Irish News. OUR IRISH LETTER.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 4, 23 January 1902, Page 9

Irish News. OUR IRISH LETTER.

(From our own correspondent.) Dublin, November, l'JOl A LANDLORD'S RIGHTS Who owns the bottom of the sea around the coast of New Zealand '> Up to the present hour, 1 am ceitam the solving of such a question has never presented itself to any Court or to any body of men in your island. It is to be hoped it nevei will, for it is a ticklish question and one that over here has many a time brought out into high light the squalid selfishness of the Anglo-Irish landlord, that being who lives by the sweat of other men's brows. Of late we have had a revival of this old grievance m a new and aggravated form. Hitherto a few landlords have wrestled with their own poor tenants — or other men's poor tenants, as the case may be — who live on the seaboard and draw sand and gravel from the foreshore for use upon roads or farms. In most case 1 * the wrestling has resulted, as might be expected, in victory for the strong man, and the poor have had either to pay for or to cease taking away the useful materials with which the Almighty daily strews the shore afresh from the storehouse of the deep. This is always looked upon as a hardship and an injustice, akin to that law which deprives a former who rents land down to the ■^cry bankfc of a fish-providing river of the right to take one single salmon from out that river, even though the landlord and all who pay that landlord highly for the privilege of fishing are constant trespassers upon the tenant's land while in pursuit of sport. In the same way that, until a short time ago, a farmer dajvd not shoot or trap the \ery rabbits that often devoured the produce ot whole fields. But quite recently we have seen a still more glaring instance of landlord greed in the case of what has been termed ' a submarine estate A case has been tried in the land courts in which the lord of the soil abutting upon the sea m a certain part of Galway likewise claims sovereignty over the bottom of the ad lacent ocean and all it contains and yields up; consequently, he claims a certain part of the monies earned by the poor peasants engaged in th.it most toilsome and ill-paid trade, the making of kelp. Those who have never seen kelpmaking can know nothing of the hardships endured by those engaged im the business. They can scarcely realise what it is to work da.v after day in cold and wet, often neari\ up to the waist in the surf, gathering in the slimy weed, collecting it along shore to dry, then burning it down to that material called kelp, from which are extracted iodine and other useful products. Some idea of the labor entailed by this trade will be given by the fact that 20 tons of sea-wrack must be gathered to produce one ton of kelp, for which the laborer obtains sometimes £2 per ton, sometimes £4, for in many districts a curious custom has been established by the kelp purchaser. The kelp-makers are a little company of, let us say, two men When they and their families ha\e collected the raw material and it has been finally burnt down in rude kilns erected along the sea shore, the product is divided into equal shares ; the trader comes along and gives, haphazard, a fair price for one lot and a poor price for the second, and thus the lottery gives one family a fairly remunerative price for the season's work, while the second has but a pittance for their hard toil, yet the bare chance of the better money next time induces all to go on again the ensuing season, which begins in May and ends in August, gathering, drying, and burning included. Take the

trade all round, it is but a wretched earning nowadays, jet, upon these scani, pittances, wrung literally from the deep, a („'ahvay landowner 'claims and has successfully fought cut m a com t of mstice (save the nuik) the right to levy a tax upon this product of hr ' submarine estate ! ' Oh, > (S •' the Irish aic a discontented people. hot having- been created <vls, strange to say, they cannot help wrjn-i;— whilst being skinned. A CHANNEL TUNNEL Theie is another sub-mai me business that starts up now and again, like the sea serpent, and which has once more been active of Lite— on paper this is the idea of a .submarine railroad tunnel between the north of .Ireland and Scotland, intended by its promotois to fulfil throe ends : first, the doing away with sea-siokne.ss, which some politicians believe to be the real cause of the sickening dislike which exists between these sea-divided nations. The theory is, that could the English reach Ireland and the Irish reach England without having their bile mutually stirred up m the passage across our stormy channel, all notional animosities would disappear and there would be complete union of hearts and hands, etc., etc. Secondly, the How of tourist traffic would be diverted from Dublin and the south to Belfast and the north, as, naturally, almost e\cry traveller from the Continent and' England would prefer to cross the Channel by rail and, coming first to Lame, near Belfast, or perhaps to some point further north, would spend most tune and money amongst the Orangemen Thirdly, the proposed tunnel would cost some millions, which would, through certain northern Tory interest. be divided out between Scotch, English. and North of Ireland engineers, contractors, and laborers and would quiet for a period some grumblings that at times .ire heard amongst t lie working (lasses o f e\en t'c> pi osperous Nonh, winle bringing a fair share of money m the neighho: hood of a certain nobleman who is hum anxious to li«i\e the tunnel begun, e\en before the war ,s ended. OVER-T/VXEP IRELAND. Mr. William O'JJnen lias been forced by ill-health to take a longsea voyage, but his woik of the United Irish League lenwms m good hands during Jus absence Two little item<- of statistics will show the need, there is m Ireland for legislation on the lines laid down by the League, i.c , the compulsory sale of farms to \.ho tenants, and the breaking up of the big grazing ranches into small holdings li eland is naturally one of the most feitile tillage lands m the world, thercfoie, her people should be, for the most part, an agricultuial population So fertile is the soil that, with proper cultivation, it would suppoi t 3."}, 000,000 of people in comfoi t Before 18-jS, there were 8.000,000 of inhabitants : there are now but a little over 1,000.000, the i idlest districts having- been cleared of inhabitants in order to make way for cattle, so that at the present' time there are 12,000,000 acres under grass and only 3,000,000 under tillage. To take one county as an example Sixty yeais ago Tippernry Count v had a population of 412,000 today, Tipperary contains but 100,000 inhabitants In a late number of the ' Foi tnightly Review,' Lord Mayo and Mr. N. L. Synnott published a iomt article containing some startling figures, especially startling when taken in connection with the above items. Writing of the ' increased taxation of Ireland with no increased capacity for taxation,' these gentlemen tell us that . ' From IROI to 180(5 there wns an increase of nearly £600,000, from 1896 to 1900. an increase of more than £600,000.

The total increase in those six years was, m lmiud numheis, £1,100^,000, or six shillings per head on every man, woman, and child of the population ' But tiie increase for the present year, J'JOl, is £1,871,000. That is an additional burden of £2,000,000 laid upoli this country since 181)0, ' when li ish taxation was declared by the Financial Relations Commission to be two millions and three quarters in excess of Ireland's I a\.abli_ capacity •' Whilst uu smile, we soothe affliction ' was ll. u motto o\ er the stage of a provincial theatre vorv celebi ated in its day. Il is well for us Irish, that we can smile under almost any affliction, e\en taxes, at least so long as our up-to-date educators leave us our faith in a happy world to come. A FASHION LN MOURNING. In London there is a fashionable mourn my warehouse in which is a department styled the mitigated affliction department. We don t i|uite advertise the purveying of mitigated affliction m Dublin, vet 1 think it is creeping in, for 1 smiled the other evening at a concert to see a very young and very pretty gui, with dark eyes and black hair, wearing right in the south-easl-bv-south, m her curly front locks — just above the mendian of the heart — a snow-white curly tress, to the memory of her Jirst-lo\e, no doubt ; a tress suggests c of sorrow her young days shading, but prettily and becomingly shaded, not darkened. The question wiis debated in my row was the lock put on or was that one sad spot genuine, the result of an accident to the scalp, or a sudden breaking off of an engagement ? The question was settled next clay when 1 saw a. row of piecisely the same white tresses in a fashionable hairdresser's window. A 13 OU SLIDE. There are still some people alive who date particular events from the \enr of the Big Wind, a storm which, if ! mistake not, occmred in the year 182(5 This \ear we have had a'huii K.ini' saw] to be the liei ct-st gale that has been experienced suice that tune, now 75 \ ears ago. Floods, wrecks, lires, loss of life, are reported from all parts of Ireland, and a serious bog-slip occurred in the County of Clare, by which, though no human li\(.'t weie lost, several farmers ha\c been ruined through the loss of cattle, houses, and even land, for hundreds of acies lh.it had been purchased and reclaimed are now lying 15 feet neneath an mund.it ion of bog stud. A public subsci lption has been started to help the sullerers who, by this aw fill \ l.sit ation., see themselves beggaied. depi ivcd m a fyvv short houis of the work of generations of hard toilers One family, consisting of father, mother, and nine child] on baiely escaped m the night, without I'M'n getting time to dress, as the mother ,\n<\ children had to be carried oil m their night clothes to a house that was fortunately out of the track of 1 ho torrent of liquid bog that streamed down from the summit of the mountain. When clci.N light came, the poor people found that everything they possessed in this world — house, furniture, clothes, cattle, and tlie % cry land, with its crops, lay buried as hopelessly as if an eruption from a volcano had burst forth and consumed all before it.