FADING RUIN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1717, 25 January 1905, Page 58

FADING RUIN.

PITIFUL PLIGHT OF A LONELY IRISH ISLAND. SAD PICTURES. ACHILL ISLAND, December 6. Achill is the worst stage yet. Already the position in some of the poor villager inward in the island is deplorable in the extreme. Famine here is only a question of weeks, unless the few shopkeepers have more staying power than they admit of, which I doubt; or unless the Government interferes. The potato crop, except in a few cares, has been a miserable failure in the island. In several places the unfortunate people found nothing whatever to dig out in their ridges; in others the potatoes turned out were small, rotten, diseased, and even poisonous. Achill. even more than the Mayo mainland, puts its trust in the potato crop, and struggles on in a weary way from hand to mouth year in year out.

Achill Island is a poor, wild, scourged, tragic place. It is a sort of earthly purgatory to the Connaught man’s imagination. When times become bad on the mainland the peasant says. "God help us; things must be terrible entirely in Achill.” Once Achill was quite cut off from the mainland, and the islander returning with his purchases from Westport and elsewhere, had to wait wearily in cold and hunger by the sound till the water was sufficiently low to allow him to get his "slips” of pigs across. For years, however, a bridge has spanned the sound, and Achill is not apparently isolated, though some of its villages might be a thousand miles in the seas from Mayo so little are they in touch with mainland pad pom a HARVESTERS’ FAILURES. Other islanders, from the age of fourteen upwards, go to Scotland and England in early summer, and remain away till near November, trying to eke out the means of subsistence that their bleak, hilly, stony, and boggv isle denies them. And a deal of Achill is not worth working. This year the results in Britain were sadly below the average — cruelly disappointing in many cases. On the other hand, storms spoiled the season so far as the fishermen were concerned. Lastly came the potato failure, the blackest ill of all. So AchilFs position is desperate, and Achill contains some seven thousand souls, most of whom have now no winter store at all.

The shopkeepers cannot stand much further strain. One of the chief of them told me yesterday that several of hi? island custom el's had not been able to pay him anvthing for twelve months pas 4 It' was honed that a fair potato crop would enable them to "clear up,” and, as in other places, the Achill crop promised well till the great storms came. Now all hope is gone. One might drive through Achill and conclude that it was simply a cheerless, impoverished place—a shade worse than Mayo, but not so bad as it really is. The worst in Achill is awful. Yesterday I went with some who know the island intimately to homes —if they can bo called homes—of the people. In villages like Dooega and West Dooega the conditions are terrible, and at Keel and Dooach they are just as bad. Several of the homes are wretched one-room affairs, in which cattle as well as people are, perforce, housed. There is no system of drainage, the elementary laws of sanitation are unknown, and but for the winds that sweep in from the Atlantic pestilence must long since have laid low the inhabitants. SICK AND UNATTENDED.

In some houses it was hard to see anything for rolling smoke, though the cheery Irish words of welcome, at, once pious and poetic, were never missing. There are illness in many a cabin. I shall not soon forget the picture of one old woman in Dooega West, who lay by the fire poorly overeu on an apology for a bed, moaning pitifully in a fever, and for the time untended, while the wind swopt in through the open doer. It was one of the most painful evenings of my existence.

The children and adults in Dooega West and the neighbourhood have already a starved look. The men, when closely questioned—for these poor people do not air their grievances or wear their hearts upon their sleeves—spoke of the position with dull despair; of their failure in Scotland and England; and of the far worse failure of the potato at home. The relieving officer, who looked as sorrowful as themselves, bore out tlieir stories afterwards, and an exrelieving officer, who lias spent all his life in the island, declared that the project was dreadful even for Achill, which has -often come to close quarters with famine. o*n all sides there is sheer and strained anxiety as to what the Government will do. An inspector of the Irish Local Government Board has been in the island -and I believe has already reported. Alas! the ways of the Irish Government are devious and tedious, and Achill is out of the world. A CRUEL DISAPPOINTMENT.

It is not for want of care and labour on the part of (he peasantry that the Achill crop has boen so cruel a disappointment. They work like slaves in Achill or their bleak patches, which average about au acre. The men, for one thing, carried up loads of seaweed on their ’backs for miles, and spread it on the unfertile land. But their toilsome labour was well-nigh in vain, the land being too poor to bo much benefited by seaweed. Mr Owen Lavelle, who is physically and mentailv a fine type of the Achill inlander, and who represents that island on the Westport Rural District Council, told me that many families would have

fared better had they left their patche* wholly untilled. In that case they might have got work somewhere else, whereas now, after all their labour, they have no reward whatever —nothing but disappointment, sickness of heart, and the fear of famine. The greatest tribute one can pay to the poor peoiile is to say that the terrible conditions under which they live have not demoralised them. On the contrary, in their x - ags and squalor, they are still a cheery, a pious, and lovable people. On Saturday night, barefooted, coatless old men, who looked as if they had not had a good meal for months, sang for mo with rare gusto racy and rollicking song 3 in Irish, and singers and listeners were carried for the nonce out of the drear realities of Achill. They deserve a kindlier fate. COMFORT FROM THE PULPIT. On Sunday, at mass in one of the churches, the priest based a long sermon on the gospel of the day—Christ’s terrible picture of the signs and portents that shall precede his Second Coming, and the Resurrection and Judgment. The priest told his poor congregation how happy they were in the knowledge that, ages before those days of awe, they in. their island home beside the vast Atlantic would have returned to the peaceful dust. There was not a word about the sufferings of to-day in Achill. The poor people, esp.--iafly the old women looked for the moment as if they were blessed indeed.

Then the preacher spoke cf the Resurrection and eternal hope, and for the time* dreary Achill in the sea seemed but an incidental stage in a pilgrimage, whose end is radiant glory. There are more things in the soul of Achill than are dreamed of in much modern philosophy, but I confess I would have liked a little more recognition of the ordeal of the body in a wintry world.

Having gone in mud and cold and rain into ihe famished homes of the people, I can say without the least exaggeration that the immediate winter trials which threaten Achill art) harrowing to contemplate.