The Temuka Leader SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 1890. IRISH CRIME.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2017, 8 March 1890, Page 2

The Temuka Leader SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 1890. IRISH CRIME.

''Father Kinsella has beeu sentenced to two months' imprisonment on a . charge of building huts for evicted i tenants from the Cloncurry estate." ! Such is the cablegram which was for- ! warded to New Zealand a week ago, and it is so extraordinary that a few words in explanation of it may not prove uninteresting. To ub in this colony to succor the poor and house the homeless appears to be a work of charity,' but in Ireland, as will be seen by a } perusal of the above cablegram, it is a . crime punishable by imprisonment. . The reason it becomes a crime in i Ireland, is because it is one of the weapons by which rapacious landlords are successfully fought. It is part of the system, and is worked as follows : —When a landlord evicts his tenants, they are taken in hand by the local , authorities of the National League, by t the parish priest, or by some of the l members of Parliament, wooden huts are built for them, food and clothing 1 are provided, and no one is allowed to take the farms which they recently , occupied. It will be seen from this that i it is the landlord, and not the tenant t whs suffers. The latter is housed and r cared for, but the former has his land thrown on his hands and no one will take it. Herein, therefore, lies the crime. It enables the tenant to carry on the warfare with the landlord, because he knows that if evicted it does not amount to, as Mr Gladstone once said, " a sentence of death," and i he knows also that there is scarcely > any probability of anyone else taking ) up the farm. The crime, therefore, r consists, not in building the huta, but - in thus rendering the poor tenant » comparatively independent of the , landlord. Very often the landlord employs what is known as " emergency men," to look after the farms, and endeavors to work them himself by running sheep on them, but the general result is that after having tried everything he finds it to his advantage to reinstate the same tenant again. In several instances tenants have been reinstated after the farms have remained profitless for two and three years, and thus in the end the tenant has won. That is the explanation of the imprisonment of Father Kinsella. He has built huts for tenants evicted from Lord Cloncurry's estate, and intends to maintain them until they are reinstated in their holdings. Now thrt question is, does the money which goes to mainU ' them come from ? It can be easily seen that with the number of evictions which take ■ place in Ireland it is no easy matter to provide fnnds to carry on the war . fare on the above system. The answer is, the money is collected everywhere. It was for this that ¥- John Dillon and Sir Thomas Esmonde canvassed the Australian <otonies, and it is to this use the money which was collected for them will be devoted. This is called the Irish Tenants Eviction Fund, and this is the use which is made of it. To persons unacquainted with the internal conditions of Irish life the whsle thing must appear extraordinary, but it needs only a few words of explanation to understand why such an unusual course has to be adopted to adjust these disputes. Ireland is a country which has few industries, and consequently there has always been a very keen competition for land. The consequence was that as soon as a tenant was evicted there were a great many others ready to pay the landlord a premium for the vacant farm, aad generally the candidate who paid most got it. Thus the landlord had an interest in evicting his tenants, as it put money in his pocket. The Irish leaders, recognising that so long as this was allowed to go on the landlord must remain master of the situation, adopted the course which we have explained, with great success. The landlord has no longer any interest in evicting his tenants. On the contrary, his interest is to do the best he can with them, for so sure as he evicts them he loses by it. Now | this is the sort of crime which the i Coercion Act passed by the Conserva- I tive Government punishes, and it is the I kind of crime of which the Parnellites I have been found guilty. It is a ' conspiracy to drive landlords out of l Ireland, but we think that most f people will sympat* r -- g with the \ I criminals. From this .t can be seen h

that the Conservative G-overnment of England goes to great extremes in Ireland in the vain endeavor to maintain the landlord party, but that party is doomed, it is on its last legs, and our prayer io " God speed the day when it shall be heard of no more." [Since the above was in type a cablegram has informed us that Father Kinsella has been released, owing to a technical error in the mode of his arrest, j