HEARTRENDING EVICTIONS IN IRELAND.

Thames Star, Volume XIII, Issue 4236, 29 July 1882, Page 1 (Supplement)

HEARTRENDING EVICTIONS IN IRELAND.

The special correspondent of the Daily • News has been visiting the scene of recent evictions in Connemara. About 300 families have been turned out of their holdings within a fortnight. Many of the evicted tenants have been re admitted as care takers, but in a large proportion of cases, there is neither shelter nor means of subsistence. Tlio people would wel come emigration as an escape from their present miseries, whichare due to a sheer inability to pay rent, owing to the poverty of the district and the badness of the seasons. Some of the scenes which are described by the correspondent are sad enough. On Mrs Kirwin's Carraroe property, on which evictions took place, the large number of 120 tenants and their families had been reinstated as caretakers. " But," he' continues, '• of those whom I saw, a considerable number had been ' put out' in the full sense of the words. An old man of 78, with tears in his eyes, said it was the first time in long life that 'he had been without a home. At one house we found a family who had been evicted, and whose few sticks of furniture were lying scattered over the yard in front of the house, the door of which was blocked up with stones. Husband, wife, and children—the latter all very young—had passed the night in the open air. The mother and child, as we came suddenly upon them, were dining off potatoes, their table being a rickety old chair set in the open yard. At an* other house, in the open yard also, were mother and children feeding upon Indian meal stirabout without milk—'and not enough of that,' said the poor women. In a third house, where the tenant had been allowed back as a care*, taker, a young girl was lying sick on a little straw on the floor, her pillow being the base of the huge boulder which formed the end wall of the house, thinly covered with straw enclosed in coarse canvas. One more scene of which I was an eyewitness. The family had been evicted ; a little boy was sick, most probably of in- \ eipient fever; the father had during the day previous improvised a sort of hut, the covering being the canvas of a small boat; the sick child lay so sheltered on a bed of furze laid upon the boggy ground, an extra petticoat, in addition to his ordinary petticoat garb, being thrown over him."