February 21st, 1846: Daniel O'Connell begs the House of Commons "to stop the impending calamity" in Ireland.
He cites the report of the Devon Commission to show that the people are not to blame for their poverty. He notes that more than two million quarters of grain and nearly 2 1/2 million cwt of meal were exported to Britain last year. While Ireland produces such abundance, the inhabitants are starving: "So blessed was she by Providence, so cursed by man."
The Liberator sums up: "I have shown you that there are no agricultural labourers, no peasantry in Europe so badly off suffering such privations: as do the great body of the Irish people. In no part of Europe, I repeat, is there such suffering as in Ireland.
"There are five millions of people always on the verge of starvation ... They are in the utmost danger of a fearful famine, with all its concomitant horrors."
O'Connell denies that he has come to ask for money. "I am here to say Ireland has resources of her own. You have a revenue from the woods and forests of Ireland."
He suggests borrowing money on the rents of Irish landlords (hear, hear, and loud cheers). "It is the business of the landlord to protect the tenant. Somebody must pay. Surrounded by sickness and famine and death, in all its worst forms, are we to be mincing the matter - raising nice questions as to the position and liability of the landlord? The tenantry must perish, or the landlords must contribute.
"You may tell me there is a poor law and poor houses. My reply is that one and the other were meant for ordinary seasons - that they were never calculated to meet famine and disease. The poor houses may make good hospitals for the sick, and you may want them. Fever is raging in Cork; it has broken out in Kilkenny; it prevails in Killarney. There is fever in Limerick, and it is daily carrying off its victims in the lanes of Dublin ... Famine is coming, fever is coming, and this house should place in the hands of government power to stay the evil.
O'Connell supports government measures, but they are only "miserable trifles". "Once more", the Nation comments, "the grim phantoms of Irish misery has been held, up before the averted eyes of our legislators. They will not a look at their hideous work. They seem, in words, to admit the coming dearth, disease and death - speak with conventional phrases of sympathy about it - hint obscurely at some beggarly `relief' they shave been providing and then wave their hands, and bid the spectre vanish."
"Speranza" vaporises from the German:
. . . For Destiny tolls the hour
Hear ye it not afar?
When oppression shall sink
`neath the power
Of the last great Holy War.
AN oak tree was planted by South Dublin County Council yesterday to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine.
The sessile oak, Ireland's national tree, was planted by Cllr Breda Cass in the Famine Arboretum in Corkagh Park, Clondalkin. It is the first of 2,000 trees to be planted over the next two years.
The trees will be planted in five rays, representing the continents to which Irish people emigrated during the Famine.
The site of the arboretum is near Newlands Cross, where the Quakers are believed to have operated a soup kitchen during the Famine.