SNIPPET: "If the first and most pressing problem for the living was how to remain alive, the second was how to dispose of the dead. For though there were virtually no births and therefore few infants less than a year old - pregnant women being too starved and emaciated to carry, much less feed, a fetus - the deaths from starvation, typhus, relapsing fever, famine dropsy, scurvy, dysentery or from combinations of any of them became so frequent and numerous, the dead so common everywhere, that if the driver of a car felt a bump at night, he knew he had ridden over a body stricken on the highway. Next to food, clothing, and medical help, families stood in need of coffins, and as they became too expensive to buy, and then almost impossible to obtain at any price, a sad and humiliating change took place in the way the Irish put their dead to rest. Before the famine, the poorest farmer believed in and strove for the credit and respectability attached to a good, large, well-conducted funeral. Many saved for no other purpose than to have the necessary money to buy a coffin, finance a wake, engage professional keeners, and hire the horse-drawn hearse that hundreds would follow on foot to the grave. No custom was more firmly rooted in Ireland's pagan past or more resistant to Roman Catholic criticism (primarily, for excesses at wakes) .... In Ireland the pagan and Christian rituals had become so intertwined as to be inseparable. About the importance of a coffin, however, there was no argument from either side. In everyone's eyes the coffin represented the dead person's ultimate seclusion, his final and inviolable private room. To be without one at the end was to lose respect and to cast shame on those you left behind. It was so important that in 1847, when deaths outnumbered burials and unburied bodies began to accumulate, relatives of the dead pulled old family chests apart to make coffins. When the chests were gone and the people kept dying, tables and boats were torn apart, warped coffin boards were stolen from old graveyards. In Armagh, County Tyrone* where people knew the art of basketry, basket coffins were made for the dead when wood became unobtainable. In other districts the dead were wrapped by their relatives in sheets, sacking or straw mats or in barrel staves bound up with straw ropes. One woman brought her wasted dead husband, wrapped in a sheet, on her back to Kilsarcon churchyard to be buried. The edges of the sheet were held together by 'scannans,' then bogdeal spars worked in and out through the edges of the sheet. Finally, a new kind of reusable coffin, called a 'trap coffin,' came into use. Built sturdy enough to withstand the wear and tear of hundreds of funerals, it was fitted with a hinged bottom that swung open like a trap door when released at the graveyard, whereby the dead person was dropped into the grave. The man who owned it also owned the horse and cart that carried the dead person to the graveyard. He made several trips a day, always with the same coffin and often to the same grave, which was filled with as many as six bodies, the topmost one being very close to ground level, before the grave was closed and covered over. This explains why starving dogs, so starved they could no longer bark, raided graveyards at night and why one famine graveyard, Cashel, Co. Tipperary, was later, after the turn of the century, barbarously and contemptuously called 'The Shank Yard..' As the manner and means of burial became uppermost in everyone's mind, some starving and exhausted people, knowing they had a short time to live, sought admittance to the poorhouse. They wanted not so much aid as the coffin and decent burial that their families and friends could not afford them. Others, not so desperate but expecting a death in the family, rushed to the carpenter's and ordered a coffin ahead of time for fear there would be no lumbar left when the death occurred. 'In every village the manufacture was remarkable at the doors of the carpenters' homes, and in the country parts I often met coffins, and boards for making coffins, carried on the backs of women,' wrote the Reverend F. F. TRENCH in a letter dated 1847. 'At Glengariff, the Roman Catholic Chapel is turned into a place for making coffins ... I entered .. and said to one of the carpenters, 'What are you making boys?' -- 'Coffins and wheelbarrows, Sir.'" *(Note -- Apparently the Poor Law Union town of Armagh was a civil registration district for some townlands in both Cos. Armagh and Tyrone). -- Excerpt, "Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846-47", Thomas and Michael Gallagher (1982).