The years of the ’eighties were years of leanness, “years that the locust hath eaten.” Congested District Boards and Departments of Agriculture had not then arisen. Successive alterations of the existing land tenure had bewildered rather than encouraged the primitive farmers of this southern seaboard; the benefits promised were slow in materialising, and in the meantime the crops failed. The lowering or remission of rents did not mean any immediate benefit to people who were often many years in arrears. Even in normal years the yield of the land, in the district of which I speak, barely sufficed to feed the dwellers on it; the rent, when paid, was, in most cases, sent from America, by emigrated sons and daughters. There was but little margin at any time. In bad years there was hunger.
Two or three fairly prosperous farms there were, and for the rest, a crowd of entirely “uneconomic” holdings, a rabble of fragmentary patches, scarcely larger than the “allotments” of this present war time, each producing a plentiful crop of children, but leaving much to be desired in such matters as the increase of the soil.
The district is not a large one. It contains about eight miles of fierce and implacable seaboard, with only a couple of coves in which the fishermen can find some shelter for their boats, and its whole extent is but three or four miles in length, by a little more than half as many in depth. A great headland, like a lion couchant, sentinels it on one side; on the other, a long and malign spike of rock, thinly clad with heather, and furze, drives out into the Atlantic, like an alligator with jaws turned seawards. Not few are the ships that have found their fate in those jaws; during these past three years of war, this stretch of sea has seen sudden and fearful happenings, but even these tragedies are scarcely more fearful than those that, in the blackness of mid-winter storms, have befallen many a ship on the desperate rocks of Yokawn and Reendhacusán.
It is hard to blame people for being ignorant, equally hard to condemn them for thriftlessness and dirt in such conditions as obtained thirty years ago in what are now called “Congested Districts.” Thriftlessness and dirt were indeed the ruling powers in that desolate country. In fortunate years, desolate and “congested” though it was, its little fields, inset among the rocks and bogs, could produce crops in reasonable quantity, and—as I do not wish to overstate the case—not less luxuriant in growth than their attendant weeds. The yellow ragwort, the purple loosestrife, the gorgeous red and orange heads of the docks, only in Kerry can these fleurs de mal be equalled, even in Kerry they cannot be surpassed. The huge shoulder of the headland is beautiful with heather and ling of all sorts and shades; the pink sea-thrift—would that other forms of thrift throve with equal success!—meets the heather at the verge of the cliffs, and looks like a decoration of posies of monthly roses. Osmunda Regalis fern fringes the streams, and the fuchsia bushes have fed on the Food of the Gods and are become trees. On a central plateau, high over the sea, stands one of the signal towers that were built at the time of the French landing in Bantry. In its little courtyard you stand “ringed by the azure world.” From west to east the ocean is wide before you. On many days I have seen it, in summer and winter alike lovely; a vast outlook that snatches away your breath, and takes you to its bosom, making you feel yourself the very apex and central point of the wondrous crescent line of fretted shore, that swings from the far blue Fastnet Rock, looking like an anchored battleship, on the west, to the long and slender arm of the Galley Head, with its white lighthouse, floating like a seagull on the rim of the horizon. Between those points, among those heavenly blues and greens and purples, that change and glow and melt into each other in ecstasies of passionate colour, history has been made, and unforgettable things have happened. But standing up there in the wind and the sun, on that small green circle of grass, hearing the sea-birds’ wild and restless cries, watching the waves lift and break into snow on the flanks of the Stag Rocks far below, it is impossible to remember human insanity, impossible to think of anything save of the overwhelming beauty that encircles you.
In that climate and that soil anything could flourish, given only a little shelter, and a little care, and the elimination from the cultivators of traditional imbecilities; eliminating also, if possible, fatalism, and the custom of attributing to “the Will o’ God” each and every disaster, from a houseful of hungry children to an outbreak of typhus consequent on hopelessly insanitary conditions.
“How was it the spuds failed with ye?” asked someone, looking at the blackened “lazy-beds” of potatoes.
“I couldn’t hardly say,” replied the cultivator, who had omitted the attention of spraying them; “Whatever it was, God spurned them in a boggy place.”
Things are better now. The Congested Districts Board has done much, the general spread of education and civilisation has done more. Inspectors, instructors, remission of rents, land purchase, State loans, English money in various forms, have improved the conditions in a way that would hardly have been credible thirty years ago, when, in these congested districts, semi-famine was chronic, and few, besides the “little scholars” of the National Schools, could read or write, and the breeding of animals and cultivation of crops was the affair of an absentee Providence, and no more to be influenced by human agency than the vagaries of the weather.
The first of the “Famines” in which I can remember my mother’s collecting and distributing relief was in 1880. The potatoes had failed, and I find it recorded that “troops of poor women came to Drishane from the west for help.” My mother lectured them on the necessity of not eating the potatoes that had been given them for seed, and assured them, not as superfluously as might be supposed, that if they ate them they could not sow them. To this they replied in chorus.
“May the Lord spare your Honour long!” and went home and boiled the seed-potatoes for supper.