This was a hard summer but people were getting used to corpses by the road and along ditches and did their best not to step on them. John Mitchel was shocked himself, at how he could leave home in Ontario Terrace, having kissed his children’s heads and absorbed the smell of warm oats they exuded, and then stride down Mount Pleasant Street barely noticing the ragged old man on the corner who might both be younger than him and have typhus. Or the hollowed country girl with her face in a skeletal rictus of pleading, seemingly unable to ask anymore, for anything.
But there was one incident in that year that came to his mind whenever the word ‘Famine’ was used in later times. William Smith O’Brien, a member of the Irish Party in the House of Commons and the leader of their faction, Young Ireland, that Mitchel himself belonged to, had been in Limerick. There he wanted to give a speech for his re-election to the House of Commons, and he needed conservative votes to bolster his normally progressive ones. He had been embarrassed that John Mitchel, seen as a firebrand, had turned up in town to visit some fellow radicals to talk about necessary matters, like stopping the next harvest ever being shipped out of the country.
Tom Meagher, who accompanied Mitchel, did not necessarily like to stay around in Limerick while Smith O’Brien pretended to be a harmless and hopeful improver of things that Westminster had no intention to improve. Meagher was young and, even with a rough country walk in mind, appropriately dressed and shod and looked the very essence of the healthy and alluring orator unleashed on nature.
He and Mitchel both happened to like those Comeragh Mountains just south of Clonmel, and John said he knew the way to a clachan on the southern end, close to the sea and on the banks of a stream, that he had visited in years past. He had for some time wondered how they were faring down there, the people who had been so hospitable in his earlier visit.
When they departed the public house at Knocknacullen, where they had left their horses, John carried some bacon and bread and wine in his satchel, and the two set off over the slopes of Crohawn, from which, that clear day of late April, they hoped to see the coast. A lovely wild scene faced them at each step, a shaggy country of great boulders and scooped loughs under blue mountain bluffs. The white-mantled hawthorn bushes lent a brightness to the scene, though, and reminded John of paintings he had seen of the branching coral of the South Pacific…
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