The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1849-06-19 00:00:00

THE CONDITION OF IRELAND.

Our readers have no doubt occasionally perused the
writings of an indefatigable correspondent of the Times,
the Rev. S. G. Osborne, That gentleman has just paid
a visit to th,3 union of Ballinasloe, in Ireland ; and his
revelations of the sad state of the population are most
distressing to reflect upon. In addition to the workhouse
in the town, the authorities have hired fourteen houses,
and fitted them up as hospitals. The following is his
description of his visit to the workhousz‘ itself:--
"I found the boys at dinner. I believe no power of pen or
pencil could exhibit their real appearance, especially that of
those lately received into the house. One disease had printed
itself in a type readable to every eye on three-fourths of their
countenances—starvation—hunger borne with, ought with,
and only yielded to when the workhouse or the grave had be-
come the sole option ; till I thus witnessed it, I could not have
• believed how famine could clothe childhood with all the phy-
sical appearance of old age. Had that mass of animated skin
and bone been a soulless mass, I could have knelt and prayed
Heaven at once to change their home from the union-house to
the grave. True, it may he that they gain strength• by admit-
tance into the union house; the food they get may, for a time,
fresh trim life's lamp, but it was marked on the countenance
of hundreds that the light of adult life never could shine in
them; care, food, cleanliness,. shelter, come too late to such.
Turn to another scene. I should not like to say, for it would
scarce be zredited, the number of yards in length of wards, on
both sides of which lay beds thickly tenanted by children and
others in different stages of dysentery ; their heads and arms
alone could be seen ; no groan of impatience did I hear—nay,
not a cry of pain. Passive in the extremity of their weakness,
they were pictures of sad, silent, suffering, which would have
wrung the hardest heart. Shed after shed, building after build-
ing, each tells the same tale ; in one part of the hospital I was
shown several stages of a disease induced by the poor creatures
having eaten a particular poisonous plant, which grows wild,
and has a blossom similar to the corn kail —a plant which they
gladly seek for. • with nettles, &c., for their food. They fre-
quently make the mistake or picking the one plant for theother,
and thus become poisoned ; the face swells frightfully, turns of
a dark colour, breaks out in blotches, and takes the form of a
formidable disease."
The writer continues :

"The reluctance of the peasantry to enter the workhouse is
scarcely to be credited; the groups I see lying ahout the s reets
and roads are in appearance far worse than those who are in•
door paupers; and yet, unsheltered, unfed s.:arce clothed,
they are content to run a race with death, and will not try to
escape him at the workhouse door, till he has marked them as
his own. I shall know better some days hence how far it is
credible that the extremity of hunger has driven some of them
to eat • strange meats;' at present, my impression is that, in
nine cases out of ten, they would die rather than touch such
food. The di-lirium of fever, the brutality of idiotism. may in
some cases have led to acts which may have given foundation
to such tales ; but I was informed by a highly respectable Catho-
lic priest, whose experience amongst the very poorest is great,
that he believet they would perish rather than eat anything of
the sort."

" I have just visited the burying-ground, a large walled-in
enclosure about half a mile out of the town ; the dead have
been literally trenched in ; large pits are opened, 12 feet by 9,
beginning at one wall, or rather a few yards from it ; as one
pit is filled another is dug, the soil from one covering up the
other ; and so on right across the enclosure, and then a fresh
trench is begun. Six only were buried last night. I asked the
men how many they had buried in any one day ; the answer
was, Faith, sir, and it Would be a good clerk who could tell
that.' Those I saw appeared to have decent coffins found
them. I grieve to say I have a strong impression that many
hundreds are fast approaching this last home ; cholera may
have ceased, but dysentery and hunger are, I believe, only yet
at the commencement of their fatal work. Until I have seen
more I will give no opinion either as to the origin or the remedy
for this state of things ; at present I only wish faithfully to tell
what is, how it came to be ; how it is to be arrested I have
yet more fully to learn.
. _

" The outward character of the country is this, as far as I
have yet seen—great breadth of land under tillage, the crops
looking very well, a good deal of potato sown, the leaf rather
more coiled than I quite like to see. One most prominent
feature is the number of gable ends of cabins from which the
roofs have been torn, the people driven ; few, if any, pigs are
to be seen ; you for ever meet groups of half-raked women and
children going somewhere with bundles of nettles and corn
kail they have gathered for food ; hunger is written on every
peasant brow ; perplexity is legible on the countenance of those
above them ; increasing rates, approaching ruin—this is the
theme ever on every lip: But relief, liberally given, might save,
they say, hundreds of lives, but at the cost of the ruin of those
who, once ruined, rating must cease, and famine rule the laud
less checked than now.