ORDERED TO MARRY.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LX, Issue 143788, 11 May 1912, Page 5

ORDERED TO MARRY.

A Rural District Council in Meath, Ireland, lias taken upon itself the enormous responsibility of ordering its tenants to marry or give up their cottages. At a recent meeting of the council a letter was received from an Irish girl living in Derbyshire, declaring that it was tho councillors’ failure to do their duty that kept her in exile. She complained that the occupants of the greater number of the labourers’ cottages in her native district were bachelors, and would not take good Irish wives to keep the houses in order. Tho necessity for frequent repairs to the houses she ascribed to the use by the occupants of paraffin cooking lamps, tho “curse of the country.” A return showed that the occupants of nearly all the houses were unmarried. After some discussion an order was made that the tenants get married within three months or give up their houses. We do not know yet which alternative the tenants have chosen, but papers to hand report that the advertising of the number of bachelors in this neighbourhood has elicited quite a number of inquiries from England by women who wanted to got married. One letter asked if it were any use “offering four girls from Bristol,” who “would be very pleased, owing to the dreadful state of the countrv at present, to settle in the apparently peaceful village of Dunshauglilin with good husbands.’’ “I am an English girl, aged twenty-nine, anxious to settle down to matrimonial bliss,” said a letter with a London address. “Iris and Doris 7” writing from Portsmouth, enclosed a photograph of one pretty girl, and stated that thev were sisters, had a little income of their own, and would be obliged for the photographs of two “nice young men, and they must be in a decent position.” A correspondent writing from Kent described herself as “quite domesticated, musical, tall, slight, and dark.” The council ordered the letters to remain with tile clerk for inspection by any interested persons, and it will ho interesting to see whether anything important results from the inquiries. There were also several letters from English bachelors for the Irish exile who had stirred up the council to action, and it would bo an ironical conclusion to her efforts if, after all, sho married a man from an alien country.