Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) by William Henry Hurlbert

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Our hostess's son, the trustee of the Eviction Fund, was on one of the
cars which passed us, with two or three companions, who proved to be
"gentlemen of the Press." We passed a number of cottages and some larger
houses on the way, the inmates of which seemed to be minding their own
business and taking but a slight interest in the great event of the day.
We made a little detour at one of the finest points on the road to visit
"Winn's Folly," a modern mediaeval castle of considerable size, upon a
most enchanting site, with noble views on every side, quite impossible
to be seen through its narrow loopholed and latticed windows. The castle
is extremely well built, of a fine stone from the neighbourhood, and
with a very small expenditure might be made immediately habitable. But
no one has ever lived in it. It has only been occupied as a temporary
barrack by the police when sent here, and the largest rooms are now
littered with straw for the use of the force. At the beginning of the
century, and for many years afterwards, Lord and Lady Headley lived on
the estate, and kept a liberal house. Their residence was on a fine
point running out into the bay, but, I am told, the sea has now invaded
it, and eaten it away. In 1809 the acreage of this Glenbehy property was
8915 Irish acres or 14,442 English acres, set down under Bath's
valuation at L2299, 17s. 6d. Between 1830 and 1860 the rental averaged
L5000 a year, and between these years L17,898, 14s. 5d. were expended by
the landlord in improvements upon the property. This castle, which we
visited, must have involved since then an outlay of at least L10,000 in
the place.

The present Lord Headley, only a year or two ago, went through the
Bankruptcy Court, and the Hon. Rowland Winn, his uncle, the titular
owner of Glenbehy, is set down among the Irish landlords as owning
13,932 Irish acres at a rental of L1382.

After we passed the castle we began to hear the blowing of rude horns
from time to time on the distant hills. These were signals to the people
of our approach, and gave quite the air of an invasion to our
expedition. We passed the burned cottages of last year just before
reaching Mr. Griffin's house at West Lettur. They were certainly not
large cottages, and I saw but three of them. We found the Sheriff at
West Lettur. The police and the soldiers drew a cordon around the place,
within which no admittance was to be had except on business; and the
myrmidons of the law going into the house with the agent held a final
conference with the tenant, of which nothing came but a renewal of his
previous offer. Then the work of eviction began. There was no attempt at
a resistance, and but for the martial aspect of the forces, and an
occasional blast of a horn from the hills, or the curious noises made
from time to time by a small concourse of people, chiefly women,
assembled on the slope of an adjoining tenancy, the proceedings were as
dull as a parish meeting. What most struck me about the affair was the
patience and good-nature of the officers. In the two hours and a half
which we spent at West Lettur a New York Sheriff's deputies would have
put fifty tenants with all their bags and baggage out of as many houses
into the street. In fact it is very likely that at least that number of
New York tenants were actually so ousted from their houses during this
very time.

The evicted Mr. Griffin was a stout, stalwart man of middle age,
comfortably dressed, with the air rather of a citizen than of a farmer,
who took the whole thing most coolly, as did also his women-kind. All of
them were well dressed, and they superintended the removal and piling up
of their household goods as composedly as if they were simply moving out
of one house into another. The house itself was a large comfortable
house of the country, and it was amply furnished.

I commented on Griffin's indifference to the bailiff, a quiet,
good-natured man.

"Oh, he's quite familiar," was the reply; "it's the third time he's been
evicted! I believe's going to America."

"Oh! he will do very well," said a gentleman who had joined the
expedition like myself to see the scene. "He is a shrewd chap, and not
troubled by bashfulness. He sat on a Board of Guardians with a man I
knew four years ago, and one day he read out his own name, 'James
Griffin,' among a list of applicants for relief at Cahirciveen. The
chairman looked up, and said, 'Surely that is not your name you are
reading, is it?' 'It is, indeed,' replied Griffin, 'and I am as much in
need of relief as any one!' Perhaps you'll be surprised to hear he
didn't get it. This is a good holding he had, and he used to do pretty
well with it--not in his mother's time only of the flush prices, but in
his own. It was the going to Kilmainham that spoiled him."

"How did that spoil him?"

"Oh, it made a great man of him, being locked up. He was too well
treated there. He got a liking for sherry and bitters, and he's never
been able to make his dinner since without a nip of them. Mrs. Shee
knows that well."

To make an eviction complete and legal here, everything belonging to the
tenant, and every live creature must be taken out of the house. A cat
may save a house as a cat may save a derelict ship. Then the Sheriff
must "walk" over the whole holding. All this takes time. There was an
unobtrusive search for arms too going on all the time. Three ramrods
were found hidden in a straw-bed--two of which showed signs of recent
use. But the guns had vanished. An officer told me that not long ago two
revolvers were found in a corner of the thatch of a house; but the
cartridges for them were only some time afterwards discovered neatly
packed away in the top of a bedroom wall. It is not the ownership of
these arms, it is the careful concealment of them which indicates
sinister intent. One of the constables brought out three "Moonlighters'
swords" found hidden away in the house. One of these Colonel Turner
showed me. It was a reversal of the Scriptural injunction, being a
ploughshare beaten into a weapon, and a very nasty weapon of offence,
one end of it sharpened for an ugly thrust, the other fashioned into
quite a fair grip. While I was examining this trophy there was a stir,
and presently two of the gentlemen who had passed us on Mr. Shee's car
came rather suddenly out of the house in company with two or three
constables.

They were representatives, they said, of the Press, and as such desired
to be allowed to remain. Colonel Turner replied that this could not be,
and, in fact, no one had been suffered to enter the house except the
law-officers, the agent, and the constables. So the representatives of
the Press were obliged to pass outside of the lines, one of the
constables declaring that they had got into the house through a hole in
the back wall!

Shortly after this incident there arose a considerable noise of groaning
and shouting from the hill-side beyond the highway, and presently a
number of people, women and children predominating, appeared coming down
towards the precincts of the house. They were following a person in a
clerical dress, who proved to be Father Quilter, the parish priest, who
had denounced his people to Colonel Turner as "poor slaves" of the
League! A colloquy followed between Father Quilter and the policemen of
the cordon. This was brought to a close by Mr. Roche, the resident
magistrate, who went forward, and finding that Father Quilter wished to
pass the cordon, politely but firmly informed him that this could not be
done. "Not if I am the bearer of a telegram for the lawyer?" asked
Father Quilter, in a loud and not entirely amiable tone. "Not on any
terms whatever," responded the magistrate. Father Quilter still
maintaining his ground, the women crowded in around and behind him, the
men bringing up the rear at a respectable distance, and the small boys
shouting loudly. For a moment faint hopes arose within me that I was
about to witness one of the .exciting scenes of which I have more than
once read. But only for a moment. The magistrate ordered the police to
advance. As they drew near the wall with an evident intention of going
over it into the highway, Father Quilter and the women fell back, the
boys and men retreated up the opposite hill, and the brief battle of
Glenbehy was over.

A small messenger bearing a telegram then emerged from the crowd, and
showing his telegram, was permitted to pass. Father Quilter, in a loud
voice, commented upon this, crying out, "See now your consistency! You
said no one should pass, and you let the messenger come in!" To this
sally no reply was returned. After a little the priest, followed by most
of the people, went up the hill to the holding of another tenant, and
there, as the police came in and reported, held a meeting. From time to
time cries were heard in the distance, and ever and anon the blast of a
horn came from some outlying hill.

But no notice was taken of these things by the police, and when the
tedious formalities of the law had all been gone through with, a squad
of men were put in charge of the house and the holding, the rest of the
army re-formed for the march back, our cars came up, and we left West
Lettur. Seeing a number of men come down the hill, as the column
prepared to move, Mr. Roche, making his voice tremendous, after the
fashion of a Greek chorus, commanded the police to arrest and handcuff
any riotous person making provocative noises. This had the desired
effect, and the march back began in silence. When the column was fairly
in the road, "boos" and groans went up from knots of men higher up the
hill, but no heed was taken of these, and no further incident occurred.
I shall be curious to see whether the story of this affair can possibly
be worked up into a thrilling narrative.

We lunched at Mrs. Shee's, where no sort of curiosity was manifested
about the proceedings at West Lettur, and I came back here with Colonel
Turner by another road, which led us past one of the loveliest lakes I
have ever seen--Lough Caragh. Less known to fame than the much larger
Lake of Killarney, it is in its way quite worthy of comparison with any
of the lesser lakes of Europe. It is not indeed set in a coronal of
mountains like Orta, but its shores are well wooded, picturesque, and
enlivened by charming seats--now, for the most part, alas!--abandoned by
their owners. We had a pleasant club dinner here this evening, after
which came in to see me Mr. Hussey, to whom I had sent a letter from Mr.
Froude. Few men, I imagine, know this whole region better than Mr.
Hussey. Some gentlemen of the country joined in the conversation, and
curious stories were told of the difficulty of getting evidence in
criminal cases. What Froude says of the effect of the prohibitive and
protection policy in Ireland upon the morals of the people as to
smuggling must be said, I fear, of the effect of the Penal Laws against
Catholics upon their morals as to perjury. It is not surprising that the
peasants should have been educated into the state of mind of the
Irishman in the old American story, who, being solicited to promise his
vote when he landed in New York, asked whether the party which sought it
was for the Government or against it. Against it, he was told, "Then
begorra you shall have my vote, for I'm agin the Government whatever it
is." One shocking case was told of a notorious and terrible murder here
in Kerry. An old man and his son, so poor that they lay naked in their
beds, were taken out and shot by a party of Moonlighters for breaking a
boycott. They were left for dead, and their bodies thrown upon a
dunghill. The boy, however, was still alive when they were found, and it
was thought he might recover. The magistrates questioned him as to his
knowledge of the murderers. The boy's mother stood behind the
magistrate, and when the question was put, held up her finger in a
warning manner at the poor lad. She didn't wish him to "peach," as, if
he lived, the friends of the murderers would make it impossible for them
to keep their holding and live on it. The lad lied, and died with the
lie on his lips. Who shall sit in judgment on that wretched mother and
her son? But what rule can possibly be too stern to crush out the
terrorism which makes such things possible?

And what right have Englishmen to expect their dominion to stand in
Ireland when their party leaders for party ends shake hands with men who
wink at and use this terrorism? It has so wrought upon the population
here, that in another case, in which the truth needed by justice and the
fears of a poor family trembling for their substance and their lives
came thus into collision, an Irish Judge did not hesitate to warn the
jury against allowing themselves to be influenced by "the usual family
lie"!

A magistrate told us a curious story, which recalls a case noted by Sir
Walter Scott, about the detection of a murderer, who lay long in wait
for a certain police sergeant, obnoxious to the "Moonlighters," and
finally shot him dead in the public street of Loughrea, after dark on a
rainy night, as he was returning from the Post-Office on one side of the
street to the Police Barracks on the other. The town and the
neighbouring country were all agog about the matter, but no trace could
be got until the Dublin detectives came down three days after the
murder. It had rained more or less every one of these days, and the
pools of water were still standing in the street, as on the night of the
murder. One of the Dublin officers closely examining the highway saw a
heavy footprint in the coarse mud at the bottom of one of these pools.
He had the water drawn off, and made out clearly, from the print in the
mud, that the brogan worn by the foot which made it had a broken
sole-piece turned over under the foot. By this the murderer was
eventually traced, captured, tried, and found guilty.

Mr. Morphy, I find, is coming down from Dublin to conduct the
prosecution in the case of the Crown against the murderers of
Fitzmaurice, the old man, so brutally slain the other day near Lixnaw,
in the presence of his daughter, for taking and farming a farm given up
by his thriftless brother. "He will find," said one of the company,
"the mischief done in this instance also by prematurely pressing for
evidence. The girl Honora, who saw her father murdered, never ought to
have been subjected to any inquiry at first by any one, least of all by
the local priest. Her first thought inevitably was that if she intimated
who the men were, they would be screened, and she would suffer. Now she
is recovering her self-possession and coming round, and she will tell
the truth."

"Meanwhile," said a magistrate, "the girl and her family are all
'boycotted,' and that, mark you, by the priest, as well as by the
people. The girl's life would be in peril were not these scoundrels
cowards as well as bullies. Two staunch policemen--Irishmen and
Catholics both of them--are in constant attendance, with orders to
prevent any one from trying to intimidate or to tamper with her. A
police hut is putting up close to the Fitzmaurice house. The Nationalist
papers haven't a word to say for this poor girl or her murdered father.
But they are always putting in some sly word in behalf of Moriarty and
Hayes, the men accused of the murder."

"Furthermore," said another guest, "these two men are regularly supplied
while in prison with special meals by Mrs. Tangney. Who foots the bills?
That is what she won't tell, nor has the Head-Constable so far been able
accurately to ascertain. All we know is that the friends of the
prisoners haven't the money to do it."

Late in the evening came in a tall fine-looking Kerry squire, who told
us, _a propos_ of the Fitzmaurice murder, that only a day or two ago a
very decent tenant of his, who had taken over a holding from a
disreputable kinsman, intending to manage it for the benefit of this
kinsman's family, came to him and said he must give it up, as the
Moonlighters had threatened him if he continued to hold it.

A man of substance in Tralee gave me some startling facts as to the
local administration here. In Tralee Union, he said, there were in 1879
eighty-seven persons receiving outdoor relief, at a cost to the Union of
L30, 17s. 11d., being an average per head of 7s. 1d., and 1879 was a
very bad year, the worst since the great famine year, 1847. A
Nationalist Board was elected in 1880, and a Nationalist chairman in
1884. 1884 was a very good year, but in that year no fewer than 3434
persons received outdoor relief, at a cost of L2534, 13s. 10d., making
an average per head of 14s. 9d.! And at the present time L5000 nominal
worth of dishonoured cheques of the authorities were flying all over the
county!

"On whom," I asked, "does the burden fall of these levies and
extravagances?"

"On the landlords, not on the tenants," he promptly replied. "The
landlord pays the whole of the rates on all holdings of less than L4 a
year, and on all land which is either really or technically in his own
possession. He also pays one-half of the rates on all the rest of his
property."

"Then, in a case like that of Griffin's, evicted at Glenbehy, with
arrears going back to 1883, who would pay the rates?"

"The landlord of course!"[4]

CHAPTER VIII.

CORK, _Thursday, Feb. 23d._--We left Tralee this morning. It was
difficult to recognise the events yesterday witnessed by us at Glenbehy
in the accounts which we read of them to-day when we got the newspapers.

As these accounts are obviously intended to be read, not in Ireland,
where nobody seems to take the least interest in Irish affairs beyond
his own bailiwick, but in England and America, it is only natural, I
suppose, that they should be coloured to suit the taste of the market
for which they are destined. It is astonishing how little interest the
people generally show in the newspapers. The Irish make good journalists
as they make good soldiers; but most of the journalists who now
represent Irish constituencies at Westminster find their chief field of
activity, I am told, not in Irish but in British or in American
journals. Mr. Roche, R.M., who travelled with us as far as Castle
Island, where we left him, was much less moved by the grotesque accounts
given in the local journals of his conduct yesterday than by Mr.
Gladstone's "retractation" of the extraordinary attack which he made the
other day upon Mr. Roche himself, and four other magistrates by name.

"The retractation aggravates the attack," he said.

When one sees what a magistrate now represents in Ireland, it certainly
is not easy to reconcile an inconsiderate attack upon the character and
conduct of such an officer with the most elementary ideas of good
citizenship.

After Mr. Roche left us, a gentleman in the carriage, who is interested
in some Castle Island property, told us that nothing could be worse than
the state of that region. Open defiance of the moral authority of the
clergy is as rife there, he says, as open defiance of the civil
authorities. The church was not long ago broken into, and the sacred
vestments were defiled; and, but the other day, a young girl of the
place came to a magistrate and asked him to give her a summons against
the parish priest "for assaulting her." The magistrate, a Protestant,
but a personal friend of the priest, esteeming him for his fidelity to
his duties, asked the girl what on earth she meant. She proceeded with
perfect coolness to say that the priest had impertinently interfered
with her, "assaulted her," and told her to "go home," when he found her
sitting in a lonely part of the road with her young man, rather late at
night! For this, the girl, professing to be a Catholic, actually wanted
the Protestant magistrate to have her parish priest brought into his
court! He told the girl plainly what he thought of her conduct,
whereupon she went away, very angry, and vowing vengeance both against
the priest and against him.

This same gentleman said that at the Bodyke evictions, of which so much
has been heard, the girls and women swarmed about the police using
language so revoltingly obscene that the policemen blushed--such
language, he said, as was never heard from decent Irishwomen in the days
of his youth.

Of this business of evictions, he said, the greatest imaginable
misrepresentations are made in the press and by public speakers. "You
have just seen one eviction yourself," he said, "and you can judge for
yourself whether that can be truly described in Mr. Gladstone's language
as a 'sentence of death.' The people that were put out of these burned
houses you saw, houses that never would have needed to be burned, had
Harrington and the other Leaguers allowed the people to keep their
pledges given Sir Redvers Buller, those very people are better off now
than they were before they were evicted, in so far as this, that they
get their food and drink and shelter without working for it, and I'm
sorry to say that the Government and the League, between them, have been
soliciting half of Ireland for the last six or eight years to think that
sort of thing a heaven upon earth. An eviction in Ireland in these days
generally means just this, that the fight between a landlord and the
League has come to a head. If the tenant wants to be rid of his holding,
or if he is more afraid of the League than of the law, why, out he goes,
and then he is a victim of heartless oppression; but if he is
well-to-do, and if he thinks he will be protected, he takes the eviction
proceedings just for a notice to stop palavering and make a settlement,
and a settlement is made. The ordinary Irish tenant don't think anything
more of an eviction than Irish gentlemen used to think of a duel; but
you can never get English people to understand the one any more than the
other!"

The fine broad streets which Cork owes to the filling up and bridging
over of the canals which in the last century made her a kind of Irish
Venice, give the city a comely and even stately aspect. But they are not
much better kept and looked after than the streets of New York. And they
are certainly less busy and animated than when I last was here, five
years ago. All the canals, however, are not filled up or bridged over.
From my windows, in a neat comfortable little private hotel on
Morrison's Quay, I look down upon the deck of a small barque, moored
well up among the houses. The hospitable and dignified County Club is
within two minutes' walk of my hostelry, and the equally hospitable and
more bustling City Club, but a little farther off, at the end of the
South Mall. At luncheon to-day a gentleman who was at Kilkenny with Mr.
Gladstone on the occasion of his visit to that city told me a story too
good to be lost. The party were eight in number, and on their return to
Abbeyleix they naturally looked out for an empty railway carriage. The
train was rather full, but in one compartment my informant descried a
dignitary, whom he knew, of the Protestant Church of Ireland, its only
occupant. He went up and saluted the Dean, and, pointing to his
companions, asked if he would object to changing his place in the train,
which would give them a compartment to themselves. The Dean courteously,
and indeed briskly, assented, when he saw that Mr. Gladstone was one of
the party.

After the train moved off, Mr. Gladstone said, "Was not that gentleman
who so kindly vacated his place for us a clergyman?"

"Yes." "I hope he won't think I have disestablished him again!"

At the next station, my informant getting out for a moment to thank the
Dean again for his civility, and chat with him, repeated Mr. Gladstone's
remark.

"Oh!" said the Dean; "you may tell him I don't mind his disestablishing
me again; for he didn't disendow me; he didn't confiscate my ticket!"

With this gentleman was another from Kerry, who tells me there is a
distinct change for the better already visible in that county, which he
attributes to the steady action of the Dublin authorities in enforcing
the law.

"The League Courts," he said, "are ceasing to be the terror they used to
be."

I asked what he meant by the "League Courts," when he expressed his
astonishment at my not knowing that it was the practice of the League to
hold regular Courts, before which the tenants are summoned, as if by a
process of the law, to explain their conduct, when they are charged with
paying their rents without the permission of the Local League. In his
part of Kerry, he tells me, these Courts used not very long ago to sit
regularly every Sunday. The idea, he says, is as old as the time of the
United Irishmen, who used to terrorise the country just in the same way.
A man whom he named, a blacksmith, acted as a kind of "Law Lord," and to
him the chairmen of the different local "Courts" used to refer cases
heard before them![5]

All this was testified to openly two years ago, before Lord Cowper's
Commission, but no decisive action has ever been taken by the Government
to put a stop to the scandal, and relieve the tenants from this open
tyranny. These Courts enforced, and still enforce, their decrees by
various forms of outrage, ranging "from the boycott," in its simplest
forms up to direct outrages upon property and the person.

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