In the 1940s, the Folklore Commission conducted interviews with thousands of elderly people around Ireland who remembered what they themselves had heard from ancestors who had survived the Famine.

Cathal Poirteir has edited a selection of these recollections, arranging the material in an order which follows the rough chronology of the Famine itself.

This remarkable book, dealing as it does with the oral transmission of folk memory, is a record of the last living link with the survivors of that terrible event.