“What do you give them for dinner?” I asked.
“Stirabout and new milk,” she replied.
“Potatoes?” I suggested.
“They do not care about potatoes,” she said.
Our corn-meal, among its many other Irish uses, seems likely to supersede the national dish. What a change since 1847, the year of the potato famine! This family used Indian meal because it was cheaper than oatmeal, but they did not like it so well. As for the inferior animals, they occasionally give horses corn-meal, but generally feed them in winter on oats, turnips, bran, and hay. Indian meal and bran are fed to cows with young calves. To pigs corn-meal is given the year round, occasionally adding a few boiled potatoes, the sortings. They are fattened on meal and sour milk when it can be spared. Poultry abounds here, and Ireland exports large quantities of eggs. I never saw corn-meal at home stand so constantly in the chicken-trough as at Collins’s.
I have said that the domestic came into my room to hide the teapot. The cup which cheers but not inebriates is in immense demand here. The old aunt wanted tea. The children worried the girl for tea. The beggar-woman insisted on tea. The three-year-old Norah says she has a pain and wants tea. It might be a very happy thing for Ireland if the people would confine themselves to such cups as these; but, while all other manufactures are languishing in the county Cork, malt liquor and whiskey distilleries are flourishing. (However, Scotland, a Quaker told me, excelled Ireland in regular drinking.) As to what constitutes moderate drinking, I was amused by the remarks of a girl in Cork. Speaking of young men, she said that she did not object to a bottle of porter at dinner and one in the evening, but seven or eight bottles a day she thought gluttony and a sin. Porter, however, is not dear. On draught it sells at about eight cents the quart imperial. Whiskey is quite another thing. I hear that the tax on a gallon is twelve shillings and ninepence, or about three dollars. It has been said that Ireland pays more for liquor than for rent; yet estimates given me show that while over nine millions of pounds sterling are spent yearly on intoxicating drink, the rent of the country amounts to thirteen million pounds. Let no one jump to the conclusion that it is the working farmers who expend this great amount, for doubtless the small landlords are great consumers.
Distillers and brewers are great men in such a country. I heard of several celebrated Protestant churches indebted to them for funds. A distiller gave twenty thousand pounds and a brewer ten thousand pounds to assist in building or renewing an Episcopal cathedral in Cork. It is said to have cost Guinness, the great brewer, two hundred thousand pounds to remodel St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Dublin and to build the appurtenant houses. And a distiller gave a great sum to repair Christ Church in the same city.
To return to my farmer, Collins, in whose house I saw no intoxicating liquor drunk. He rented seventy acres, of which twenty were bog, nearly worthless; the peat for burning being all cut from the bog land in this neighborhood. (Nor is the county Cork, taken altogether, a rich agricultural tract. Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary, 1837, gave the acreage at about one million seven hundred thousand, of which about seven hundred thousand acres were bog and mountain.)
Collins’s lease was for thirty-one years, of which six remained. He has built the part of the house in which we live, having slate-roofed it. He has also built a stone stable and a small dairy, with slate roofs. The landlord gave him almost nothing toward these improvements, not even the flooring of the loft. The stone Collins got off the place. When he came here the walls of the fields were mostly of clay or mud, and he has built stone ones. In this neighborhood the walls are mostly built of stone. In some cases they are covered with earth, and grass and other plants are growing on them. “These walls,” I said to him, “must take up a great deal of room. That one beside your house is a yard across the top.”