A GEM OF MISGOVERNMENT IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 44

A GEM OF MISGOVERNMENT IN IRELAND

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Irishman once directed a piper to play up '"The Boyne Water"—gently, to see could he stand it.' If the British public 'can stand it' [1] out will go the remaining eighteen families on the bleak island rocks, and out will go after them the remainder of the famishing islanders, for whom Mr. Balfour was only last year issuing pathetic appeals to British charity, and decking his policemen with angels' wings, and composing melting speeches in reply to his Removables' rhetoric. And when the last of the O'Malleys are left roofless amidst the wild waves for not disgorging to the landlord the little store of food contributed for their starving children, surely they may well contrast piracy as practised on their island in the nineteenth century not altogether favourably with piracy as it was understood in the sixteenth.

But now comes the crowning touch of paternal government in Ireland. For it turns out that while Mr. Balfour was spending tens of thousands of pounds out of public taxes in useless road-making, and keeping the island in an agony for the sake of a few hundred pounds of landlord's rents, Nature had all the time provided within gunshot of Clare Island a wealth of deep-sea fishing enough to have fed the islanders and paid the landlord fifty times over; and that throughout three hundred years it never once occurred to a paternal Government that such a treasure was there, or to provide the islanders with the means of grasping it. Last week there were twenty-two steam trawlers in Clew Bay, gathering up tons of turbot, soles, and mackerel on every side of Clare Island—Scotch trawlers, English trawlers, Manx trawlers, even French trawlers—and not a single Irish boat in the lot. For many years officials like … continue reading »

[1] The appeal to British public opinion stopped the evictions. They have never taken place since.

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