SAD PICTURE OF DISTRESS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1073, 20 February 1883, Page 3

SAD PICTURE OF DISTRESS.

Of all Hie accounts of the distress now prevailing in Ireland none is move heartrending than that supplied to an English contemporary by the Rev F. W. Gallagher, parish priest, Cafrick Glen, Golumkill, County Donegal. He says : ‘ Sheer want and the cry of my dying poor force me with great pain and reluctance to bring before your many readers their wretched, starving condition. Absolute famine and deep distress arc increasing daily, and are being intensified by the great severity of the weather. I am hourly surrounded by crowds of poor sufferers begging with heartrending appeals the price of a few pounds of Indian corn to save life, By the charity of some few individuals—for which I heartily thank them a thousandfold—l have been

enabled to prolong their lives up to ilie present. All rescources arc now exhausted, and it is heartrending to have to listen to their piteous cry when one can’t, assist them. Take, for exampß a few instances out of yesterday’s applications. One family of six children, father, mother, grandmother, had been subsisting for three days previously on the entire store of 41bs of Indian rued. Another applicant was a poor woman, who in frost and snow travelled ten miles. She left her husband and throe children without food, nor bad they any for two days before, and she was apprehensive that she would find some of them dead on her return. A third instance was the case of a family where the mother had been confined to led after childbirth, her only food in this delicate state being the extract of Indian meal, obtained by pouring hot water upon it, and known among the poor as Indian meal tea,’ Mr Gallagher adds that he could supply simitar instances of distress by the score, and proceeds ‘Since the beginning of last October 1 have been distributing alms to the extent of £3O sterling per week, These alms were given, as a rale, in lieu of work done on their own farms, etc I have hitherto succeeded in warding off death, hut now all available resources are exhausted, and unless immediate and abundant relief be sent 1 shall not he able to do so any longer, whilst the lives of over twenty-five hundred individuals, who are without food or the means of procuring it, are in immediate danger The situation then may bo summed up this—lmmediate relief or immediate deaths.”