May 3rd, 1847: The Famine suffering is sapping not only the vitality but the compassion of the people.
In Skibbereen, Dr Daniel Donovan is given ample opportunity to study the sensations experienced by the starving. Young and old are becoming increasingly insensitive to the wants of others, he notes, responses being dictated by the desperation of their own needs.
Dr Donovan has seen mothers snatch food from their starving children, sons and fathers fight over a potato, and parents look on the dead and decaying bodies of their offspring without evincing the slightest emotion.
While the people dread that they or their relations might be buried without a coffin, they are terrified of pestilence. Corpses are lying out in the fields, Bishop Charles McNally of Clogher tells the president of Maynooth College, and "none but the clergy can be induced to approach. Yesterday sent a coffin out for a poor creature who died in a field of fever, and have just heard that no one could be prevailed to put the body in it."
In Co Kerry, Archdeacon John O'Sullivan of Kenmare records there is "nothing unusual to find four or five bodies on the street every morning. They would remain so and in their homes unburied, had we not employed three men to go about and convey them to the graveyard."
In Tralee a visitor is informed that the local distress is "quite beyond their means of relief" even though the town is situated on the estate of an "unencumbered landlord, who draws about £12,000 a year out of it but whose subscription for the relief of his starving tenants was paltry in the extreme".
The body of a child lies in the main street opposite the principal hotel, "and the remains have lain there several hours on a few stones by the side of a footway like a dead dog".
From Clare, Cork, Galway and Mayo come reports of the dead being buried without coffins everywhere, as the living are too weak to carry their bodies to the graveyard.
The Times, always ready to pounce on the sister kingdom's wound, says "the astounding apathy of the Irish themselves to the most horrible scenes under their eyes and capable of relief by the smallest exertion is something absolutely without parallel in the history of civilised nations ... The brutality of piratical tribes sinks to nothing compared with the absolute inertia of the Irish in the midst of the most horrifying scenes.
It regards the Irish as "a people born and bred from time immemorial in inveterate indolence, improvidence, disorder and consequent destitution". It argues that money spent on Irish relief is wasted. Ireland needs "real men possessed of average hearts, heads and hands".
Edward Twistleton, the Chief Poor Law Commissioner in Ireland, is concerned that such racist opinions in the most influential newspaper of the day are having a negative impact on British policy.