ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 88

ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

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the Ponsonby estate among the fifteen hundred persons who were left homeless there. The attempt to trace crime to the Tipperary combination was laughed out of court even by two Removables of the strong-stomached type of Messrs. Shannon and Irwin. The lives lost during the reign of Balfourism in Ireland were all taken by Mr. Balfour's ministers: three men shot on the square of Mitchelstown by the police; John Mandeville wilfully murdered in Tullamore Gaol (according to the finding of a coroner's jury); Patrick Larkin, son of a Clanricarde evicted tenant, done to death in Kilkenny Gaol; Hanlon run through the body with a bayonet on the Ponsonby estate; Kavanagh shot dead by an emergency man on the Coolgreany estate; a boy named Heffernan, fourteen years of age, shot down by the police in the main street of Tipperary; a Tipperary shopkeeper, named McGrath, found dead in Clonmel Gaol; and so on. The corpses were all Nationalist; the lethal weapons all official. There is one unanswerable crime-test in relation to the Plan of Campaign. Of the only 'crimes' the most keen-scented Removables could detect in the Plan of Campaign twenty-three members of the House of Commons were convicted. Those convictions were duly read out by the Speaker to the House, and even the Government that sent the Pigott forgeries before three judges had not the hardihood to ask its Tory majority to express a more than Platonic horror of these three-and-twenty criminals in their midst by treating them to the vote of expulsion so liberally exercised against various non-Irish criminals of another stamp during the late Parliament.

There are those, indeed, who, waiving the question whether the tenants were not right 'at the commencement of the row,' and free from criminal reproach during its … continue reading »

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