ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 87
ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?
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an unparalleled sacrifice of their property in order to dissuade their landlord from one of the darkest crimes ever perpetrated in Irish landlord history towards men too poor and broken to defend themselves. The more the Tipperary struggle is tested by keen inquirers, the more quickly the absurd impressions generated in the English mind upon the subject by the misrepresentations of Messrs. Balfour and Smith-Barry will vanish, and the more incontestably it will be proved that the abandonment of Mr. Smith-Barry's town and lands in Tipperary was as heroic a deed of self-sacrifice as ever men performed for their weaker fellow-men. Even by the lower test of success in 'making an example of the devastator of the Ponsonby estate, the New Tipperary exodus was, until the moment of the disruption of the Irish party, a series of amazing triumphs over the infamous influences employed to quell it. I shall be delighted to meet Mr. Smith-Barry at the witness-chair of the Evicted Tenants' Commission on Tipperary topics.[1] The evicted tenants' justification 'at the commencement of the row, before the Plan of Campaign was adopted' may now be taken as conceded ground. Another of the outcries against the Campaign combinations with which Tory platforms once reverberated—namely, their criminal character—has long ago been silenced. I doubt whether any witness before a Commission of Inquiry would deny that the Campaign fight has been the means of saving the country for the past six years from agrarian crime, instead of promoting it. The statistics are irresistible. Five fearful agrarian murders took place on the Clanricarde estate in the years prior to the Plan of Campaign; not one since. Not a single deed of bloodshed has been perpetrated on … continue reading »
[1] The landlords, as was here anticipated, shirked the investigation on a transparent pretext.
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