ACUTE SUFFERING

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 51, Issue 3154, 7 August 1942, Page 3

ACUTE SUFFERING

STARVATION IN EIRE NOTHING BUT POTATOES TRAGIC WEST OF IRELAND The internal food situation of Eire has become so bad that the London “Daily Mail” recently sent a representative across to investigate the position. The following,is his story of what the “Mail” refers to as the tragic West of Ireland:— “ ’Tis three weeks, sorr, since we saw bread.’ It was in Renvyle, Eire, farming and fishing village between the wild hills of Connemarra and the Atlantic, where the cottage housewife uttered these words.

“For the first time in my life I saw the fear of famine in human eyes. In Dublin the previous day I had seen bread queues 600 yards long; no queues in Renvyle. “It was useless for this woman to go to the few shops. The shopkeepers are as badly off. Four young children sat at the cottage door. A boy of four w4s nibbling a cold boiled potato, nibbling at it like a child worrying an orange.

“ There was a frightful listlessness about all four' children. For three weeks they had. lived on potatoes -boiled in their skins —hot for breakfast, cold for lunch at school, hot at night—no butter, flour, or oatmeal to take with them.

“It was pathetic resignation with which these dark-eyed, sturdy people assured me that ‘God will (be merciful. Bread will come again,’ and in the next hreath told how every few days adults and barefooted children have been tramping 10, 12 and 15 miles to Clifden in the hope of buying fresh flour.

Days of Plenty Are Over

“Days of plenty are over in Eire. For months food reserves have been used up rapidly and light-heartedly the while the people sympathised with ‘those poor folks over there in England existing on rations.’

“There is no.. domestic coal, only peat and wood, blocks. “Three foodstuffs are still fairly plentiful—ibacon, meat and eggs. Butter is scarce. I talked to people in Galway who had not tasted (butter for a fortnight.

“Eire has no margarine. Lards and fats are almost unobtainable. Oatmeal and cereals generally are scarce. In the far west they are almost non-existant. All the shops I Visited in country towns and villages had small stocks of jams and preserves.

“In Galway city I was told by a shopkeeper: ‘At the rate at which people are buying now we shall be cleaned out in two to three months. Devil of it is that the poor are getting none. Men with five or six children who are earning about £2 a week cannot afford it. Those who can afford it are buying in, and in case .of other shortages using what they buy.’ “To the outside world Eire admits no food crisis. To its own people the says: ‘Yes, some

goods are scarce and worse is to come. Transport is the cause of present area shortage.’

“A wide extension of rationing is shortly to be introduced, but responsible people fear that action has been taken too late. 'Stocks which might have been t eked out have gone. Transport difficulties are the foot cause. That is why I went west. I never expected to find so much acute suffering. Misery of Children

“The. peat and potato standard of living has struck the west from Clare to Donegal. It is a terrible thing to see children going hungry —short of bread.

“Listen to this cottager from Kilfenora, in County Clare: ‘Give me bread of any kind for me and my children.’ His family of seven in all had been on a potato diet for 11 days.

“The children cry when they see potatoes, he went on. ‘I am a road worker. Take cold boiled potatoes for my midday meal. ‘Tis hard to work on cold potatoes, and we have seen no butter either this eight days past. But for the poteen I could not go on.’ ,

“lillicit poteen—crude, raw, dangerous spirit—is being made in increasing quantities. It helps the men forget the gnawing of empty stomachs.

“Kilfenora. is less than 40 miles from the wjheat-growing area of Athenry. I asked this man if he could not get flour from there. ‘‘How, sorr?” he asked me. ‘I would have to walk and lose two or three days’ pay.’

I went to see an elderly country doctor, a lovable Connemara practitioner, counsellor* and friend to his patients.

“ ‘Praise God, not many of my patients are going really hungry,’ he said. ‘But they cry out for something besides potatoes. It is a ruinous diet.’ ”