THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1906.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8282, 8 November 1906, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1906.

The sitting of the Royal Commisaion appointed to deal with the congested districts problem ia Ireland has once more drawn attention to the misery in whictf some oil the Irish peasantry live. Mr Percy Aldeu, one of a Parliamentary party wbiuh has been touring in pares the Irish peasants in the congested difcttiots to the figure in Mil' let's "Man with the Hoe." Never, he saye, has he seen in any country such poverty as came under his notice in Donegal and Connemara. In one place not yet taben over by the Congested Districts Board, constant subdivisions have split up the plots into such smal! sections that it, is not worth while putting fences ud. One man's fifty patohes do not make four acres. The general rule is that the cattle and the pigs, the geese and the bene, all sleep in the same cabiii with the family. In one room in North Mayo, sixteen by 4 twelve, thinly thatched with straw, a man, his wife, end five children/J three uows, two oalves; one donkey, two pigs; and thirty or forty geese and fowls were discovered. There are said to be scores of similar cases. Lord Dudley mentioned; at a sitting of the Commission, that it was the custom, when a son married, for the father to give him the cowhouse as a living room, and a field or two to work. The Congested Districts Board, whioh has been working hard to relieve the congestion, and is now at the end of its tether, offers to the tenant a holding equal in value and not less in size than the many plots be has

been in tbe habifc of cultivating. These are tben all swept away, and the land is restripped and new oofctages bu»lt wherever necessary, the tenant paying a certain sum per year for all t tbe benefits he receives, which oum enables hira in time to make the cottage and holding his own. The Dillon estate of over ninety thousand acres, purchased for £290,000, has all been treated in this i?ay and in more than four thousand oases the cottages have been improved, cattle sheds have been built, holdings enlarged or benefited by reclamation, drainage and improved methods of husbandry. Clare Island, 4,000 aores in extent, once a scene of lawlessness and disoontent, where rents and rates had to ha collected with the help of the oonstabulary, is now, tbaoks to the Board, a place of comparative peaoe and prosperity. Altogether there are 98,000 uneoonomio holdings In the scheduled districts, and more than £13,000,000 worth of land must be acquired to make them eoonomic. If the Treasury does uot allow an inoreaae iu tbe annual expenditure it will take exactly 100 years to deal with these districts, and iu the meantime abject misery will continue and Irisb men and women emigrate to Amerloa. All the party is said to be agreed that compulsory purohase must oome, and the sooner the better.