A FORTNIGHT IN KERRY.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2105, 22 November 1880, Page 4

A FORTNIGHT IN KERRY.

Under the above heading James Bedpath, the “ Now York Tribune’s” commissioner in Ireland, writes as follows : Dord Dansdowne owns neatly all the country around Kenmare —every foot of the town itself —two entire parishes adjoining and south of it, and most of the parish of Kenmare. His estates cover about twenty square miles of the County Kerry, The town lots, on which the stores and dwellings stand, are leased; and Lord Dansdowne himself has done nothing to build up or improve Kenmare. Ho has done nothing but tax the citizens. The finest dwelling in the neighborhood is the residence of Mr Trenoh, the agent of Dord Dansdowne. The memory of Trench, senior, as well as the memory of the grandfather of the present Dord Danadowce, is execrated by the peasantry around Kenmare. Between them they Grove thousands of the working people to America, and under the name of “The rules of the estate ” they devised a code of laws (that were rigidly enforced) which would have brought disgrace on the most despotic rulers of Eastern despotisms. The present Marquis and the present agent only carry out the ruthless code that their predecessors contrived. They do not modify it, but they do not bear the double curse of inventing and enforcing. Some persons exonerate the Trenches, and lay the blame on the Dansdownes ; but the greater number oay that in this Bleeding Heart Yard, twenty miles square, it is Panoks Trenoh and not Oasby Dansdowne who is to blame. IPanoks is quoted by both parties. Trenoh Thus boasted that Kerry would never be a second Mayo— that is, a country where the peasantry have been aroused to a sense of their rights, and that he would rule the tenants with a rod of iron; and again, when a peasant has spokon of the peculiar hardohip in some instances of eviction, Panoks has defended himself by remarking, “ Give me the feathers, and I will fly.” What are the rules of the estate ? They are an unwritten code of the most arbitrary laws, in defiance of human rights, which at lus own will the landlord enacts, alters, modifies, or abolishes, but always has the power to execute. Trenoh was so bold in his slanders of the tenantry whom he and his master had driven from their homes, that his hook provoked investigation, and brought out the truth, and the truth has silenced him ever since. He contents himself now with offering bribes to journalists to suppress any farther developments. One of the rules of the Dansdowne estate was that no tenant should marry without the agent’s permission. This decree included the children of the tenants. One young couple, both of them the children of tenants, defied this rale ; but they were punished for their rebellion, and “ the two fathers-in-law wore not merely warned —they were banished as a punishment for harboring their son and daughter by a fine of a gale of rent.” A gale is half a year’s rent. Another rule of the estate was that no stranger should be lodged or harbored on the estate, lest he should become sick or idle, or in some way chargeable on the poor rates. I was told by Kenmare citizens of many examples of the ruthless execution of this rule. But Mr Thomas Crosby, of Cork, has put on record that several of Dord Dansdowne’s tenants wore warned and punished for giving lodging to a brother-in-law, and even a daughter ; and although the accusation has been long printed, it has never been denied.

The London “Spectator,” of July 17th, referred to one terrible example of Lord Lansdowne’s cruelty in enforcing this decree. It was the great Marquis—the patriot of the Eeform Bill—that the “ Spectator ” referred to, and I quote what it said as repeated, in a reply to the charge, by the present Lord—the stainless noble, who refused to contaminate his character by continuing in Mr Gladstone's Administration:— “ Those who remember a very remarkable book called “ Bealitiea of Irish Life,” by W. Stewart Trench, land agent in Ireland, will remember how Draconic used to be the conditions of life on Lord Lansdowne’s estates — conditions so severe that on one occasion—of course long before the present Lord Lansdowne’s regime —a boy came to a cruel death through the terror felt by his relatives, of whom bis grandmother was one, of sheltering even for a few days any one in their cabins whose presence there had not been permitted by the agent. On the Kerry estate of Lord Lansdowne no tenant might shelter his daughter-in-law if the son married, and the orphan children of deceased sons were excluded as sternly by the rules as their mother.” I heard this story told in the rich Kerry tongue with the inimitable pathos of unconscious art by a man who knew the boy and the people. Ho told the story as an illustration of the truth that tyranny hardens the hearts of both oppressor and oppressed. Who would believe such a story of as warm-hearted a race as the sun ever shone on ? I wish I had written down bis words, but as his memory or truthfulness might bo doubted—for I should be forced to suppress his name—l shall quote the story as related by Mr Godkin, who abridged it from the London “Times” of 1857;

“ An order had gone forth on the estate —a common order in the land—that no tenant was to admit any lodger into his house. This was a general order. It appears, however, that sometimes special orders were given, and one was promulgated that Dennis Shea should not be harbored. This boy had no father living. He had lived with a grandmother who had been turned out of her holding for harboring him. He had stolen one shilling and a hen—done such things as a neglected twelve-year-old child would do. One night he came to his aunt Donohue, who lodged with Casey. Casey told the aunt and uncle not to allow him into the house, as the agent's drivers had given orders about him. The aunt beat him away with a pitchfork, and the uncle tied bis hands with cord behind his back. The poor child crawls to the door of a neighbor and trios to get in. The uncle is called to take him away, and he does so. He yet returns, with his hands still tied behind, having been severely beaten. The child seeks zefnge m other cabins, but all are forbidden to shelter him. He is brought back by some neighbors in the night, who try to force the sinking child on his relatives. There is a struggle at the door. The child is heard asking someone to put him upright. In the morning there is blood on the threshold; the child is stiff dead—a corpse—with its arms tied ; around it every mark of a last fearful struggle for shelter food the common rights of humanity.” What does the present Lord Landsdowne say to this story ? This: “ As for the boy who came to a cruel death, &0., the story, I believe, made its appearance some thirty years ago, and it is impossible for me to disprove it after snoh a lapse of time. I do not, however, hesitate to assert that it is, to say the least, a gross exaggeration, and a specimen of those virulent attacks of which Mr Stewart Trench complained.”

The “Spectator” crushed the noble Lord’s Podsnappery reply by saying that the story was not hearsay, but [quoted from the summing up of Chief Baron Pigott at the trial, " in which he repeatedly declares that the child was refused shelter in one cabin after another, including the lodging of his own uncle and aunt, from fear of the agent and his rule.” The “ Spectator” then quotes the Chief Baron's words, which toll the story as the “ Times’ reported it in 1851, These “ rules of the estate” were copied by other landlords in Kerry; but Mr God kin shows how they are sometimes suspended. An ejectment was lately obtained at the quarter sessions in a southern county against a widow who had married without leave, or married a different person from the one the agent selected. But it is supposed that the threat of assassination prevented a recourse to extremities in this and other cases. For the people seem with one consent to have made a desperate stand against this cruel tyranny. A landlord said to me “ Ho one in this part of the country would presume to evict a tenant now from fear of assassination. That is the tenants’ security.” ‘ The landlords are evicting tenants whenever they have not this fear before their eyes. The absentees, of course, are not thus influenced, and they are only held in check by the Land Leagues, where these organisations are strong and many. These leagues have three methods of opposing landlord cruelty and despotism. They urge that no one shall take a farm from which a tenant has been evicted for non-payment of rent, if the tenant was unable to pay owing to the failure of the crops. In every instance of eviction thus far the evicted tenants have been supported all the winter by the charity of foreign people; and in moat oases the seed that they have sown has been supplied by the Dublin committees or the Government. It should be remembered also that the landlords who have enforced the power given them by the laws they enacted—for both tho House of Lords

and the House of Commons are controlled by “the landed interest”—contributed nothing to relieve the distress of their tenantry, and that in the West of Ireland when a tenant with a “ long family” is evicted he is absolutely ruined, thrown on the poorhouse, and that he cannot secure another farm in this country. But of the large number of farms from which tenants have been flung since last November, only one thus far has been taken and held. Several farms were taken, but they were surrendered. In three or four instances threats, nocturnal visits of disguised men, and once violence, was used to compel these surrenders by the people in the neghborhood. But the surrenders for the most part have been made under the most terrible power of social ostracism. The tenant who has attempted to take a farm thus vacated has been shunned like a leper, and he found that none would speak to him or to his wife or children, and that shopkeepers who were willing to trade with him shared his fate. The second influence used has been to prevent men, by social ostracism, from oven working for the landlord himself. The potatoes remain undug—excepting when they disappear by Highland the hay remains uncut, excepting again when it cuts itself and vanishes between two days. The land remains idle, and the crops go to waste. The third method is a general refusal to buy stock that has been distrained for rent. One result of this triple lino of defences is that even when evictions have taken place the tenants have been restored by the landlords as “ caretakers.” It was boasted in fcbe debates on tbe Disturbance Bill that this fact was a proof of the leniency of the landlords. Mr Gladstone exploded this theory by showing that a caretaker could be evicted at any time by the simplest agency of the law. He did not tell the whole truth. The landlords know that the Dand Deague has baffled them in preventing the re-letting of these farms, and in order to save the crops they cannot confiscate yet, the caretakers are put back to save them, in the hope that they can throw them out and seize the harvest as soon as it is ripe. The Dand Deague, in fact, is trying to organise all the tenants of Ireland into a monster trades union, under the belief that it will be impossible to evict a whole people, and that thereby they will compel a radical change in the present feudal system of laud tenure in Ireland.