I have been fighting shy of the Congested Districts Board ever since I left Cork; but here, in the very heart of the worst of the congested districts, I may as well explain what the words mean.
No one, travelling from Galway to Clifden and then on to Leenane, as we had done, would have thought of the district as "congested," for, while the little huddles of thatched roofs which mark a village are fairly frequent, they are scarcely noticeable in the great stretches of hill and bog and rocky meadow among which they nestle. And, indeed, "congested," in this sense, does not mean crowded with people; it means exceptionally poor; and there is no district of Ireland poorer than Connaught, that land of bog and granite, where every inch of ground must be either elaborately drained or wrested from the rock, and where, even after years of labour, the fields are still either so wet that a little extra rain ruins them, or so full of stones that the reaping must be done with the hook. In Connaught, even the poorest man has a right to be proud of his home, because, however small and mean it may be, it represents infinite toil.
But how does it come that any one lives in these hills, where life is such a constant and heartrending struggle? The answer is that Connaught is the Irish pale. After Cromwell had subdued Ireland, the Puritan Parliament announced that it was "Not their intention to extirpate the whole nation," as many people had been led, not unreasonably, to believe; and a year later, they proved their humanitarian intentions by enacting that such Irish as survived should be permitted to live thereafter between the Atlantic and the Shannon, certain portions of which were set aside, as the Parliament said in unintentional rhyme,
"For the habitation
of the Irish nation."
It was stipulated, however, that they should not settle within four miles of the sea, within four miles of a town, nor within two miles of the Shannon; they were given until the first of May, 1654, to get into their new homes, after which date, any found outside of Connaught were to be treated as outlaws and killed out of hand. The misery and sufferings of the little bands of terror-stricken people, wandering in the depth of winter westward along unknown roads to an unknown, inhospitable country, will not bear thinking of—or, thinking of it, one can understand something of Irish hate for Cromwell's memory. As a matter of fact, the edict sounds worse than it was, as such edicts usually do, for it was impossible for it to be literally carried out. All the Irish were not banished to Connaught, for many of them preferred to face death where they had always lived rather than among the Connemara hills; and they were not murdered out of hand, but given work, for the new landlords were glad to employ them at menial labour, since no other labourers were to be had. But from that time on, it was usually the Protestant Englishman who lived in the mansion house, and the Irish Catholic whose home was roofed with thatch and floored with dirt.
Let us be careful not to grow sentimental over the wrongs of Ireland, nor to magnify them. They are not unique, for they have been paralleled many times in history. We should be careful, too, not to judge a seventeenth-century Parliament by twentieth-century ideals. There is this to be said for it: that its only hope of existence lay in stamping out rebellion, and the only way, apparently, to stamp out rebellion in Ireland was to kill the rebels. That the Parliament chose to banish them rather than kill them is so much to its credit, and I doubt not that, after the vote had been taken, many of those old Puritans went home with the feeling that they had done a merciful and Christian deed. Nor should we forget that the wars of religion were as bitter on one side as on the other: St. Bartholomew was far more bloody than Drogheda, and the removal of the Irish to Connaught was matched by the banishment of the Huguenots from France, thirty years later. It did not seem possible, in that day, that Protestant and Catholic could ever live side by side in peace and friendship, and that narrow bigotry alone would strive to keep alive the memory of those mistaken, centuries-old feuds and persecutions.
The best portions of Connaught were already fully settled, as the fugitive Irish found when they got there; furthermore, although the broad Shannon formed a natural moat which would hold safely the Irish who had crossed it, it was further strengthened by giving to Cromwell's soldiers all the broad belt of fertile land along the river, as well as the rich valleys running back into the hills. All that was left for the newcomers were the bleak moors and rocky mountain-sides, where no one else would live; and since these, for the most part, were quite unfit to be cultivated, there was every reason to believe that the people condemned to live among them would soon cease from troubling.
But they didn't—at least, all of them didn't. They built rude shelters of rock for their families, and the cabins one sees to-day throughout Connemara are the direct descendants of those early ones, with scarcely an altered feature. They set to work to reclaim the hillsides, and though, every year, the spade turned up a new crop of stones, the fields slowly grew capable of producing a little food. Before that time, of course, many of the people had starved, but those that were left were all the better off, and it looked, for a while, as though they might some day be able to open the door without seeing the wolf there.
But the end was not yet. It should be remembered that these mountain farms did not belong to the people who had created them, and who laboured constantly to improve them, but were part of the "plantation" of some court favourite or adventurer, so that rent must be paid for them; and as the farm improved the rent was raised, although the improvement resulted from the labour of the man who paid the rent, so that, in the end, it was not the tenant who was richer, but the landlord. If the rent was raised to a point where the tenant couldn't pay it, or if the landlord wanted the land, the tenant was evicted with absolutely no compensation for the improvements he had made. Then it was a question either of going to America, or, if there wasn't money enough for that, as was usually the case, of taking up some other stretch of rocky hillside, and beginning the weary struggle all over again. The craze for grazing, which started some forty or fifty years ago, resulted in the eviction of many thousands from farms their own industry had made, and to-day, as one drives through Connaught, one sees great stretches of land given over to sheep which were once part of such farms, and one can tell it is so by the faint ridges which mark the old tillage.
So evolution proceeded, but for the Irish peasantry it was devolution, for every step was a step downward; and millions of them left the land in despair, and millions of those that remained were unable to make enough to live on; and the workhouses kept getting bigger and bigger, and the people poorer and poorer; until finally, a few English statesmen, with a somewhat broader outlook than the average, saw that something had to be done, and set about doing it. There is no need for me to enumerate the steps that were taken—some of them wise, many of them foolish; but the greatest of all was the enactment of legislation permitting and assisting tenants to become the owners of the land on which they lived.