's land where they met with terrible torture and they were sent to plough and tear up the soil and they had to sleep in sod huts.
- Collector
- Betty Booth
- Gender
- Female
- Address
- An Fraoch Mór, Co. Laoise
- Informant
- Mr R. Booth
- Gender
- Male
- Address
- An Fraoch Mór, Co. Laoise
