Michael Davitt in his book, The fall of feudalism in Ireland, published in 1904, told the story.it is related that Mr John O’Conneli, M.P., … son of the Liberator, read aloud in Conciliation Hall, Dublin [the meeting place of the Repeal Association], a letter he had received from a catholic bishop in west Cork, in 1847, in which this sentence occurred — ‘the famine is spreading with fearful rapidity and scores of persons are dying of starvation and fever, but the tenants are bravely paying their rents’ — whereupon John O'Connell exclaimed, in proud tones, ‘I thank God I live among a people who would rather die of hunger than defraud their landlords of the rent!’