About 75 per cent of the claims that have been filed under the Evicted Tenants Act have been genuine; the remainder are apparently fraudulent or in doubt, and some of those that have been already allowed are questionable. I heard of a case in which a tenant who was evicted in 1889 for refusal to pay his rent was restored to his old home under rather peculiar circumstances. His misfortunes were voluntary, and due to political reasons rather than from the lack of means, and when he was thrown off his farm he went into business as a cattle broker and became rich. But, in common with his former neighbors, he filed his claims under the act, was restored to his old home, and the generous agents of the estates commission bought a couple of cows, a few sheep, and hogs from his own pastures, paid him for them, and then gave them to him. He is now occupying the place and cultivating it by hired labor, and will be asked to refund the money the government has advanced for him in the year 1975.
In the application of the provisions of the act no distinction is made between those who were evicted because of their poverty and those for political reasons. About one thousand evictions were the result of what is known as the “Plan of Campaign” adopted in 1887, when the National League determined to force the issue and organized a general strike among the farmers against the payment of rent upon certain estates selected because their landlords were habitual absentees, who spent the revenues they derived from their estates outside of Ireland and were oppressive to their tenants and generally offensive. As a rule, the tenants paid half a year’s rent to the agents of the league for a war fund, so far as they were able. Most of them were able to pay, although there was a great deal of suffering and privation among about a thousand families who were thrown out of their homes during one land war which lasted for two or three years. Practically all of them have already been restored to their former farms.
In 1901 another land war was inaugurated, under the direction of Dennis Johnston and John Fitzgibbons of the United Irish League, in Roscommon and neighboring counties, and a large number of tenants who had voluntarily agreed not to pay their rents were thrown off their farms as voluntary martyrs in a campaign which finally resulted in the enactment of the act of 1907, which was prepared and introduced into parliament by George Wyndham, chief secretary for Ireland under the late conservative government. This act authorizes the estates commission having in charge the administration of the Land Act of 1903 to acquire by force if necessary eighty thousand acres of land wherever they consider it expedient, to be sold under mortgages of sixty-eight years at 3½ per cent interest to families who have been evicted from their former homes. The commissioners are required to investigate the claims of those who have been evicted, through their staff of inspectors, and if found genuine to serve notice upon the owner to vacate the farms from which they were evicted within a certain time. The landlord has the right of appeal, but every one of the owners of lands from which tenants were evicted has voluntarily consented to their restoration except the Marquess of Clanricarde, and a Mrs. Lewis who has a large estate in County Galway and has been one of the most vindictive and oppressive of all the landlords. She is a woman of very determined character, and will not even answer letters addressed to her by the officials of the government.
The Marquess of Clanricarde is nearly eighty years old, very eccentric, a miser, dresses very shabbily, lives like a recluse and pays no bills. He has visited his Irish estates but once since he inherited them in 1874, He was in the diplomatic service as a young man during the ’fifties, and at one time was a member of parliament. His name is Hubert George de Burg Canning, Marquess of Clanricarde, Viscount Burke and Baron Dunkellin, and he has several other titles, but has no family—a childless widower.
The Clanricarde estates lie directly west from Dublin in Galway County and were obtained by his ancestor, William FitzAnselm de Burg, the founder of the Burke family, under a grant from Henry I., and he founded the town of Galway. To this day the whole province of Connaught is dotted with the ruined castles of the De Burg family, monuments of four or five centuries of uninterrupted fighting with the O’Neills, the O’Donnells, the O’Flahertys, the O’Connors, and other powerful clans in the early history of Ireland. The battle of Knockdoe, fought in the fourteenth century between an undisciplined horde of native clansmen under the Earl of Clanricarde, was provoked by an insult he offered to his wife. She was the daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald the Great, Earl of Kildare, and her affectionate father in vengeance attacked his son-in-law with a disciplined force loaned him by his neighbors, the lords of the Pale of Dublin. It is said that eight thousand dead bodies were left upon the field. Those were strenuous days, and the earls of Clanricarde have been reckoned among the fiercest fighters from the time they came over from England in the fourteenth century. Sometimes they have been on one side and sometimes on the other, but like most genuine Irishmen, they have usually been “agin the government,” whatever, policy it represented. There have been several earnest patriots in the line. An old Irish ballad begins with the line, “Glory guards Clanricarde’s grave!” but the present earl is not the one referred to.
The late earl was very popular with his tenants, and so liberal and lenient was he, according to the gossip, that they got into bad habits, and when the present earl came into the property in 1874 he pulled them up very sharply and demanded a prompt and full payment of all their obligations. Being unaccustomed to such stern measures, they were resentful, and a quarrel began which has lasted until now, and Clanricarde, convinced that he has right and justice on his side, has used the mailed hand. There have been more trouble and disturbance upon his estates than upon any other in Ireland. Every one of his tenants has been evicted, and sometimes a succession of them, and their farms have been let to what are called “planters,”—a term used in Ireland to describe families imported from a distance and planted upon land which no person in the neighborhood will rent because the previous tenant has been evicted from it. Every man on the Clanricarde estates is a “planter.” After the passage of the act of 1907 the estates commissioners requested him to sell his entire holding under the act of 1903, but he not only rejected the proposition, but has declined even to discuss the subject, and has maintained that uncompromising attitude from the beginning, an embittered, relentless, vindictive old man.
Portumna Castle, County Galway; the Seat of the Earl of Clanricarde
When the commission undertook to apply the compulsory clause of the Evicted Tenants Act and published the notice in the Dublin Gazette, the earl filed a protest. Mr. Justice Wiley of the Lower Court sustained the commission, but the Court of Appeals, composed of twelve judges, unanimously reversed the decision and decided that the estates commission has no power to forcibly dispossess any bona fide “planter” from land already under lease.