Sir, Much is now being written, spoken, sung and broadcast on the Great Hunger and what we hear and read is mostly in measured tones. Maud Gonne spoke more passionately when she addressed the Catholic University of the Luxembourg
"Whole families, when they had eaten their last crust, and understood that they had to die, looked once upon the sun and then closed up the doors of their cabins with stones, that no one might look on their last agony. Weeks afterwards men would find their skeletons gathered round the extinguished hearth ...... Yeats quoted a longer extract in his column in the Boston Pilot (July 30th, 1892), remarking how the spoken oratory and drama of his day had divorced themselves from literature and yet the passage quoted "has much of the serene beauty of good writing Is me agat, go buioch beannachtach Gleann na gCaorach, Co Atha Cliath.