Scoil: Knocktemple (B.)

Ar an leathanach seo

1. The Famine Period (ar lean)

   

   Roinn Roinn Postáil

   (ar lean ón leathanach roimhe)

   for the labouring class it was the ambition of every labourer to get possession of a piece of cutaway on which he built a cabin, usually of sods, roofed with bog oak and thatched with rushes. This type of holding is common to the present day, improved very much in many cases, and is an economic one. Fire[?] is generally of turf, deal and sods or "scraws", all abundant. Ducks and geese are usually kept and find food in the drains and marshes and the owner is generally adding a little to the farm every year, and owes no "days" to petty landlords, so he can work where he will get the highest wages. It is not too much to say that had the labouring class been in possession of such little homesteads instead of the habitations they occupied, they would have managed to exist during the period which proved so fatal to them. Nor is there any doubt that the system then in vogue by which the farmer was complete master of the labourer was a most cruel, unjust and antiquated arrangement ending as it was bound to do, in the disaster known as The Famine, but which was actually a Famine only for the poor labourers, their wives and children. I often heard old men who had lived through The Famine, relate how the horses of so and so (mentioning farmers) were well fed while the poor peasantry were dying of hunger along the ditches. Again Old Jimmy Mulvaney (the thatcher) whose great-grandsons attend this school frequently related how in Bradys Newcastle there was always a goose or turkey for dinner on Sunday and how the woman of the house ignored the dreadful catastrophe around her.

   (leanann ar an chéad leathanach eile)

   

   Tras-scríofa ag duine dár meitheal tras-scríbhneoirí deonacha.

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