AMONG THE CLOUDS IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 36

AMONG THE CLOUDS IN IRELAND

« previous page | book contents | start of this chapter | next page »

of clammy mist, bears health and hope and roses with every breath to the little shoeless cherubs who lisp their soft Gaelic at the cabin-doors, or peep like mountain goats from their free crags at the unprecedented invaders in their travelling-carriage. How characteristic of English government in Ireland that this beautiful region should have been discovered by means of a terrible murder! Such alas! is the case. Some ten years ago, two bailiffs, father and son, were murdered here in a tit of frenzy, and their corpses cast into the lake. In the very bosom of the glen, the iron police-hut, which was planted there in consequence, still stands like a black mark against the character of the gentle-faced surroundings; a road had to be constructed for the accommodation of the police, and thus the poor community, which for centuries had lain neglected in misery and darkness, until it shed blood and got into the newspapers, is now able to travel to market over an excellent cart-road, and has two superb school-houses, and is on the high-road to becoming one of the most favoured resorts in this island.

Upon the whole there is a cheering air of improvement beginning to blow all around. When I was last in Connemara (in 1879) the people were cowering in terror of a famine which the Tory Government of the day, of course, denounced as a Nationalist fiction, and which, equally of course, they a few months afterwards were spilling out a million of money in endeavouring to cope with. But even more awful than famine in those days was the unbridled power of eviction and rent-raising, which haunted every peasant's door like a black Erinnys. It is only now that the remote and hunger-sodden peasant of the Wild West is beginning vaguely to realise that the landlord has no longer the power of a Jehovah—that it is … continue reading »

« previous page | book contents | start of this chapter | next page »