Mr. Brooke confirmed Dr. Dillon’s statement that he had ordered out of his counting-house two tenants who came into it with a peculiarly brazen proposition, of which I must presume Dr. Dillon was ignorant when he cited the fact as a count against the landlord of Coolgreany. I give the story as Mr Brooke tells it. “The Rent Audit,” he says, “at which my tenants were idiots enough to join the Plan of Campaign occurred about the 12th December 1886, when, as you know, I refused to accept the terms which they proposed to me. I heard nothing more from them till about the middle of February 1887, when coming to my office one day I found two tenants waiting for me. One was Stephen Maher, a mountain man, and the other Patrick Kehoe. ‘What do you want?’ I asked. Whereupon they both arose, and Pat Kehoe pointed to Maher. Maher fumbled at his clothes, and rubbed himself softly for a bit, and then produced a scrap of paper. ‘It’s a bit of paper from the tenants, sir,’ he said. A queer bit of paper it was to look at—ruled paper, with a composition written upon it which might have been the work of a village schoolmaster. It was neither signed nor addressed! The pith of it was in these words,—‘in consequence of the manner in which we have been harassed, our cattle driven throughout the country, and our crops not sown, we shall be unable to pay the half-year’s rent due in March, in addition to the reduction already claimed!’ I own I rather lost my temper at this! Remember I had already plainly refused to give ‘the reduction already claimed,’ and had told them not once, but twenty times, that I would never surrender to the ‘Plan of Campaign’! I am afraid my language was Pagan rather than Parliamentary—but I told them plainly, at least, that if they did not break from the Plan of Campaign, and pay their debts, they might be sure I would turn the whole of them out! I gave them back their precious bit of paper and sent them packing.
“One of them, I have told you, was a mountain man, Stephen Maher. He is commonly known among the people as ‘the old fox of the mountain,’ and he is very proud of it!
“This old Stephen Maher,” said Mr. Brooke, “is renowned in connection with a trial for murder, at which he was summoned as a witness. When he was cross-examined by Mr. Molloy, Q.C., he fenced and dodged about with that distinguished counsellor for a long time, until getting vexed by the lawyer’s persistency, he exclaimed, ‘Now thin, Mr. Molloy, I’d have ye to know that I had a cliverer man nor iver you was, Mr. Molloy, at me, and I had to shtan’ up to him for three hours before the Crowner, an’ he was onable to git the throoth out of me, so he was! so he was!’”
Neither did Dr. Dillon mention the fact that one of the demands made of Captain Hamilton, Mr. Brooke’s agent, in December 1886, was that a Protestant tenant named Webster should be evicted by Mr. Brooke from a farm for which he had paid his rent, to make room for the return thither of a Roman Catholic tenant named Lenahan, previously evicted for non-payment of his rent.
When Mr. Brooke’s grandfather bought the Coolgreany property in 1864, he adopted a system of betterments, which has been ever since kept up on the estate. Nearly every tenant’s house on the property has been slated, and otherwise repaired by the landlord, nor has one penny ever been added on that account to the rents.
In the village of Coolgreany all the houses on one side of the main street were built in this way by the landlord, and the same thing was done in the village of Croghan, where twenty tenants have a grazing right of three sheep for every acre held on the Croghan Mountain, pronounced by the valuers of the Land Court to be one of the best grazing mountains in Ireland.
Captain Hamilton became the agent of the property in 1879, on the death of Mr. Vesey. One of his earliest acts was to advise Mr. Brooke to grant an abatement of 25 per cent. in June 1881, while the Land Act was passing. At the same time, he cautioned the tenants that this was only a temporary reduction, and advised them to get judicial rents fixed.
The League advised them not to do this, but to demand 25 per cent. reduction again in December 1881. This demand was rejected, and forty writs were issued. The tenants thereupon in January 1882 came in and paid the full rent, with the costs.
Eleven tenants after this went into Court, and in 1883 the Sub-Commissioners cut down their rents. In five cases Mr. Brooke appealed. What was the result before the Chief Commissioner? The rent of Mary Green, which had been £43, and had been cut down by the Sub-Commissioners to £39, was restored to £43; the rent of Mr. Kavanagh, cut down from £57 to £52, was restored to £55; the rent of Pat Kehoe (one of the two tenants “ejected” from Mr. Brooke’s office as already stated), cut down from £81 to £70, was restored to £81; the rent of Graham, cut down from £38 to £32, 10s., was restored to £38. Other reductions were maintained.
This appears to be the record of “rack-renting” on the Coolgreany property.