County Clare and County Galway are the districts of the greatest unrest
in Ireland; and the largest number of boycotts, cattle drives, and
evictions have occurred there of late years because certain large
landowners, chief of whom is the Earl of Clanricarde, stubbornly refuse
to sell their estates under the Land Act of 1903 or restore the tenants
they have evicted or divide up their pastures into farms. The Earl of
Clanricarde carried the matter into court, where he was sustained in his
refusal to sell, on the ground that the law is not compulsory, and it is
probable that parliament will adopt an amendment, now pending and
introduced since the decision, requiring every large landowner in
Ireland to divide up his estates among his tenants at prices to be fixed
by the courts.
The disturbances that are taking place at present are gentle and mild
compared with what have occurred during the land wars of the past, and
they are confined to a limited area and a small number of estates. The
methods of "persuasion" used by the tenants and the "landless" men, as
those who are entirely without farms are called, are, however, very much
the same as those adopted years ago, but they are not so effective as
they used to be. They are severely punished by the courts, and the
taxpayers are assessed for all the damages committed. If these
assessments could be confined to the particular parish within which the
outrages occur it would be very much better, for it is not fair to ask
innocent property owners twenty and thirty miles from the scene to pay
for the mischief of a few reckless and irresponsible persons over whom
they have no control.
County Limerick is usually quiet. There has been no trouble there and
the best of feelings prevail between the landlords and their tenants,
with a few exceptions. There was only one criminal case (of infanticide)
at the dockets of the courts in July, 1908, when I was there, two
boycotts, and twenty-one complaints of intimidation, which, however, did
not all relate to land matters. There were thirty-four evictions in
County Limerick that year, most of them being due to poor crops and the
lack of remittances from America.
Lough Rea, the seat of the Clanricarde, has been the residence of that
family since the year 1300. Althenry, the neighboring town, is also very
old, and has belonged to the earls of Clanricarde since 1238. There is a
castle, a Dominican monastery, a Franciscan monastery, and several
churches, all in ruins, destroyed by Red Hugh O'Donnell in 1596. The
Earl of Clanricarde never visits his Irish property. He has never
occupied his ancestral home and has been seen in the vicinity but once
since he came into the inheritance thirty or forty years ago.
The boycott was invented at the little town of Ballinrobe, a pretty
village of about fifteen hundred inhabitants, on Lough Mask, about
twenty miles north of Galway. Charles S. Parnell made a speech at Ennis,
the capital of County Clare, Sept. 19, 1880, advising the people to
punish those who did not sympathize with them by "isolating them from
their kind as if they were lepers." This advice was first applied to
Captain Boycott, agent for the estate of Lord Erne, near Ballinrobe, and
he was a complete victim of the policy. The police could do nothing.
There was no law under which dealers could be compelled to sell him food
and drink, and all his supplies had to be shipped to him from Dublin.
Nobody would speak to him, nobody would work for him, nobody would
accept his money, and, as Parnell suggested, he was treated as if he
were a leper. The plan was so successful that it was promptly adopted
throughout Ireland, and has since been commonly used elsewhere under the
name of the first victim.
But boycotting is growing unpopular in Ireland. It is condemned by the
bishops and the clergy generally. They are taking more and more positive
grounds, and many refuse the communion to persons who are guilty of
either boycotting or cattle driving, because they are contrary to
justice and charity and are therefore sinful. I heard one of the bishops
preach an impressive sermon on the subject. He condemned all
combinations of persons to cause suffering or distress in their
neighbors as inhuman, immoral, and unjust. He declared that boycotting
was worse than murder, because it caused a greater degree of suffering.
When a man was shot he usually died without agony, but when he was
boycotted he suffered the worse sort of mental torture, and to cause
such sufferings was one of the worst of sins. Father Gilligan, parish
priest at Carrick-on-Shannon, preached against boycotting the Sunday we
were there. He said, in introducing the subject, that he deeply
regretted that many of his parishioners had joined in a boycott for
which they imagined they had a good excuse, but nothing would justify a
boycott. It was a crime, and those who had engaged in it would not be
admitted to communion until they had sincerely repented. Every effort
had been made by advice, by intimidation, and even by threats of
violence, to keep the people from dealing with some of the most
respectable merchants in the town. There were three degrees of
boycotting--mild, medium, and savage--and all three had been condemned
by the Church. "Have nothing to do with it," said Father Gilligan, "do
not touch it with a pole that would reach New York."
At present boycotting is applied to landlords and cattle men who are
occupying their land that is wanted for farms. The cattle men have no
permanent tenancy, they erect no buildings, they make no improvements,
and the cattle business is so profitable that they are able to pay twice
as much rent as the ordinary farming tenant. For those reasons, and
because he has only one man to deal with, a landlord is always glad to
rent his lands for grazing, and gradually Ireland is becoming one great
pasture.
Cattle driving is another weapon used by the same people for the same
purpose, and that is condemned by the bishops and the clergy with equal
emphasis. Archbishop Fennely of Tipperary recently preached a sermon in
which he expressed the hope that before he closed his eyes in death he
would see every acre of land in Ireland owned by the men who tilled it,
but he could not sympathize with and he must earnestly condemn every
form of violence and every unlawful measure that was used to secure that
end. He gave his diocese a solemn warning that cattle driving,
boycotting, and similar unlawful practices would not be tolerated by the
Church.
This form of argument, it must be admitted, is a great advance over the
fierce methods that have been used in the past, when murder and
bloodshed were quite common, and other damages that cannot be repaired
by money or by the judgment of the court were suffered. It was a
habitual jest to speak of the "closed season for landlords."
The Irish never overlook the humor in a situation, and at a cattle drive
which took place in 1908 at Tuam, which is a place of considerable
ecclesiastical importance, being the residence of the Most Rev. John
Healey, one of the ablest and most influential Roman Catholic bishops in
Ireland, the following lines were pinned to the tail of one of the cows:
GOD SAVE IRELAND.
"Leave the way, for we are coming.
And, on my soul, we got a drumming;
They cleared us out so mighty quick,
And, faith, they used their hazel stick.
Well, now, Paddy, of you we implore,
Don't put us through Cloomagh any more;
For if you do you're bound to die,
And we have the powder fresh and dry;
God bless the Cattle Drivers."
The taxpayers are compelled to pay damages for all cases of cattle
driving, for loss of business in boycotting, and for other claims
growing out of such outrages. Usually the courts assess one pound per
head for cattle where no harm is done, five pounds per head where an
animal is injured, and about one-third as much for sheep. Most of the
cattle driving and the boycotting is committed by irresponsible young
men who are led by mischief-makers with private grudges, and they never
reason for themselves. It goes without saying that the love of fighting
is one of the most conspicuous traits of the Irish character. The
history of Ireland from the foggiest period of the past is a tale of
continuous warfare. In the early days fighting was the chief end and aim
of men, and women fought beside their fathers and husbands and brothers
until St. Patrick forbade them to do so. And they thought very little of
the consequences.
The case was well stated in a little poem from an American paper that
was shown me by a friend the other day:
"'Who says that the Irish are fighters by birth,'
Says little Dan Crone;
'Faith, there's not a more peacable race on the earth
If ye l'ave them alone.'"
But sometimes they won't be let alone. In the summer of 1908 there was a
riot in the town of Thurles and a mob did a lot of damage in order to
show its disapproval of legal proceedings that had been taken against a
fellow townsman. Richard Burke, who was "licensed to sell spirits not to
be consumed on the premises," was unable to meet his obligations and
went into bankruptcy. The sheriff took charge of the establishment under
the orders of the court, and the license, good will, and the stock in
hand were offered for sale to the highest bidder. But the bids did not
come up to the valuation of the court and were all rejected. A few days
later a private offer from Mr. Cody, who has been competing with Mr.
Burke to quench the thirst of Thurles for several years, to take the
entire place for £2,000 was accepted. Mr. Burke, who has been in the
habit of consuming too much of his own merchandise for the good of his
business, became very indignant because his old enemy was going to step
into his place, gathered together a few sympathetic friends, raided his
own establishment, smashed the bottles, knocked in the heads of the
barrels, and invited the whole town to help themselves, which they did
with an energy that would have been commendable in another cause. Then,
when almost every citizen of the town, young and old, was drunk, they
started up the street smashing their own windows and doors and doing
what is estimated at $15,000 worth of damages to their own property,
besides $7,000 worth of destruction in Mr. Cody's place.
Although Cody had signed the papers, he had not paid for Mr. Burke's
former stock, and naturally he now refuses to do so, since it does not
exist, so that Mr. Burke and his creditors suffer the entire loss of his
own raid and hospitality, and the taxpayers of Thurles have been
assessed to pay for the other foolishness.
There are twenty thousand Galway people in the United States, or "across
the herring pond," as a banker there expressed it, who have been in the
habit of making remittances to their fathers and mothers and brothers
and sisters here in generous amounts, and many families are partly and a
large number are wholly dependent upon them. Most of the Galway
emigrants are in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other
large cities, earning good wages, but they were out of employment after
the recent panic and have had all that they could do to take care of
themselves. Hence very little money has been received here from America
for nearly a year. The postmaster told me that the American money orders
cashed at the Galway post office have averaged £40,000 a year for the
last eight or ten years, and in 1908 the total will not reach £15,000.
An even larger sum of money has been coming in checks and drafts and the
bankers say that the remittances in that form are not more than ten per
cent of the usual amount. The merchants complain that their customers
are not bringing in any American checks, which have been presented in
payment daily for ten or twelve years. Christmas checks were very scarce
in 1907, and that is the principal reason for the poverty. Wages are
very low in Galway--ten shillings a week, and two shillings a day is the
average for ordinary labor. The Allan Line steamers have been touching
at Galway since 1881, and have carried to Quebec an enormous number of
emigrants for the United States as well as Canada, but the faster boats,
touching at Queenstown, have reduced the business considerably. The
steerage passage is $27.50 and $30; the average emigrants are chiefly
between seventeen and twenty-three years of age, and most of them go to
Boston.
Galway is a foreign-looking little town, unlike any other we saw in
Ireland, and much of the architecture is Dutch and Spanish, departing
from the plain, ugly brick front without cornice or eaves which is so
common elsewhere. The streets are irregular and run all sorts of ways;
some very narrow and some very wide, and they vary in width at different
places, with occasionally an odd-shaped space at the intersection.
Everything looks old and shabby and out of repair. It is queer as well
as significant to see buildings half in ruins in the principal streets
and others with the glass broken out of the windows. There are some
smart-looking shops, however, and neatly kept residences, but they are
not frequent. Nor is the town well kept. The Common Council evidently
lacks a sense of the æsthetic, because the streets are dirty, the park
is scraggly, and the grass and trees are very much neglected. It is
altogether the untidiest public park I saw in Ireland. Many of the
people we met on the principal streets, particularly the women, are
repulsive in their rags and dirty faces and unkempt hair and bare feet.
We saw a few barefooted women in Tipperary and Limerick, but in Galway
none of the working women wears shoes, although the men seem to be well
shod. The women cover their heads with thick shawls that are often
greasy and torn, and their faces show evidences of sorrow and privation,
and perhaps other causes have left a mark.
[Illustration: FISH MARKET, GALWAY]
The foreign appearance of Galway is accounted for by the fact that many
Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Dutchmen were in business there in early
times. The town was named from the Gauls, and for centuries an extensive
trade was carried on with the Continent by foreign merchants and foreign
fleets. Richard de Burgo, founder of the Burke family, was given the
country of Connaught by the king, and, having in 1232 crushed the
O'Connors, who were formerly kings there, he enlarged the Castle of
Galway and made it his residence, calling around him a flourishing
foreign colony. But the "tribes of Galway," as Cromwell called the
natives, would not submit to him, and kept up a guerrilla warfare that
was very annoying. The English took all the measures they could to
protect themselves, and in 1518 a law was passed forbidding the people
of the town "to recieve into their housses at Christemas, Easter nor no
feaste elles, any of the MacWilliams, Kellies, Joyces, Lynches nor to
cepte Elles without permission of the Mayor and Councill; on payn to
forfeit £'5 and that no one called O' nor Mac shalle strutte ne swaggere
thro the streetes of Galway." And the following inscription was formerly
to be seen over the west gate to the city:
"From the fury of the O'Flaherties
Good Lord deliver us."
There are some quaint old houses--one of them on the principal street,
known as "the mansion," being elaborately decorated with carved
moldings, drip stones, cornices, balustrades, medallions, crests, coats
of arms, and other ornaments in which the lynx and the monkey, which
were used upon the family arms, appear frequently. The same story is
told to account for the monkey that is used to explain the appearance of
that animal upon the escutcheon of the Earl of Desmond--that the heir to
the house was rescued by a monkey when it was burning.
The Burkes, the Joyces, and the Lynches were the leading families there.
The records show that eighty-four members of the Lynch family have held
the office of mayor. A tragic story of James Lynch, the second mayor
after the charter of the city was granted by Richard III., is kept in
the minds of the people by a tablet imbedded in the wall of a ruined
house on one of the principal streets. It bears this inscription:
"This memorial of the stern and unbending justice of the chief
magistrate of this city, James Lynch Fitzstephen, elected mayor,
A.D. 1493, who condemned and executed his own guilty son, Walter,
on this spot, has been restored to its ancient site, with the
approval of the town commissioners, by their chairman, the Very
Rev. Peter Daly, P.P. and Vicar of St. Nicholas."
The Rev. Mr. Daly has immortalized himself in this simple way, and his
character may be judged by the fact that his name appears even more
prominently on the tablet than that of the unnatural father whose act he
perpetuates. The story goes that Mayor Lynch, being one of the most
successful of the shipping merchants in the city, visited Spain in the
very year that Columbus discovered America, to make the personal
acquaintance of his customers, and, being treated with generous
hospitality, invited the son of one of his friends to return with him to
Ireland. The young man spent several months in Galway, as the guest of
Mayor Lynch, and as the companion of his son, Walter. The latter, a
great favorite in the city, was engaged to a young lady of good family,
who behaved rather imprudently with the young Spaniard. This excited the
jealousy of Walter Lynch, who murdered his playmate, and then, from
remorse, gave himself up to justice. He was tried, convicted, and
condemned to death by his own father, sitting as judge of the court, and
when the sheriff, in obedience to public opinion, refused to carry out
the sentence, Judge Lynch hanged his own son with his own hands. As
there were other judges and courts in Ireland and as changes of venue
were common in those days, as they are now, one cannot sympathize with
this Spartan heartlessness.
There is a quaint old church, built in 1320, in honor of St. Fechin, who
was born about the year 600, in County Sligo, was the founder of
numerous monasteries and churches along the western coast of Ireland,
and was the first to bring the gospel to County Galway. Queen's College,
supported by the government, has a fine Gothic building, copied after
All Souls of Oxford, with about three hundred students, and there is
another college, under the Christian Brothers, which is very prosperous.
The most interesting sight in Galway is the thousands of fat salmon
lying motionless on the bottom of the river which carries the water of
Lough Corrib--one of the largest fresh-water lakes in the country--into
Galway Bay. The river is short and swift and flows through the center of
the city. Its banks are walled up with masonry and it is crossed by a
series of ancient iron bridges. From the railings of the bridges one can
see the salmon through the transparent water lying with their noses up
stream so closely that the bottom of the river is hidden; and I am told
that when they are running in the spring the stream is black with them.
They come in from the sea and go up a ladder that has been built for
them over the rapids into Lough Corrib.
The exclusive right of fishing that river was granted in 1221 by King
John to one of his favorites, and the monopoly has been recognized ever
since. It has been sold many times. The last purchaser was an ancestor
of a Mrs. Hallett, who enjoys the privilege at present, and lives in a
big stone house on the river banks, surrounded by high walls. A series
of traps extends from her garden across the river, covering four-fifths
of its width, one-fifth being always kept open by act of parliament, so
that the fish can go up and down freely, but as they are all strangers
in Galway, and young and reckless, many of them run into the traps
instead of the passageway and become the property of Mrs. Hallett. She
ships them to London and makes three or four thousand pounds a year by
selling them. The fishermen in charge told me that in the spring they
often caught as many as two or three hundred a day in each of the traps.
Any one who desires to try his luck with a fly can do so by getting a
permit from Mrs. Hallett, for which the fee is $2.50 a day or $25 a
year.
Near the mouth of the river and at the head of the Bay of Galway is an
ancient village called Claddagh, whose inhabitants have been engaged in
the herring and salmon fisheries for ten centuries, and have lived apart
from the world, having their own municipal organization, their own laws
and courts and customs and manner of dress. From the beginning of time
they have been ruled by one of their own number, elected by themselves
for a term of years, who exercises executive, legislative, and judicial
functions, from which there is no appeal. They have no written laws, no
records of their judicial proceedings, but when there is a dispute
between any of the fishermen they take it to their chosen umpire, who
decides it according to the merits of the case. And his decision is
always accepted. I am told that no citizen of Claddagh has ever been
before a Galway court, either as a plaintiff or defendant. They live in
low thatched cottages, grouped in irregular streets on the bank of the
river, with a large and very modern-looking church, which they attend
regularly. They are remarkable for their piety and their morals. They
will not work, nor will they leave their village for any reason, on
Sundays or religious holidays. They never allow strangers to live among
them, their young men and women never marry outside of the colony, they
take care of their own sick and poor, and, although they are only five
minutes' walk from the principal street of Galway, they are as isolated
as if they were on an island in the middle of the ocean.
Formerly the Claddagh people wore a distinctive dress, resembling that
of the fisher folks of Holland,--a red skirt, a blue waist, elaborate
headdress, and bare feet and legs,--but this costume has been discarded
by the younger women and is only worn by their grandmothers now. But all
the women go barefooted. They never wear shoes or stockings. The men are
engaged exclusively in fishing, although they do all of their own
masonry, carpentering, and boat building. They pack their fish in the
village, but carry a portion of each catch across the river to the fish
market of Galway.
There is an attractive resort for city people on the Bay of Galway, with
a long promenade, several hotels, and a number of comfortable villas.
[Illustration: SALMON WEIR, GALWAY]
XXXI
CONNEMARA AND THE NORTHWEST COAST
Clifden is the extreme western point of Ireland, and for that reason
Marconi selected it for his wireless telegraph station in communicating
with Canada and the United States. It is 1,620 miles in a direct line of
St. John, New Brunswick, and, as a native remarked, "There's not a
spheck of droy land upon which a burrd could rist the sole of its foot
bechune this blessed spot and Americky." If you will examine the map you
will understand the situation better, and a geological chart of the
island will show you that the western coast, from Mizzen Head to Bloody
Foreland, is protected by a chain of mountains, bleak, rugged, and
abrupt, which nature has placed as a buttress to support the rest of
Ireland against the fierce attack of the Atlantic. They have terrible
storms there, and a northwest gale several times a year that is
terrific. The east winds, which we dread, bring good weather in Ireland,
but the west wind brings storms and cold and mists that are almost as
bad as the London fog.
Connemara is the congested district, but it does not bear that name
because the population is overcrowded, but because there are too many
people for the inhospitable soil to support. The inhabitants are
scattered over a vast area. I could see everything from one point as far
as a radius of twenty-two miles, and there wasn't a human habitation in
sight, nor was there any inducement to build one because the country was
a bleak, barren, rocky wilderness without soil for crops or shelter for
cattle. There is the greatest degree of poverty and suffering in
Ireland, and there the government is doing its greatest benevolent work
in trying to place the people upon farms that are large enough to
support them, and finding them other occupations by which they can earn
a few additional dollars.