From the tyrant, by rifle and sword.
No hope for a comfort in life
While crouchingly quiet and obedient
The weal of your child and your wife
Is to Trench the tyrannical agent.
The Kenmare men asked me to get printed for them some slips of what I wrote about Trench. I got them printed, and sent them to the Kerry men. Trench got hold of one of them, and was mad to find out who was the writer; he said it was inciting the people to murder him—for, the word “trench” has that meaning in Kerry. But the Kerry men did not give me away.
This Trench had earned for himself the reputation of being a most expert hand at getting rid of what the English landlords called “the surplus population” on their Irish estates. He was well known in the barony of Farney in the County of Monaghan, where he was after having gone through his work of depopulation on the Shirley estate.
And strange! this day that I am writing—some forty-five years after I wrote the lines about Trench—the “Dundalk Democrat” of November 21, 1896, comes on my desk, and I see in it an account of a Land League meeting in Carrickmacross, presided over by Dean Bermingham, the priest of the parish. The subject of the speeches at the meeting is the evictions on this Shirley estate—and this, after all the Tenant-right bills that England has passed for the tenantry of Ireland during those past forty-five years! I quote from the “Democrat” these few passages:
“On Thursday last a meeting was held in Carrickmacross, called nominally to support the claim for a reduction of rent made by the Shirley tenantry, and for the restoration of the evicted tenants on that estate.