But those dreams and many other dreams of mine have not been realized.
All this I am saying may be idle gossip, personal or family gossip, yet it may lead to something that may affect every one who is not ashamed of having an Irish father and mother, and of having every one and everything belonging to him, Irish. To those who would be ashamed of having it known who their father and mother and their family connections were, I have nothing to say, and I heed little what they say of me for having a little Irish family pride about me. My story is the story of many a decent father and mother’s son, cast out upon the world—the story, alas! of many a decent father and mother’s daughter too:
“Through the far lands we roam,
Through the wastes, wild and barren,
We are strangers at home—
We are exiles in Erin.”
When Cromwell ravaged Ireland; when the cry was to the Irish people of Munster, Leinster and Ulster—“To hell, or to Connacht, with you!” there were not enough of people left in those three provinces to till the land. Then propositions were made to the plundered, exterminated people, that some of them would return, and that others of them would go back to their lands under an agreement of paying rent to an English landlord, and some who even owned the land got a foothold to remain as rent-gatherers for the Cromwellians. The Barrys owned Rathabharrig—Castle Barry. The Frekes and the Aylmers and the Evanses came in, and changed the name from Castle Barry to Castle Freke, and the Barrys got a chance of living on their own lands, by becoming rent-payers and rent collectors for the Invaders.
Old Garrett Barry was the rent-agent on the Carberry estate. It was through his friendship and influence that my father was not crushed out entirely when he cut down the trees in the kitchen garden, and sold them to Mick Hurley.
I have said in a previous chapter that although our land was on the Carberry estate, Lord Carberry was not the direct landlord who received the rent. And here I will have to notice another trick or two of those English marauding plunderers in Ireland, and notice the habits of servility and slavery into which the writers of Irish manners and customs have fallen. There is the custom of “fosterage” and there is the custom of “sponsorship” between the plunderer and the plundered.