TOGETHER with the Duke of Leinster, Lord Cloncurry, and the Mayor of Dublin he waited on the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Heytesbury, with the object of impressing upon Government the serious nature of the situation. They were answered that specialists were being sent over from England to investigate the nature of the disease!* Meanwhile, the grain was leaving the country in larger quantities than usual. [...]
Bad as things were when Parliament met on 22nd January, 1846, there was still time to alleviate the misery of the nation. On 17th February O’Connell rose to call attention to the state of famine and disease in Ireland, and to ask for a committee of the whole House to devise means to relieve the distress of the Irish people. He was answered by expressions of good-will and sympathy; but the measures he suggested as necessary to preserve Ireland from the horrors of famine and pestilence were too bold for the timidity of the ministry and the inclination of the House.* Once again, instead of the bread he asked for, he was offered a stone — instead of a fish, a scorpion.*
abridged
* “So we have got scientific men from England!” O’Connell groaned in a letter to Martin Crean on February 13th, 1846. “It appears that they would not answer unless they came from England! — just as if we had not men of science in abundance in Ireland... They suggest a thing, and then show a difficulty; again, a suggestion is made which comes invested with another difficulty; and then they are ‘your very humble servants’!”
* Robert Dunlop is closely paraphrasing O’Connell’s own gloomy but accurate predictions, in his letter to Martin Crean. O’Connell ended: “One thing alone is certain: that there is no substantial remedy for Ireland except in the restoration of her domestic parliament.”
* Compare Luke 11:11. Not everyone in England was so ungenerous. Sir Gavan Duffy mentions £2,000 (worth a hundred times that today) from Queen Victoria, £5,000 from the Methodists and over £40,000 from the Quakers (several of whom went over as aid workers). Residents of Mauritius, Madras, Bombay, South Australia and St Petersburg and many other places chipped in.