The Old: a Laborer’s Sod Cabin
The New: Example of the Cottages built in Connemara by the Congested Districts Board
“In 1883 was passed what is known as the Act for the Building of Cottages for the Laborers of Ireland. The benefits of that measure can never be calculated. Under its authority nearly twenty-five thousand comfortable and neat cottages have been built for laborers throughout the whole country, and the miserable habitations, hovels of stone with leaky straw roofs, in which thousands of honest, hard-working peasants have been compelled to live, have been torn down and replaced with such buildings as you see in the picture, with walls of cement and roofs of slate. In addition to the improvement in their habitations, an acre of land is given with each cottage on which it is possible for the laborer to raise vegetables sufficient for his household. No estimate in money can possibly be made of the benefits that the people of Ireland have enjoyed from that act.
“In 1885 the Irish party secured the passage of the first Land Purchase Act and followed it up by winning the acts of 1888 and 1891, which went farther and still farther and benefited the country to the amount of at least one hundred and forty millions of dollars.
“Next came the Act for the Establishment of the Congested Districts Board,” continued Mr. Johnston, “expressly to deal with what are known as the congested areas of Ireland. These districts are not thickly settled, like Belgium, as one might have comparatively few population, but altogether more than the land will support. These are mountain districts along the rocky shores of the Atlantic Ocean where it is possible to raise a few cattle and goats that can find pasture in the narrow little valleys and up the mountain sides, but where there is seldom enough arable soil in a single patch to support an ordinary family. For these reasons it is difficult for the most industrious men to make a living there, and the inhabitants are the poorest, the most ill-nourished, and the most miserable in all the land.
“The Congested Districts Board was instructed to buy all the lands it found necessary in such places, moving some of the inhabitants to other sections of Ireland, where they would be able to make a living, and distributing the lands among those that remained in allotments sufficiently large to enable them to live. In deserving cases the board is authorized to build comfortable houses to replace the wretched hovels, to restock the farms, to purchase implements where they are needed, to provide seed, and do whatever is necessary to give the family a fair start and enable them to enjoy the results of their labors. The board is also empowered to build new houses upon the locations selected for the families which are moved, and has done so in many cases. You will see in these photographs the character of the cabins that were formerly occupied by the poor people in the congested districts and the character of those which have been built to replace them, by the board.”
Mr. Johnston showed me an object lesson in the form of a photograph of a cottage in County Meath for which a rental of fifteen dollars a year has been paid by the tenant for many years. It has a single room, a mud floor, a thatched roof of straw, and is entirely without the simplest conveniences or comforts. He showed me another photograph of a cottage built under the Laborers’ Act of 1906, which is now occupied by the same family with the same rent of fifteen dollars a year, with an acre of ground attached to it as a garden. It is a one-story structure of four rooms, with two fireplaces, three windows on each side, a slate roof, and walls of concrete.