INTOLERABLE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVII, Issue 24, 4 October 1889, Page 11

INTOLERABLE.

( United Ireland, August 3,) It is bard to hope that the Irish people can keep their patience The renewal of the Clanricarde eviction outrages make every honest man's blood boil with irrepressible indignation. The wanton brutality of this businees is so great as to be almost incredible. By the eviction campaign of last week fourteen additional families have been added to the great army of the homeless on the vast estate of the Moit Noble exterminator. We can never write with patience of evictions — least of all of the Clanricarde evictions, whose inhuman cruelty no man has been yet found vile enough to justify. The tenants certainly touched the very limits of prudence or possible concession (in our view they passed the limit) in their eagerness for peace. Headed by Father Pelly, who in this matter may be taken as representing the Most Rev. Dr. Healy, they tendered one year's rent at the reduction. offered as the price of a temporary respite, leaving themselves still liable to eviction at any moment. As always happens in such cists, the suggestion of peace on the tenants' part served only to render the evictors' representatives more arrogant and brutal. The wretched creature, Tener, of whom a word later on, demanded, as the first condition of a settlement, that the vast body of evicted tenants whose self-devotion had wrung from the Most Noble even the small reduction which he now offers, should be abandoned to their fate by their brethren, who profited by their sufferings. This ignoble cjiidition was indignantly refused by the tenants, and the eviction campaign began. The forces included forty police, under the command of District-Inspector Wade, a company of forty Scotch Fusiliers, urn < r the command of Captain Lermotte, and the blackguard brigade of the crowbar, under the congenial personal direction of the a<j< j nt. Mr. Tener.J Divisional Commissioner Byrne took supreme commund of the allied forces that earned warto the knife into the Portumna district. It is hard to divest onr minds of the belief that we are reading of a reprisal war on a borde of savage natives in some South Paoin; Island rather than tbe dignified administration of the law amount her Majesty's peaceful and well-meaning subjects of the United Kingdom. Take an incident from the campaign. The wretched pain ■in Diamond was at his morning meal of potatoes, with his wile ?nd little family, when the invading army arrived unexpectedly at hit, cabin door, and forthwith the table was upturned (tbe law bein^ in a hurry), and the unfortunate mao, with his wife, and children, <iud his poor sticks of furniture, were all bundled out together on thu load. Yet this was one of the least painful scenes in the horrible busmen At the house of Michael Mitchell the tenant's wife's mother was lyuiin a dying condition when the eviction was commenced. Fat'iei Pelly and Father Corcoran, who knew the poor woman's conduiuti, vainly endeavoured to make a passage through the ring of tbe baa il Emergencymen. Meanwhile the work of eviction went gaily on. The emergency lambs had a splendid time of it. They attacked two young sons of the tenant, boys respectively of thirteen and fifteen ye.us ol age, bo fiercely with their hammers that one of the lads, with his head cut and bruised, and his hand disabled with the blows of the hamuiei , to escape from hia savage assailants, leaped through a iwo-atn-y window. At length the clergymen succeeded m making their jn oust heard. Mr. Byrne would be no party to dragging tbe dyin^ worn. in from her bed. The eviction was Btopped, and the euicigiwy wolves retired growling from their prey. Tbe chk[ recreation of those playful brutes at an eviction is smashing the tenant s In i niture wLh hammer nnd crowbar, and on one of them bomy rt i|iic-f u\ by the Key. Father Pally to remove the furniture gently he icuhui, " I will remove you by the back of the neck," and if .Mr. Byrne I. "I not intervened would have put his threat into execution, Wi % v-' ll not further cuter into the lamentable details of tlicse scenes. W r are only too painfully conscious how tame is all tnat can he writ . i beside the horrible reality. But one exploit of the agent Ttiu i deserves a brief commemoration. At four o'clock in the muinni 1 / following the first day of the eviction campaign this Tener, at tli' head of his blackguard crowbar brigade, proceeded in sheer wanton devilry, to pull down the comfortable and well-built houses "1 Uu industrious tenants named Thomas Miuogue and Patrick Tuoby. IU: gang of rutlidns plied crowbar and pickaxe with a will, and tin. morning sun shone on piles of unsightly ruins where twocoro.toit.-ibi' cottages had stood at sunset. The tenantp, whose induntiy b,< I reared every stone of those houses, cowered hard by with then v .-^ n and children in the shelter of a disused barn and an upturned < '<i Just one word abjut this man. loner, the hero of this glorious CM' 1 "" He was a brokendown spendthrift, hunted by hia creditors, when chance threw in his way "the devil's work " of the Mofat \ iK\ '" which no man with a heart or conscience could stoop. Even now, while he harries and harasses the wretched tenants of the Most JSnblfor the non-payment of impossible rents, it is only by thrcils "I ni> priaonmunt his own honest creditors can force from him cveu .i small portion of their just demands. This wretched creature the Government lias had the incredible audacity to create aiJusticc of the Peace to i tin county of Galway . He "administrates justice" amongst the people li> is paid to exterminate. As " ex-officio guardian of the poor oL I'oi ■ tumna," his was the solitary voice raised in opposition to the guardians' indignant vote of censure on his master. In this last eviction c unpaign there were, as has been said, fourteen families made horae'.r I^, wanton misery and ruin inflicted, so far as it is in the Goyernnu nt'e power to inflict it, on close a hundred harmless human beings. It h not pretended that there is the faintest shadow of moral justification for this ruthless oarbanty. Even the most vehement Coercions ■; admit the justice and moderation of the tenants' claims on the Clanricarde estate ; the unreasoning barbarity and grasping exloitioii of the absentee evictor who has never visited or spent a penny on tin: estate. The Most Rev. Dr. Healy, the Lord Chief Baron Palle*, fc»iv Michael Hicks-Beach, have all borne emphatic and indignant t(«.timory against the evicting millionaire Marquis- The Tunis itsill describes his conduct towards his tenants as "marked by ul n> incredible baseness," and denounces him as " a public nuisance aim t public danger." But Balfour the Brave championß him to thu uUu-

most, and places all the forces of the Crown and all the resources of the Coercion Act at his disposal. He is eager, for his reputation's sake as a statesman, to crusb the Plaa of Campaign ou the Clanricarde estate, and to this end he abets the wanton cruelty of the Most Vile. The Marquis of Clanricarde has sworn to leave bis estate bare of human beings. The brave Balfour is pledged to back him in the attempt. There is one power to check the worthy pair, a* Balfour's prison amusements were checked, That power is outspoken British indignation. The English people must be taught to see these eviction outrages as they are. English platforms must be made ring with the name of Clanricarde, and every Englishman must he made feel, in the words of T. D. Sullivaa, '■ that by aiding the Coercion Government he is lending a hand to the batteringram and crowbar of the Irish evictor."