Story of Famine’s youngest victims unearthed in mass grave

A study of over 500 child skeletons from a mass workhouse grave has uncovered the harrowing deaths suffered by the youngest victims of the Famine.

The medical secrets from the hundreds of children buried between 1847 and 1851 in the grounds of the Kilkenny Union Workhouse are uncovered in a new study on the skeletal manifestation of stress in child victims of the Great Irish Famine.

Almost two thirds of the 545 children who were buried in the mass grave on the workhouse grounds were under the age of six, while workhouse records show the mortality rate for babies under the age of two was four times higher than older children.