a British parliament select committee inquiring into the famine, Spaight said that: I found so great an advantage of getting rid of the pauper population upon my own property that I made every possible exertion to remove them ... I consider the failure of the potato crop to be the greatest possible value in one respect in enabling us to carry out the emigration system. The same quaysides were the departure point for many emigrant ships sailing over the Atlantic. One week in April 1850 saw four ships, Marie Brennan, Congress, Triumph, an 1849 Youghal built ship, and Hannah, the smallest emigrant ship, glide down the Shannon towards the Americas. The latter three ship had 357 people aboard mostly comprising young men and women, depriving Ireland of their vigour and prosperity which they would bring to other nations instead. The Hannah at 59 feet long could barely hold the 60 passengers and eight crew, yet made eight trans-Atlantic voyages. Boycott against Limerick Jews Census returns record one Jew in Limerick in 1861. This doubled by 1871 and doubled again by 1881. Increases to 35, 90 and 130 are shown for 1888, 1892, and 1896 respectively. A small number of Lithuanian Jewish tradespeople, fleeing persecution in their homeland, began arriving in Limerick in 1878. They initially formed an accepted part of the city's retail trade, centred on Collooney St. The community established a synagogue and a cemetery in the 1880s. Easter Sunday of 1884 saw the first of what were to be a series of sporadic violent antisemitic attacks and protests. The wife of Lieb Siev and their child were injured by stones and their house damaged by an angry crowd for which the ringleaders were sentenced to hard labour for a month. In 1892 two families were beaten and a stoning took place on 24 November 1896. Many details about Limerick's Jewish families are recorded in the 1901 census that shows most were peddlers, though a few were described as drapery dealers and grocers. In 1904 a young Catholic priest, Father John Creagh, of the Redemptorist order, delivered a fiery sermon castigating Jews for rejecting the divinity of Jesus Christ, usury alliance with the Freemasons then persecuting the Catholic Church in France, taking over Limerick's economy, selling shoddy goods at inflated prices paid in instalments. He urged Catholics "not to deal with the Jews." Later, after 32 Jews left Limerick