Paddy at Home ("Chez Paddy")

by baron de E. Mandat-Grancey

“Never!” said Tim with an air of conviction; “he offered me one the day before yesterday.”

But as it was evident the driver had already met some foine gentlemen who had given him a great many more dhrinks than was good for him, I chose not to understand his hints. At last, in despair at my want of intelligence, he decided to put my portmanteau upon his car. We seated ourselves back to back, and in spite of the disadvantages of this position from a conversational point of view, we soon became good friends. He even thought it his duty to do the honours of the local curiosities.

Castle Connell is now only a small village frequented by the fishermen, who are attracted by a desire to tease the salmon in the Shannon; but its past is more glorious, for it was once the capital of one of those innumerable kings who rendered to modern Irishmen a service they now seem to appreciate very highly, by enabling them all to claim a royal descent. It was the O’Briens, kings of Munster, who inhabited Castle Connell. They built on the banks of the Shannon a castle of which we still see the ruins, not far from the spot where the hotel now stands. To borrow a verse from king Pharaoh’s celebrated ballad, these monarchs though legitimate were full of perversity, and this led to their committing many crimes, thanks to which they became very rich and very powerful; but unfortunately for them they had one virtue, and this was enough to ruin them. They were exceedingly hospitable. But that is a common virtue in Ireland, and has ruined many families from the days of the O’Briens to the present time. The Irish gentry have always carried hospitality to such a point, that it formed the most expensive of all luxuries. The table was always laid, who ever liked was welcome, and the best in the house was reserved for strangers, until the sheriff’s officer intervened. Now Irish landlords no longer dine with each other, because they dare not go out in the evening for fear of being shot. If this wise reform now due to the benevolent watchfulness of the Land League had taken place fifty or sixty years sooner many Irish gentlemen would have escaped ruin. But Mr. Parnell and his agents commenced their work too late, when the majority of landlords were already completely ruined; and consequently they feel no gratitude towards the new arrangements. It was therefore a taste for hospitality which ruined the dynasty of Castle Connell. One fine day the reigning O’Brien invited one of his friends to dinner. The latter profited by this invitation to introduce some of his followers into the castle, and seized the too hospitable dwelling. He then put out the eyes of his host and ruled in his place. In analogous circumstances Samson unhesitatingly sacrificed his life to his vengeance. He pulled down his own house and crushed the three thousand Philistines who were in it beneath the ruins. Apparently the last of the O’Briens did not seek to revenge himself in equally heroic fashion. In the first place, he was assassinated soon after the fatal dinner. Another thing, perhaps he was not so strongly framed as the victim of the fair Delilah; and also, perhaps the Irish were better builders than the Jews: the examination of the ruins strongly inclines me to this latter hypothesis. They consist of two or three rather dismantled towers, for the old fortress, which had remained intact until 1688, was taken at this date from the partisans of King James who defended it, by the Hanoverians, who undermined it and blew it up.

My Automedon did all in his power to awaken my sympathy for the family misfortunes; I also think he claimed some relationship to them, but I am not quite sure, for Irish explanations are rather diffuse and hard to comprehend. In courses of elementary mathematics pupils are often given very complicated formulæ to extract the unknown quantity therefrom: the conversations of the Irish remind me of these studies of my youth. They are so embarrassed with incidental phrases, pious exclamations, or simply polite expressions, such as “Please your honour,” that the unknown, that is to say, the true meaning, is hard to extricate. Furthermore, they have a mania for answering one question by another. For instance, when I asked my coachman if he knew his way, instead of simply answering “Yes,” he asked me if I thought he did not know his own mother.

Besides, the length of his discourse and his anxiety to impart to me all the historical reminiscences which I have faithfully recorded, had manifestly the object of deluding me about the distance which separates Castle Connell from Ballinacourty. In reality it is only a mile, and, in spite of his efforts, in less than half an hour we arrived in front of Colonel M——’s house.

My host is still a victim of the Land League. This is his history. It is curious, precisely because it resembles that of hundreds of other landlords. All the tenants on his estate, in County Clare, had leases of thirty-one years, which fact, in parenthesis, is a formal contradiction to Mr. Parnell, when he claims fixity of tenure, that is to say, security for the tenants, and declares that one of the chief reasons which prevent improvements is that the landlords refuse to give them leases, and like to retain the right of sending them away whenever they please. I may even add that I have seen a number of these leases, and my tenants may feel certain that I will never sign anything like them. It seems to me that the essential point of a lease is that it should be bilateral—that the two parties should be bound for the same time. Each runs some risk. If the years are good the landlord does not benefit by the rise, but if they are bad he does not suffer from the fall.

Now, the Irish leases—at least those that I have seen, and I am assured that until the last few years all were drawn up in the same form—contain a clause that absolutely destroys this principle. It is always stipulated that the tenant should have the right to withdraw at any time by giving six months’ notice in advance, without any reciprocal power being reserved for the landlord. I do not therefore see why the latter should tie his hands for thirty-one years; and if it is true that many landowners have refused to grant leases to their tenants, it appears to me that their refusal was clearly justified by this extraordinary clause.

But in any case the Colonel’s patrimonial estate had always been managed in this way, and consequently, while those of his neighbours who had refused to be bound by leases profited by the years of plenty that followed the famine by raising their rents 25, 50, and often 100 per cent., the rents on his property remained stationary, or at least were only raised in a very irregular manner, since the increased rents could only be charged when the leases had to be renewed.

When bad seasons returned the Government took the initiative by a law known as the Land Bill, which instituted committees charged with the regulation of the rents, but these committees ignored all previous contracts. They commenced by reducing all rents on an average 15 to 20 per cent. Then the Land League intervened, and by methods which, if illegal, were not the less efficacious, it obtained fresh reductions, which generally doubled the first. On some estates, those which are referred to when it is desirable to quote an instance, things were restored to nearly their original condition. When this happened the landlords protested a little, but merely as a matter of form; for even had the committee not imposed a reduction, they would have been glad enough to receive their rents at the same rate as before the rise took place.

But the numerous class of those who had not raised their rents naturally considered that it was supremely unjust that reductions should be forced upon them when they had not profited by the good years. And really they had some ground for complaint. Let us take the case of two landlords who own estates of the same quality contiguous to one another. In 1855, for instance, both of them let the land at 4l. per acre; in 1870 the first of them raised the rent to 8l. The second, restrained by a lease or simply by moral considerations, had not altered the price. The Government and the Land League only reduced the former to his original sum of 4l., whilst the latter saw his rent fall to 2l., and found himself impoverished by one half simply because he had not ground down his tenant like his neighbour had done.