A GEM OF MISGOVERNMENT IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 40

A GEM OF MISGOVERNMENT IN IRELAND

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that of the Spanish Main. The fleet of galleys has vanished. The islanders, whose bards once proudly bragged that 'there never was a good man of the O'Malleys yet but was a mariner,' have only two five-ton yawls to the whole island. They have lost the art of braving the billows, and have no means of fishing up their dinner out of seas from which foreign trawlers are at this moment raising tons of sole and turbot. And the little island that once ruled the Western seas? A notorious land-jobber, who was also sub-Sheriff for the county, bought it after the Great Famine, with a view to exterminating the remnant of the population and re-selling the island to the Government for a convict-station. The deal with the Government did not come off, and the speculator —a man with bowels of iron—recouped himself by trebling the rents upon the tenants, in place of evicting them root and branch. And so the poor sons of Granu Uaile staggered along through a generation, oscillating from famine to dearth, and back again from dearth to famine, until last year, in the ninety-first year of the ever-blessed Union, Mr. Balfour's inspectors reported that the entire population was without food or the means of buying it, and must be either fed at the public charges or die. The British taxpayer was laid under contribution. The official return lately presented (Relief of Distress, Ireland, 1890-91) shows that relief works were set going on the island from 23rd December to 5th August—that is to say, until the potatoes were ripe for digging; that at one time 93 out of a total population of 622 souls—roughly speaking, one from every household on the island—were in receipt of weekly wages from the State; and that in road-making alone 813l. was thus expended on wages—a comparative torrent of gold on an island whose official … continue reading »

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