The Farmer's Ashes Lysaght Summary

Women would work the land like men, and if a woman could not get a job, she may go to town and sell wool for food provided through relief efforts and sometimes travel for miles for it; “Wasn't it a pathetic story for the poor woman who walked thirty miles return journey to Westport only to have the two stones of yellow meal she brought back snatched from her.”1 Because food was scarce, having any for yourself was rather dangerous; theft and violence became a common practice by the Irish population as a whole... that means theft unto women and by women as well; Lysaght states, “It is strongly attested in the oral tradition that many women were forced through circumstances of hunger to attempt to steal food2. Lysaght also provides an example

It is said that the farmer took away with him and let it cry all that night of hunger4. Why the farmer took the baby is unknown to me. The woman's breasts were described to be “bursting with milk” and the farmer apparently was comforting the baby by letting it suck on his finger, but why not just let the child say with its mother? The farmer's family was described as being “miserably poor” so why attempt to care for a child at all; was the farmer punishing the woman in another way for her crime against him? I wonder about the next morning too, was the woman released from his barn and did she get her baby

A medical doctor at the time by the name of Dr. O'Donovan described this point of starvation as a symptom; “Another horrible symptom of starvation is the total insensibility of the suffers to every other feeling except that of supplying their own wants...” he continues to recollect on a time when he witnessed mothers snatching food from their own starving children and a son to have killed his father for a potato6. People did not just steal to survive, they also committed acts of violence upon one another for the same