One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

It is difficult to overestimate the vast amount of good this movement has accomplished. It is gradually changing the standard of life among the laboring classes throughout Ireland. It has not only furnished comfortable and decent homes for more than twenty-three thousand families, who have been living in miserable, filthy cabins for generations, but it has done much to improve their health. It will strengthen the physical constitutions of the coming generations by placing them in sanitary homes and clean surroundings.

Mr. John Redmond, in a speech in the House of Commons, said that “the agricultural laborers of Ireland had been living under conditions which were absolutely fatal to health and the habits of cleanliness, and which, in almost any other country in the world, would have proved fatal to religion and morality as well. But the Irish agricultural laborers are a remarkable race of men, highly intelligent, keen and brave, patriotic, and self-sacrificing in their patriotism. They have preserved through poverty and squalor a deep religious, spiritual feeling, and the highest possible standard of morality.”

The Congested Districts Board devotes its attention entirely to the people living in the bleak mountain lands on the west coast of Ireland, and its agencies are established at different points from the extreme south to the extreme north of the island. The poverty, the privation, the suffering, are chiefly found within a few miles from the coast, where the territory is divided into vast estates of almost worthless land, and where it is very difficult for any person to earn a living. The same conditions have existed for ages. The west coast of Ireland has never been prosperous, the soil has never been fertile, the people have never had any more comforts than they have to-day, but they have continued to live there, century after century, clinging to the rocks and suffering from the weather and the lack of food, which has been their inheritance, refusing to leave their wretched hovels for a more favorable climate and better opportunities of making a living.

It cannot be said that they remain there in ignorance, because thirty thousand or forty thousand men from the congested districts leave their cabins, their wives, and their families for several months every year and go to England and Scotland to supply the demand for labor in those countries. The migratory labor system has been going on for generations, and many of the men have gone to the same jobs generation after generation, spending half their time earning good wages in England and the other half looking after their little gardens and cattle and goats in Connaught Province, in Clare, Kerry, Galway, Sligo, and Donegal counties. It is one of the strangest phenomena in human life that they should cling as they do to their desolate, comfortless, filthy stone huts in these bleak mountains; but, be it ever so humble, be it ever so comfortless, there is no place like home.

One of the functions of the Congested Districts Board is to remove as many as possible of these families to localities where they can make a living with less labor and find more of the comforts and happiness of life; but the most pitiful and difficult part of its task is to persuade them to go. Mr. O’Connor, the solicitor of the board, told me of a wizen-faced old peasant who occupied a leaky stone hut on the mountain side, without the slightest comfort within or attraction without. He had a few acres of sterile soil, on which, with the greatest difficulty, he was able to produce enough cabbages and potatoes to keep his family from starvation, and a small herd of goats, lean and gaunt, that were trying to find sustenance in the heather and the mosses on the rocks; and yet, even in this condition, the old man stubbornly refused to move. No inducement could persuade him to abandon the worthless, filthy habitation, because it was his home. With the pride of a prince he defied the inspectors of the board, charging them with some malicious intent of depriving him of property that had been the home of his family, he declared, for nine hundred years. And nothing could induce him to leave it for a comfortable cottage and a productive farm fifty miles in the interior.

They told me, too, of a girl about eighteen years old, who, being injured by an automobile, was picked up and carried to the nearest hospital, which happened to be twenty miles or more from the place where she lived and the scene of the accident. She was being tenderly cared for in a neat, sunshiny ward, in a comfortable bed, with sheets and pillow cases of linen, with a nurse to attend her and every delicacy that could be furnished to eat, and yet she moaned and cried and begged to be taken home. Finally the Americans who had been in the automobile at the time of the accident, and had left a deposit of money to pay for every comfort and surgical attention that the girl could possibly need, consented to her removal, because the doctor said she was fretting herself into a fever. So they brought the automobile to the hospital, placed her carefully in a bed of pillows in the tonneau, and carried her back into the mountains to her “home,” a one-room cabin of the most repulsive and wretched sort, which, as my friend told me, he wouldn’t have kept his horse in. The walls were of rude stone piled one on another without mortar and the roof was made of straw. There was no floor but the earth, no furniture but a hard wooden bench, a table, and a three-legged stool. There was no window, and the only light that there was came through the door, which opened into a loathsome barnyard, where the filth was ankle deep and the stench almost insufferable. And yet when they laid the poor creature on the earthen floor she gave a long sigh of relief and satisfaction and thanked them for bringing her “home.” It is true the world over that people prize things that are worthless if they happen to be all they possess. The less we have the more valuable it becomes; the more we have the less we value it. This trait may be found in the mountains of Switzerland, in Lapland, in Norway, and other countries where people enjoy the least blessings and comforts and where living is a constant struggle.

The Congested Districts Board consists of Sir Antony MacDonnell, under secretary for Ireland, who has recently been elevated to the peerage as Lord MacDonnell of Swineford; Sir Horace Plunkett, a well known agriculturalist; Rev. Dennis O’Hara, a Catholic priest of County Clare; Henry Dorran, the chief inspector and executive officer in actual charge of the work, and Mr. O’Connor, the solicitor in charge of the office work. The board is constituted by an act of parliament and has a large staff of agents and officials in the field.

An Irish Cabin in County Donegal.