IRISH INTELLIGENCE.
AWFUL STATE OF THE COUNTRY!
(From our own Correspondent.)
We are at length enabled to inform the Public that we have, at a vast expense, completed our arrangements for the transmission of the earliest news from Ireland. We have just received the Over-bog Mail, which contains facts of a most interesting nature. We hasten to lay our sagacious correspondent’s remarks before our readers:—
Bally-ha-ghadera, Tuesday Night.
PUNCH will appreciate my unwillingness to furnish him with intelligence which might in any way disturb the commercial relations between this and the sister island, more particularly at the present crisis, when the interests of that prosperous class, the London Baked Potatoe vendors, are so intimately connected, with the preservation of good feeling among the Tipperary growers. However, my duty to PUNCH and the public compel me to speak.—I do feel that we are on the eve of a great popular commotion. Every day’s occurrences strengthen my conviction. Bally-ha-ghadera was this morning at sunrise disturbed by noises of the most appalling kind, forming a wild chorus, in which screams and bellowings seemed to vie for supremacy; indeed words cannot adequately describe this terrific disturbance. As I expected, the depraved Whig Journalist, with characteristic mental tortuosity, has asserted that the sounds proceeded from a rookery in the adjoining wood, aided by the braying of the turf-man’s donkey. But an enlightened public will see through this paltry subterfuge. Rooks and donkeys! Pooh! There cannot be a doubt but that the noises were the preparatory war-whoops of this ferocious and sanguinary people. We believe the Whig editor to be the only donkey in the case; that he may have been a ravin(g) at the time is also very probable.
No later than yesterday the Cloonakilty Express was stopped by a band of young men, who savagely ill-treated our courier, a youth of tender age, having attempted to stone him to death. Our courier is ready to swear that at the time of the attack the young men were busily engaged counting a vast store of ammunition, consisting of round white clay balls baked to the hardness of bullets, and evidently intended for shooting with.
I have to call particular attention to the fact that a countryman was this day observed to buy a threepenny loaf, and on leaving the baker’s to tear it asunder and distribute the fragments with three confederates!!! an act which I need not say was evidently symbolical of their desire to rend asunder the Corn Laws, and to divide the landed property amongst themselves. The action also appears analogous to the custom of breaking bread and swearing alliance on it, a practice still observed by the inhabitants of some remote regions of the Caucasus. I must again solemnly express my conviction that we are standing on a slumbering VOLCANO; the thoughtless and unobservant may suppose not; probably because in the present tee-total state of society they see nothing of the CRATER.