One of the striking features of the Great Irish Famine was that it occurred in an era of mass media. Newspapers reported on the event in Europe and America, cables relayed news around the globe with relative ease and,

as one of the writers in this article notes, the worst hit areas of the country were only a day or two's travel from the heart of a world spanning empire. This technological age has thus left the researcher or casual reader with a bounty of sources with which to engage. This article will look at some of those sources and in particular the correspondents and writers whose work, by dint of the passage of time, is now solidly in the public domain.

Although he visited Ireland in the years prior to the famine, William Makepeace Thackeray, in his work The Irish Sketchbook of 1842 commented extensively on conditions on the ground for the Irish and of their dependence on potatoes. For instance he mentions Kilcullen in Kildare:

The little town, as they call it, of Kilcullen, tumbles down a hill and struggles up another; the two being here picturesquely divided by the Liffey, over which goes an antique bridge. It boasts, moreover, of a portion of an abbey wall, and a piece of round tower, both on the hill summit, and to be seen (says the Guide-book) for many miles round. Here we saw the first public evidences of the distress of the country. There was no trade in the little place, and but few people to be seen, except a crowd round a meal-shop, where meal is distributed once a week by the neighbouring gentry. There must have been some hundreds of persons waiting about the doors; women for the most part: some of their children were to be found loitering about the bridge much farther up the street: but it was curious to note, amongst these undeniably starving people, how healthy their looks were.
Going a little farther, we saw women pulling weeds and nettles in the hedges, on which dismal sustenance the poor creatures live, having no bread, no potatoes, no work. Well! these women did not look thinner or more unhealthy than many a well-fed person. A company of English lawyers, now, look more cadaverous than these starving creatures.

From his words above there is a sense of Thackeray's initial feelings of disbelief regarding Irish complaints though the more one reads the Sketchbook, the more I believe his opinion is turned more favourably to the Irish and their conditions:

And so it is throughout the south and west of Ireland; the traveller is haunted by the face of the popular starvation. It is not the exception, it is the condition of the people. In this fairest and richest of countries, men are suffering and starving by millions. There are thousands of them at this minute stretched in the sunshine at their cabin doors with no work, scarcely any food, no hope seemingly. Strong countrymen are lying in bed "for the hunger'' — because a man lying on his back does not need so much food as a person a-foot. Many of them have torn up the unripe potatoes from their little gardens, to exist now, and must look to winter, when they shall have to suffer starvation and cold too.

Whereas Thackeray avoided the Famine itself, other did not. One visitor was James Hack Tuke, who was from York in England but who engaged in considerable philanthropic work in Ireland during the years of the famine and afterwards as well. His especially moving description of the Barony of Erris in his work A Visit To Connaught in the Autumn of 1847. A Letter Addressed To The Central Relief Committee Of The Society of Friends, Dublin hits home strongly:

I must be allowed to dwell at some length upon the peculiar misery of this barony of Erris, and parish of Belmullet, which I spent some days in examining. Afflicting as is the general condition of Mayo—fearful as are the prospects of the province in general, there is here yet a lower depth in misery, a district almost as distinct from Mayo as Mayo is from the eastern parts of Ireland. Human wretchedness seems concentrated in Erris, the culminating point of man's physical degradation seems to have been reached in the Mullet. It may seem needless to trouble you with particular descriptions of the distress I have witnessed; for these descriptions are but repetitions of the far too familiar scenes of the last winter and spring; although the present seem aggravated by an earlier commencement; nevertheless, such a condition as that of Erris ought, however painful, to be forced on our attention until remedies are found and applied.
This barony is situated upon the extreme north-west coast of Mayo, bounded on two sides by the Atlantic ocean. The population last year was computed at about 28,000; of that number, it is said, at least 2,000 have emigrated, principally to England, being too poor to proceed to America ; and that 6,000 have perished by starvation, dysentery, and fever. There is left a miserable remnant of little more than 20,000 ; of whom 10,000, at least, are, strictly speaking, on the very verge of starvation. Ten thousand people within forty-eight hours' journey of the metropolis of the world, living, or rather starving, upon turnip-tops, sand-eels, and sea-weed, a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal which he keeps. And let it not be supposed that of this famine diet they have enough, or that each of these poor wretches has a little plot of turnips on which he may feed at his pleasure. His scanty meal is, in many cases, taken from a neighbour hardly richer than himself, not indeed at night, but, with the daring of absolute necessity, at noon-day.*

* The Inspecting Officer in his reports to the Poor-Law Commissioners, written about a month subsequently, thus forcibly bears out this statement: " During the past week J have visited every portion of my district except the extreme part of Belmullet electoral division, and I regret to state that distress—indeed judging by the appearance of the people, I may say starvation—appears nearly general, but more particularly in the electoral division of Binghamstown (the Mullet), where the poor really are in a sad state, their only food bad turnips, and their supply of them limited, many having nothing to subsist upon but the roots of weeds."

Hack Tuke was moved by the fate of the poor in Erris as this paragraph implies:

One poor widow with a large family, whose husband had recently died of fever, had a miserable patch of potatoes seized, and was thus deprived of her only resource for the ensuing winter. What could she do ? The poor-house was thirty miles distant, and it was full. Though many of these ruined creatures were bewailing their cruel fate, I heard nothing like reproach or reflection upon the author of their misery, and the bailiff told me that he had no fear of molestation in pursuing his calling.

But he was not alone in seeing the suffering of the Irish. Another traveller to the island during the famine was Sidney Godolphin Osborne who, in his work Gleanings From The West of Ireland, offered a more graphic illustration of just how desperate the poor and hungry Irish were:

My friend here again indulged himself in large investments in bread, to feed the poor wretches he found in the street, and with the customary result; he soon being forced from the pressure, to make a retreat at the rear of the shop. I cannot wonder at the perseverance he displayed, he was new to Ireland; less hardened than myself. From a window we got an opportunity of seeing, ourselves unseen, some of the bread he had given consumed; there was no deceit in the way it was devoured; more voracious reality, it would be hardly possible to conceive ; to see the fleshless arms grasping one part of a loaf, whilst the fingers—bone handled forks—dug into the other, to supply the mouth—such mouths too! with an eagerness, as if the bread were stolen, the thief starving, and the steps of the owner heard; was a picture, I think neither of us will easily forget.

Benevolence has its drawbacks; if Mazeppa had been bound to an Irish car in Connemara, in a year of famine, with a few loaves of bread tied to him, he would have had a scarcely less lively experience of one wolf hunted, than he had on his wild horse, after the fashion in which his perilous ride is handed down to us. No sooner was our car under weigh, than a pack of famished creatures of all descriptions and sexes, set off in full chase after us; the taste of fresh bread, still inflamed the spirit of some; the report of it put others in hot hungry pursuit; the crescit eundo is ever realized in the motion of an Irish mob. Our driver did his best, but our pursuers had us at advantage; for our road was up a very steep long hill; they gained on us, and we were soon surrounded by the hungry pack; the cry of the regular professional mendicant, the passionate entreaty of the really destitute—the ragged, the really starving; the whining entreaties of the still more naked children, still more starved,—in a famine the weakest ever suffer soonest. The quickness and volubility of Irish national mendicity, sharpened by hunger, and excited by the rare chance of appeasing it, all combined to give voice to the pack. No two luckless human beings were ever so hunted; no ravening wolves ever gave more open expression of their object—food. A little coaxing—my friend's; a little violence—my own ; a little distribution of copper coin from both of us, at last rid us of the inconvenient, but natural result of an Englishman, with money in his pocket, and a baker's shop near, wishing in Ireland to feed some starving people.

For all the commentary and writing on the subject however, change and help was woefully inadequate to relieve the pressure on the population. Death, disease and immigration brought the population down from its 1841 level of 6 and half million to an 1861 figure of just under 4 and half million.