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*Migration Histories > Irish > Origins
* Schull and Skibbereen - 'The Two Famine-Slain Sisters of the South' 
 
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Boy and Girl at Cahera - Illustrated London News 20 February 1847
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Boy and Girl at Cahera - Illustrated London News 20 February 1847
* Moving Here catalogue reference (PRO) ZPER 34/10
Harrowing images such as these were intended to shock, like those of starving children in Africa on television are today. The commentary makes it clear that 'our main object in the publication of this series of Illustrations is to direct public sympathy to the suffering poor of these localities'.

The situation in Skibbereen was also the focus of a number of national newspaper reports. It soon became a byword for human suffering. As early as March 1847, the Liverpool Journal headed a report on fever deaths in Webster's Court, off Oriel Street, Liverpool - 'A Skibbereen In Liverpool'.

The scenes we have witnessed at Skibbereen, equal any thing that has been recorded by history, or could be conceived by the imagination. Famine, typhusfever, dysentery, and a disease hitherto unknown, are sweeping away the whole population. The poor are not the only sufferers: fever is spreading to every class, and even the rich are becoming involved in the same destruction.
Narrative of a Journey from Oxford to Skibbereen during the year of the Irish Famine by Lord Dufferin and G F Boyle (Oxford, 1847).

Early in 1847, two aristocratic young Oxford undergraduates, Lord Dufferin and G F Boyle, visited Skibbereen. Shocked by what they saw, they published their Narrative of a Journey from Oxford to Skibbereen to raise funds for famine relief. They described how, in some cottages, 'dead bodies had lain putrefying in the midst of the sick remnant of their families, none strong enough to remove them, until the rats and decay made it difficult to recognise that they had been human beings'.

Small farmers whose crops had failed had to join public works schemes for 8-10d a day but 'half a stone of meal costs 1s 8d and is barely sufficient to afford a daily meal to a moderate family'. The poor had *pawned most of their possessions to buy food. The workhouse, built to house 800, had 1,449 inmates.

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On entering another house the doctor said, 'Look there, sir, you can't tell whether they are boys or girls.' Taking up a skeleton child, he said, 'Here is the way it is with them all; their legs swing and rock like the legs of a doll'.
Rev F F Trench's description of Schull from Realities of Irish Life by W S Trench

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Creators: Aidan Lawes

 
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