A GEM OF MISGOVERNMENT IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 43

A GEM OF MISGOVERNMENT IN IRELAND

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with liberal musket blows, and with eighty Coercion prosecutions. I have had an opportunity recently of detailing to the House of Commons the incidents of last winter on Clare Island, and I do not propose to harrow your readers further with them here. The main point is that the myrmidons of the State actively assisted in robbing the poor-box they themselves had filled; that the policemen, who a few months before visited the cabins as State almoners, revisited them now to spy out for the landlord's bailiff the peasant's mountain-goat or handful of potatoes; that the very men and women who up to August had to be supported on the relief works were—eighty of them—prosecuted under the Coercion Act for 'illegal assembly' in collecting in their terror to watch the operations of the bailiff and riflemen; that during a period of three stormy months they were no less than five times summoned to the mainland on the solemn charge of overawing the forces of the law, and once, in mere selfish cruelty, compelled to walk thirteen miles further inland in a snowstorm to convenience the Removable Magistrates; and that, finally, the Removables from the Bench, and Mr. Jackson in the House of Commons, wound up the prosecutions with a lecture worthy of Mr. Podsnap in his most dithyrambic vein upon the benignity of British law and the glories of the British connection. The islanders, of course, only escaped from the Coercion Court to fall in the Eviction Court. At the last Castlebar Quarter Sessions, decrees for possession—which Mr. Gladstone well described as 'sentences of death'—were passed against nineteen island families; X. the agent, with his decrees in his hand, moved X. the Sheriff for the usual quota of British bayonets to assert the clemency of the law. One family was evicted experimentally—as an … continue reading »

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