SNIPPET: Elderly Maire ni GRIANNA, from Rannafast, Donegal, recorded with poignant clarity these memories from the 1847 Famine: "The years of the Famine, of the bad life and of the hunger, arrived and broke the spirit and strength of the community. People simply wanted to survive. Their spirit of comradeship was lost. It didn't matter what ties or relations you had; you considered that person to be your friend who gave you food to put in your mouth. Recreation and leisure ceased. Poetry, music and dancing died. These things were lost and completely forgotten. When life improved in other ways, these pursuits never returned as they had been The Famine killed everything. Not many people died from hunger here. There were good years for oats here, and during the Famine anyone who saved the oats made meal from it. Those people were alright. But those who were dependent on the potatoes were lost. Their families died. The poor creatures, they thought they would be able to live on seafood, but they weren't. They needed a little of the produce of the soil to stay alive. They used to stay inside their cabins, not able to walk, so weak were they from hunger. They would go out in the fields on all fours and eat their fill of grass and weeds and then they'd be able to walk home. Mothers lay in their beds with the children beside them and they were so weak they were not able to get up. They used to lie there until one after another they died of hunger. The hunger killed the old and the children for the most part. Stronger people were able to survive the hardship. When the people began to die of hunger, a big cauldron was set up in Rannafast to make broth or gruel to keep people alive. No one knew where it came from or who had sent it. Bones were boiled to make the broth and there's no record of where those bones came from. Anyone who had anything at all to eat or any way of getting it would get no broth at all. But there weren't many here who could do that. Every one got one serving of broth per day. Crowds would be milling around as they gave out the broth and they'd be pushing and shoving, nearly killing one another to get up to the cauldron. Everyone was trying to get in before others, so great was the hunger. No one had mercy for anyone else. At any rate, between broth and whatever the soil produced and seafood or weeds, they were kept alive, but barely so. That cauldron was in Rannafast until a few years ago.... Far more died of fever than of hunger. The people were so wasted and weak with hunger and starvation that, when the fever came, they could not withstand the disease and therefore hundreds of them died. There were no hospital or doctor in this area either..." -- Excerpts, "The Irish, A Treasury of Art and Literature," ed. Leslie Caron Carola (1993).