ere was expended for the relief of Irish
distress the sum of L733,372; of which L368,000 was in loans, and
L365,372 in grants. The sum raised in voluntary subscriptions, through
the Relief Committees was L98,000. The largest number of persons
employed at any one time in this first season of relief was 97,000;
which was in August, 1846.[94]

There was very considerable delay in affording relief to the people
under the above acts. New Boards--new Commissioners--new Forms--new
everything had to be got up, and all were commenced too late; it was,
therefore, long, provokingly and unnecessarily long, before anything was
done. The Rev. Mr. Moore, Rector of Cong, in one of his letters,
complains that he was superciliously treated at the relief office in
Dublin Castle, and finally told relief was only to be had in the
workhouse. He then wrote to the Lord Lieutenant asking for a consignment
of meal to be sold in his neighbourhood, undertaking to be responsible
to the Government for the amount. A promise was given to him that this
would be done, but I cannot discover that it was ever fulfilled.

Great numbers were in a starving condition in the southern and western
counties, and in districts of Ulster also. A correspondent of the London
_Morning Chronicle_, writing from Limerick under date of the 16th of
April, says: "The whole of yesterday I spent in running from hut to hut
on the right bank of the Shannon. The peasantry there were in an awful
condition. In many cases they had not even a rotten potato left. They
have consumed even the seed potatoes, unable any longer to resist the
pangs of hunger." The Rev. Mr. Doyle, of Graig, in the county Kilkenny,
writing on the 13th of April, says, he had made a visitation of his
parish and found five hundred and eighty-three distressed families,
comprising two thousand seven hundred and thirty individuals; of this
number fifty-one had constant employment, two hundred and seventy none
at all; the rest got occasional work; three-fourths of the whole had not
three days' provisions. Sir Lucius O'Brien, (afterwards Lord Inchiquin),
as Chairman of the Ennis Board of Guardians, took occasion to remark,
"on the heartlessness of some of the Dublin papers, when speaking of the
famine." "Everyone acquainted with the country, knew," he said, "that at
this moment the people are in many places starving."[95]

The people assembled in considerable numbers in parts of the South
calling for food or employm