A THRILLING VISIT TO CONNEMARA
I had read of the grandeur of the Irish seacoast in County Clare, and I asked Mike to keep as close to the sea as he could. He obeyed me only too well, half of the time being over the ocean.
The rugged cliffs grew more and more picturesque as we neared Hag’s Head. After passing over this promontory, the famous Moher Cliffs came into view. These are sheer precipices, fully 600 feet high, and, as seen from the ocean, they present a magnificent appearance. In passing these cliffs our aeroplane was about 500 feet above the sea, and about 100 feet out from land, so that we saw them to the best advantage. These cliffs stretch along the coast for five or six miles. From the Moher Cliffs we turned landward, in a northeastly direction, as we wished to pass over the city of Galway, and enter the Connemara country from the shores of Lake Corrib.
The Clare farms seemed somewhat better than those of Kerry, but not much. We saw many one-room cabins. For many miles we flew about 60 feet over Clare, and I observed the country with interest. Clare and Galway are the present centers of unrest in Ireland. There is where “cattle-driving” is practised most. Fences are destroyed and large herds of cattle, belonging to some landlord, are scattered over the country roads, The cause of “cattle-driving” is the enmity of the peasants toward the landlords who turn their estates into vast grazing farms, thus depriving the peasants of any soil to cultivate.
The Government has tried to have the landlords sell out their estates to these landless ones, but some refuse to do so, and there is no compulsory legislation at present in the matter of landlords selling to tenants.
As these landlords do not live in Ireland and have little interest in Irish people the Government is now seeking remedial legislation which will compel the landlord to sell his estate. Absentee landlordism has been Ireland’s historic curse for centuries. As one Irishman expressed it: “Ireland has been overrun with absentee landlords.”
For many years the English Government sought merely to repress the outbreaks of the dissatisfied Irish. Now, an honest attempt is being made to cure the cause of the discontent, and this accounts for these Land Laws, which have proved of such benefit already to the Emerald Isle.
Absentee landlords are hard to intimidate by popular outbreaks. On one occasion the angry tenants threatened to shoot the steward of a particularly obnoxious landlord, and the steward wrote about it to his master in England. The brave Englishman promptly replied: “Tell the tenants that no threat to shoot you will terrify me.”
