A SOCIAL REVOLUTION IN IRELAND

New Zealand Tablet, 11 July 1912, Page 43

A SOCIAL REVOLUTION IN IRELAND

THE WORK OF THE CONGESTED DISTRICTS BOARDS

I spent three of the most interesting days during my recent visit to Ireland investigating the work being carried on in the West of Ireland by the Congested Districts Board in the solution of the problem of congestion in the West, says John O’Callaghan in the Boston Globe. I have had the good fortune of observing, at frequent intervals covering a period of twenty years, the great process of progress and reform which has been going on, and the more frequently I have been enabled to witness it the more fascinating the study has become. I first visited the congested districts of the West of Ireland as far back as 1892, when the work of the Congested District Board, which had only been established the year before as an experiment, was merely in its infancy, and the old, unwholesome, and troublesome conditions still obtained in Connacht. The scars left by the fierce land war of the previous ten years were plainly apparent on every hand. I visited the West again in 1900, in 1904, 1907, 1909, and again a few weeks ago, so that I have been able to witness for myself, at frequent intervals, the progress being made. Castlerea’s History Most Interesting. The story of the town of Castlerea, as told me by Mr. Fitzgibbon, is a most interesting one. The town comprises about 1500 inhabitants, and is mainly on what is. locally called the Sandford estate, the last owner being aJ. Mills Sandford. He has now sold out to the Congested Districts Board, not only his outlying property, but the entire town of Castlerea itself, and his own demesne and mansions, adjoining the town, and the lands are to be distributed among the tenants in accordance with the policy of the Board. The mansion and a considerable portion of the adjacent demesne are to be turned over to the nuns in the local convent, for the purpose of establishing a technical school, where lace-making, cookery, and other domestic sciences will be taught to the young girls of the neighborhood. The gardens and greenhouses as well as the wooded grounds adjoining comprise an area of more than seven hundred and fifty acres. Apropos of the purchase of the Sandford estate by the Congested Districts Board, said Mr. Fitzgibbon, ‘ I will tell you a story which I am sure will interest our friends in America, The Sandford family are descended from a Capt. Sandfoi’d, who came over with Cromwell. The family have been in possession ever since until last year. The father of the present J. Wills Sandford, a few years ago, when it was suggested that he should sell out the property, would not listen to such a proposal on any considerations. So he went to Dublin to have his will drawn, so that after his death the property could not be disposed of contrary to his wishes by those who might come after him. Time Has Brought Its Revenge. While, as you know, our Catholic people have nevex, anywhere in Ireland, raised the religious issue in public or national affairs, and in fact” as in the case of Lord De Freyne, at Frenchpark, close by here, have often fought the Catholic landlords even more stubbornly than did the Protestant ones. Old Mr. Sandfox d was very intolerant on religious grounds. During the height of the land agitation he used to boast that, although he had more than six hundred Catholic tenants on his property, he had neither a Catholic church or convent, or school on his estate; and he absolutely refused a delegation of the townspeople, who waited on him to ask him for a site on which to build a convent school, to give a piece of land for the purpose. He went to Dublin to consult a lawyer about having ins will drawn, and he brought back a draft of it for examination, to be sure it would be satisfactory. But he died that night, and the property passed to his son, who has now sold it out to the Congested Districts

Board, and it is being parcelled out and distributed among the tenants. - , . - ‘ And, strangely enough, the nuns, the sight of whom the old man could not tolerate, are going to his own mansion to open the school for which he refused a site, and the Board has given them forty acres of the demesne to go with it, for the purposes of technical education in the town. So that in this case, as in many others, time has brought its revenge to the downtrodden people, and it has gone equally hard with the Irish landlords. Ihe elder Sandford evicted my father no less than nine times, and it is now my pleasure and privilege to be able to vote as a member of this Board for the division on legal lines among the tenantry of the estate of the man who threw my father on the roadside.’ • . We then started to see what is being done by the Board on some of the neighboring properties recently purchased by that body. We covered that afternoon, with the aid of an automobile, an area of sixty-eight miles. One of the first estates on which we touched a few miles after we had left Castlerea and crossed the border line between the Counties of Roscommon and Galway was the Pollock estate, which has a history among the most notorious of any in Ireland. When the great clearances took place in Ireland in the years immediately following the famine of 1846 and 1847, and the people were driven from their holdings on the better class of land on to the bleak and barren hillsides, the basis was laid of that problem of congestion which the Government, after more than half a century of tardy waiting and the loss of millions of a hardy and industrious population, are now endeavoring at the eleventh hour and at a cost of millions to arrest and undo. Allan Pollock owned thousands of acres in County Galway, near the border line, between it and the Counties of Mayo and Roscommon. In one day he evicted one hundred families from one of his estates, and fifty from'"another. In all he evicted more than one thousand one hundred families, oxupward of five thousand people, and they were scattered all over the world, many of them dying of starvation, or on the emigrant ships, in the effort to reach America. Mr. John Fitzgibbon pointed out to me the Pollock’ estate, and explained the work of the Congested Districts Board, which has purchased a large portion of it for redistribution among the descendants of those who were ruthlessly driven from it sixty years ago. _ Pollock, bad as he undoubtedly was, was but typical of the class to which he belonged. The Marquis of Sligo cleared out no fewer than two thousand families, with the result that a single-tenant of his, with a few herdsmen, occupied an area of no less than two hundred square miles. To-day the land is being redivided among the people. We drove through the estates of Lord De Freyne; at Cloonanagh, Clouard, and on Loughlyne, Cultyhoe, and Moyne, evidences of the great changes taking place being apparent on every hand in the new houses and fences being constructed for the migrants, and the tenants whose holdings are being enlarged by the Board. The Murphy and Dillon estates adjoin the De Freyne estate, and are also being redistributed to the tenants. We passed through Keltybranks and Crunaun, passing over the River Lung, which the Board has deepened and widened, thus preventing the country for miles around from being periodically flooded as formerly, as well as reclaiming hundreds of acres of previously waste bog land. We then went on to Ballaghadereen, where John Dillon lives when he is not in Dublin or attending his Parliamentary duties in Westminster, and then passed on to the Flannery estate. Here a number of Ballaghadereen people, who formerly did not own any land, have been given comfortable farms. Other Estates. On the Waldron‘estate, close by, thirteen new holdings have been created by the Board, some of the tenants having been migrated from the Dillon estate. The lowering of the Lung River at this point drained 22 miles of country previously unproductive. Going on to Callow, where several new holdings have lieen

created by the Board, we viewed the Longfield estate, which has just been purchased, to Breedogue and Frenchpark, Ballinagare and Ratherohan, where a large tract of land has been , planted on the Norris, Flynn, De Freyne, and Balfe estates. On the latter y fourteen new holdings, with as many houses and outbuildings, have been arranged, although they have not been allotted. Passing through the Fitzgibbon estate at Heathfield, we reached the Murphy estate at Castlepoint, which has been offered for sale to the Board. Going on to the McDermott and Mara estates, where fifteen new holdings have been created and recently disposed of, we saw the work on the Glancy estate at Willsgrove, on which several new holdings have just been apportioned by the Board. Running through Ballintober, we passed through the estate of the O’Connor Don, which has been acquired by the ■ Board, and thence on to the Caulfield estate, near Donomoe Castle and Taimey Park, and on to the Cheevers’ estate at Turlough, where we saw numerous improvements, including the construction of new roads and fences, the erection of new buildings, and similar works, being carried out by the Congested Districts Board. It was certainly a revelation. Night had fallen when we got back to Castlerea, but the scene was interesting at every mile of the seventy we had travelled. Next morning we started on a similar journey northwards, passing through Claremorris, Castlebar, and Westport, right out to the rugged headlands where the Atlantic kisses the coast of Mayo. The Earl of Lucan absolutely swept away the town of Aughadrina. Lord Leitrim and hundreds of other landlords acted in a similar manner, and a John George Adair, who had purchased an estate in Glenveigh, County Donegal, cleared out a whole countryside because two of his dogs, he believed, had been poisoned. There are clergymen and laymen still alive in Donegal who distinctly remember the terrible scenes attending the hegira of the poor people' from their little homes. Lord Lurgan, through sheer pique, because his greyhound failed to win the grand national coursing cup at Liverpool, threw" hundreds of his tenants on the roadside, although the people had as little to do with the result as they had with what was occurring on Mars. Small wonder that such a blighting system should have at length gone to its doom. And so it has at last, in Ireland, with nobody to express regret or shed a tear for its downfall.