February 22nd, 1847: A day in the life of Hugh QuigIey, a Clare curate, during "Black `47":
"We rise at four o'clock when not obliged to attend a night call and proceed on horseback a distance of from four to seven miles to hold stations of confession for the convenience of the poor country people, who flock in thousands to prepare for the death they look on as inevitable.
"At these stations we have to remain up to 5 p.m. administering both consolation and instruction to the famishing thousands ... The confessions are often interrupted by calls to the dying and generally, on our way home, we have to administer the last rites to one or more fever patients.
"Arrived at home, we have scarcely seated ourselves to a little dinner when we are interrupted by groans and sobs of several persons at the door crying out, `I am starving', `If you do not help me I must die' and `I wish I was dead', etc...
"In truth the priest must either harden his heart against the cry of misery, or deprive himself of his usual nourishment to keep victims from falling at his door.
"After dinner - or perhaps before it is half over - the priest is again surrounded by several persons, calling on him to come in haste - that their parents, or brothers, or wives, or children, are `just departing.'
"The priest is again obliged to mount his jaded pony and endeavour to keep pace with the peasant who trots before him as a guide, through glen and ravine, and over precipice, to his infected hut...
"The curate has most commonly to say two Masses... at different chapels; and to preach patience and resignation to the people, to endeavour to prevent them rising en masse and plundering and murdering their landlords"
In Co Mayo the curate of Kilgeever, Patrick Fitzgerald, witnesses a mother sending her five children to bed, almost lifeless from hunger.
"Despairing of ever again seeing them alive, she took her last leave of them. In the morning, her first act was to touch their lips with her hand to see if the breath of life still remained; but the poor woman's fears were not groundless, for not a breath could she feel from some of her dear little children; that night buried them in the night of eternity."
At a meeting to raise funds for the Irish in a New York synagogue, the Rev Jacques Judah Lyons declares:
"We are told that we have a large number of our own poor and destitute to take care of, that the charity we dispense should be bestowed in this quarter, that the peculiar position of ourselves and our co-religionists demands it at our hands, that justice is a higher virtue than generosity, that self-preservation is a law and principle of our nature . .. It is true that there is but one connecting link between us and the sufferers . . . That link is humanity."