I have made the remark that the Beechers of a few hundred years ago, swindled themselves into the lands of the O’Driscolls in Cape and Sherkin and other islands of “Carbery’s hundred isles.” Not only that, but they and their descendants since, have been trying to wipe out the old Irish stock entirely. It is not agreeable to have around you people you have plundered, and reduced to pauperism and starvation. Doctor Dan O’Donovan, in his sketches of Carbery, says:
“In a copy of an inquisition taken in Ross Carbery in the year 1608, all the various lordships, royalties, rents and dues are detailed, and the boundaries strictly defined of the country or cantred of Collymore, called O’Driscoll’s country. It contained 65 plough-lands—39½ on the mainland and 25½ in the islands. The names of their castles would also indicate the flourishing conditions of the occupants, viz, Dun-na-sead, which means the castle of the Jewels, and Dun-an-oir, the golden fort.
“Walter Coppinger had been an arbitrator in deciding a dispute regarding landed property between Sir Fineen O’Driscoll and a relative of his named Fineen Catharach. Coppinger got an order out of Chancery against the heirs of O’Driscoll. Coppinger, after the justices had issued a commission to Sir William Hull, Mr. Henry Beecher and Mr. Barham to examine into the case, made a private contract with Beecher, and granted him a lease of the whole.”
And so, the juggling went on, till the O’Driscolls came in to be pauper tenants in their own lands, and the Beechers came in to be millionaire landlords over them.
CHAPTER XXV.
JOHN O’DONOVAN, LL. D., EDITOR OF THE ANNALS OF THE FOUR MASTERS.
The life of my early manhood is full of my acquaintance with John O’Donovan, the great Irish scholar; and when now—forty years after that acquaintance—I am writing my “recollections,” it would not be right to pass the old times by, and pass the old friends by, without saying a word about them. I will, therefore, devote this chapter to the letters of John O’Donovan that are here before me. When writing to me he used to touch upon all subjects: Genealogy, politics, public men, history, seanachus, sinsearacht, his family, his friends and his children. His son Edmond, whom I knew when he was a child, and who, when grown into manhood, became active and prominent in the Fenian movement, and active and prominent as a war correspondent in Asia and Africa, for the London journals—killed in the Soudan, or some other expedition—will be recognized in these letters of his father that I am going to show you. I will also show you, at the end of the chapter, three letters of Edmond’s own.
The old Dublin Penny Journal of my boyhood days was a very interesting journal to read. In it were papers on Irish genealogy, written by John O’Donovan. I was interested in the genealogy of my own name, and in the nickname of “Rossa” attached to it; because it it was only in whispers, my father and the families of his five uncles who lived in the town, would speak that nickname—though all the neighbors around called them “Muintir-a-Rossa.” The secret of the privacy was this: The nickname came to the family from their having owned the lands around Rossmore some generations before that, and from their having been deprived of those lands because they would not change their religion and go to church. The Hungerfords and the Townsends and the Bernards and the other “people of Quality” around, were in possession of those lands now; my people were defeated in the battle for their rights; they were allowed, here and there, by the Cromwellians, to live as tenants on their own lands, but if they stuck to the name “Rossa,” which the people gave them, it would imply that they held fast to the desire “to have their own again,”—and that was a desire they did not want to make manifest.