OLD SKIBBEREEN Oh, father dear, I often hear you speak of Erin's Isle, Her lofty scenes and valleys green, her mountains rude and wild, They say it is a lovely land wherein a prince might dwell, Oh, why did you abandon it? The reason to me tell. Oh, son! I loved my native land with energy and pride, Till a blight came o'er my crops -- my sheep, my cattle died; My rent and taxes were too high, I could not them redeem, And that's the cruel reason that I left old Skibbereen. Oh, well do I remember the bleak December day, The landlord and the sheriff came to drive us all away; They set my roof on fire with their cursed English spleen, And that's another reason that I left old Skibbereen. Your mother, too, God rest her soul, fell on the snowy ground, She fainted in her anguish, seeing the desolation round, She never rose, but passed away from life to mortal dream, And found a quiet grave, my boy, in dear old Skibbereen. And you were only two years old and feeble was your frame, I could not leave you with my friends, you bore your father's name -- I wrapt you in my cotamore at the dead of night unseen, I heaved a sigh and bade good-bye, to dear old Skibbereen. -- Anonymous, "The Irish in America," Coffey & Golway Eyewitness, Elihu BURRITT, in a famine-era letter from Skibbereen, Co. Cork, to America described seeing "entirely naked" children, "breathing skeletons" living in the outskirts of Skibbereen, one of Ireland's most devasted areas during the Great Potato Famine. He wrote: "We entered with some difficulty (the cabin) and found a single child about three years old lying on a kind of shelf, with its little face resting upon the edge of the board and looking steadfastly out at the door, as if for its mother. It never moved its eyes as we entered, but kept them fixed toward the entrance...No words can describe the peculiar appearance of the famished children. Never have I seen such bright, blue, clear eyes looking so steadfastingly at nothing....I could almost fancy that the angels of God had been sent to unseal the vision of these little patient, perishing creatures, to the beatitudes of another world; and they were listening to the whispers of unseen spirits bidding them t! o "wait a little longer." Another visitor to Ireland said that there were thousands of starving children, everywhere, inside and outside hovels, in the towns, and along the roads, in the winter of 1846-47. They no longer spoke, much less cried; they just stared with a gaunt, unmeaning vacancy, a kind of insanity, a stupid, despairing look that asked for nothing, expected nothing, received nothing. -- "Paddy's Lament," Thomas Gallagher