WASTE LANDS IN IRELAND.

Westport Times, Volume VI, Issue 934, 2 March 1872, Page 3

WASTE LANDS IN IRELAND.

A lecture was latety delivered by Mr Smyth, M. P., at the Catholic Young Men's Society in Navan (Meath), on the very important subject of a peasant proprietary, such as exists in Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, France, Norway, and other ■countries. He pointed out that Mr. ■Gladstone's Land Act left untouched the false system which discouraged agriculture, promoted pasturage, consolidated farms, and exterminated the people.— " With three millions of our population lost (said Mr Smyth), emigration still flows on, and as people disappear bog and waste increase. Is Ireland to be or not to be the home ■of an Irish people ? Whither do those people fly, and what is the magnet that draws them across the trackless deep? Land, waste land. Tot Ireland contains 6,000,000 acres of waste laud—land that, according to the testimony of successive commissions from 1810 to 1845, of Sir E. Kane, SirE. Griffiths, &c, is probably re■claimahle. So early as 1771 the Irish parliament turned its attention to waste land reclamation, and in 1771 relaxed the penal code for that express purpose. The hideous spectacle of a people flying en masse their native •country, while one-fourth of that ■country remains uncultivated, is without a parallel in history.