CHAPTER XXIV.
ADMINISTERING RELIEF TO POOR PEOPLE—A FIGHT WITH THE LANDLORDS.
In the summer time of the year 1862 something occurred that brought me face to face with the English landlord garrison of the South of Ireland; something showed me the spirit of exterminating the old Irish race, that possesses some of these landlords. Rumors reached Skibbereen in the month of May that much distress prevailed in the islands of Sherkin and Cape Clear—Innis Cleire—“the island of the clergy”; that the people were dying of starvation. Special messengers from the island waited on the Skibbereen Board of Guardians, and pressed for immediate relief. A committee of the Board, consisting of McCarthy Downing, Martin Jennings and James Murray, were appointed to take the matter in hand. They resolved to send a ton of meal into the islands immediately. The regular relieving officer, James Barry—Shemus Leathan, as he was called—was old and infirm; it was necessary to get an active man who would act temporarily as relieving officer, and act immediately; Mr. Downing sent for me, and asked me to undertake the work; that a boat with four men was at the quay that would take us in to the islands with a ton of meal. I told him I certainly would go on such a mission. I called on a neighbor of mine, Michael O’Driscoll, to go with me, and he readily assented. We got the meal on board the boat that night and next morning we set sail for the islands.
The first island I met was the island of Sherkin—that island of which Thomas Davis sings:
“Old Inis-Sherkin’s crumbled fane looks like a moulting bird;
And in a calm and sleepy swell the ocean tide is heard.”
The boatman told us that the distress was greater in Innis Cleire than in Innis Sherkin; that the people in the farther off island were dying of starvation, and that it would be better for us to go on to Cape Clear first. We accordingly decided to do so; and we decided to land three sacks of the meal in Sherkin, for distribution there next day on our return from the Cape.
It was a beautiful summer evening; the boat was steered into a little shingly cove; a man was stretched on a grassy bank, as if asleep; we called him to help us to take the sacks ashore; he turned his head high enough to look, and lay back upon the grass again—taking no further notice of us. I leaped ashore, and found that the man was unable to stand on his legs; he was dying of hunger—a man named O’Driscoll, over six feet, and about twenty-six years of age.
My wife had thought I would be out on the islands for a few days, and she had sandwiched up as much food for me as would feed me for a week; Michael O’Driscoll’s wife had done the same for him; we took our lunch baskets from the boat, laid them before the hungry man, and left him to help himself while we were landing the meal into the house of a Mrs. Hughes near by. We made a fatal mistake; we were accessory to the death of the starving man; he had eaten more than was good for him; he was dead when we returned to the island next day.
We got into Cape Clear about nine o’clock in the evening. News had reached there that we were coming. Father Collins was on the strand, with conveyance to take the meal to his house, near by. We distributed some of it that night; the priest sent word through the island to have the poor people be at his house next morning to take their share of the relief. We had supper and sleep at Father Collins’s, and next morning before breakfast we distributed the meal.