To put this song in context, this is part of a talk we attended during the 150th Famine commemoration, given by a ballad-scholar friend.
The events described came from a report in the Skibbereen area.
Jim Carroll

Even though it is extremely relevant to our theme of emigration , we cannot now delve too deeply into the whole area of the Great Famine which was brought about by a system of landlordism and rack-renting which forced the Irish plot-holder to depend on the potato. However, before leaving the area, I would ask you to bear in mind that this was a totally artificial famine brought about by economic considerations. Ireland in 1847 was not short of food, for only the potato was affected. The coffin ships which ferried the starving refugees from the potato famine to England and America went alongside ships carrying enough meat and cereals out of the country to have fed the population adequately. But the small farmers and peasants who reared the meat and grew the grain did so to pay their rent, and many thousands of them starved to death rather than lose their miserable cabins and plots of ground. Horrific obscene as this was, we in the 1990's have no reason to feel morally superior as we in the European union and North America hoard beef, grain and butter mountains while much of the world still starves.
But let me sum up the whole aura of despair at the time by quoting you a piece from the 'Cork Examiner' of March 19th, 1847, reporting on a court case in which a man had been charged with stealing food. In his defence he said that he was driven to it by what had happened to his wife. The Court was told:
The starving woman lay in her hovel next to her dead three year old son, waiting for her husband to return from begging food. When night fell and his failure to return led her to imagine him dead in a ditch, she lay there in the faint fire's dying embers, caressing with her eyes her dead son's face and tiny fists. with death searching her, and now with her own fists clenched, she made one last effort to stay alive. Crawling as far away from her son's face as she could, as if to preserve his personality, or at least her memory of it, she came to his bare feet and proceeded to eat them.
When her husband returned and saw what had happened, he buried the child, went out, and was caught trying to steal food. At his trial, the magistrate from his immediate district intervened on his behalf, citing the wife's act as a circumstance deserving special consideration. The baby's body was exhumed, the flesh of both its feet and legs were found to have been gnawed to the bone, and the husband released and allowed to return to his wife.