ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 86

ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

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deportment in demanding it. A Land Court, blurts out Mr. Townsend, would be bound to cut down the rents wholesale, and the agent ought to have offered an adequate reduction 'at the commencement of the row, before the Plan of Campaign was adopted'; but since the row has commenced, by the agent's fault, then keep the tenants out of the Land Courts, evict them to a man, and join Lord Salisbury in shouting to the British public that it is all organised embezzlement. It will be interesting to hear Mr. Horace Townsend, and his brother agent, Mr. Barter, explain to the Commission on what principle their syndicate of English capitalists, thus admonished of the injustice practised upon the tenantry ' at the commencement of the row, before the Plan of Campaign was adopted' proceeded to cast more than twelve hundred people on the roadside, and prolong for five years the 'row' which was on the point of friendly settlement when they came upon the scene with their money bags 'to make an example of the rent-crushed tenantry for 'the way in which they wanted to get the rents down.' Here is disclosed with brutal candour the landlord conspiracy which Mr. Balfour spent five years of Coercion in forwarding—and spent in vain.

Here is also the origin of the Nemesis that overtook Mr. Smith-Barry on his own estate in Tipperary. The Tipperary tenantry knew, on Mr. Smith-Barry's own agent's authority, that the eviction of the Ponsonby tenantry was a crime of the blackest dye. They had precisely the same right to surrender their shops and farms to Mr. Smith-Barry that he had to make examples of the Ponsonby men. The difference between them was that he was appealing to wealth and brutal coercion for the aggrandisement of his own class, while they were making … continue reading »

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