ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 94

ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

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and the landlords' attitude was summed up in Mr. Smith-Barry's vow to ' make an example of the Ponsonby tenantry; that, in pursuance of this policy, Mr. Balfour with his coercion machinery, and Mr. Smith-Barry with his syndicate of English capitalists, combined and confederated to ' find a good fighting ground' for proving Mr. Balfour's prowess as a Coercionist, and avenging npon the tenants their crime of successful combination: that their object, brutally avowed, was to shut the portals of the law against the Campaigners, and not to conciliate, but to crush, them; and that it was in pursuit of this cruel, unstatesmanlike, and disastrous ambition that 1,700 families were evicted, 5,000 persons hauled before Removable Magistrates, and a diabolical police tyranny set in motion.

Finally, that the ' victims ' and ' dupes' of the Plan of Campaign are 100,000 leaseholders with twenty to thirty per cent. knocked off their rents, and 150,000 other judicial leaseholders entitled to three years' swingeing abatements; that its other dire results for the Irish people are the suppression of landgrabbing, and a progress of public opinion which makes even Ulster landlord candidates echo a cry for compulsory land purchase; that the most real and illustrious of our ' victims ' is Mr. Balfour, cast down from his high place by a movement of public disgust at his five years of vicious and abortive Coercion; that on ninety-five out of the 110 Plan of Campaign estates the landlords have elected to make a sensible settlement instead of taking Mr. Balfour's advice to beg their bread; and that, as to the couple of dozen remaining estates on which the Coercionists and Eviction Syndicates have magnanimously concentrated all their forces for years to ' make an example,' the evicted tenantry, if they … continue reading »

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