ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 89

ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

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continuance, take refuge in the plea that, their farms having now passed into other hands, Parliament cannot be asked to remake history in order to reinstate them. This is a small point, and in the main an unreal one. There are not fifty cases all told in which the evicted tenants have been replaced by genuine agricultural tenants. No evicted farm has been taken on the Clanricarde or Ponsonby or Olphert estates. The only Tipperary evicted tenant whose property has been laid hold of by an incoming tenant is a man whose house was taken as a Post Office by the late Government as a piece of barefaced partisanship and pecuniary encouragement to Mr. Smith-Barry. The Coolgreany, Luggacurran, and Massereene estates are the only ones on which 'planters' have been even nominally settled, and the Commission will have a delightful field for inquiry as to the bona-fides of most of these stage tenants. Mr. Townsend Trench, who was agent of the Luggacurran estate, went to Ulster after the evictions in search of new tenants with capital and pluck. He related humorously the result: 'I found a good many who had the capital but not. the pluck, and a good many who had the pluck but had no capital.' Mr. Townsend Trench came away and was dismissed from the agency. But another was found who from the ends of the earth collected a band of landless resolutes'; to these Dugald Dalgetty levies the farms of the evicted tenants have actually been sold under the Ashbourne Act at the risk of the British taxpayer, contrary to the public protest of the late Land Commissioner MacCarthy; and the British taxpayer will have some interesting reading as to the uses made of British gold in subsidising landlord misconduct in Luggacurran. It is possible that here and there some honorarium in hard cash may be the easiest way of disposing of any of these 'planters' who are not merely … continue reading »

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