There are 114 tenants, of whom 15 hold under judicial rents; 22 are leaseholders, and 77 are non-judicial yearly tenants. There are 12 Protestants holding in all a little more than 1200 acres. All the rest are Catholics, 14 of these being cottier tenants. The estate consists of 5165 acres. The average is about £24, and the average rental about £26, 10s. The gross rental is £2614, of which £1000 go to the jointure of Mr. Brooke’s mother, and £800 are absorbed by the tithe charges, half poor-rates and other taxes. During the year 1886, in which this war was declared against him, Mr. Brooke spent £714 in improvements upon the property: so in that year his income from Coolgreany was practically nil.
What in these circumstances would have been the position of this landlord had he not possessed ample means not invested in this particular estate? And what has been the result to the tenants of this conflict into which it seems clear that they were led, less to protect any direct interest of their own than to jeopardise their homes and their livelihood for the promotion of a general agrarian agitation? It is not clear that they are absolutely so far out of pocket, for I find that the Post-Office Savings Bank deposits at Inch and Gorey rose from £3699, 5s. 4d. in 1880 to £5308, 13s. in 1887, showing an increase of £1609, 7s. 8d. But they are out of house and home and work, entered pupils in that school of idleness and iniquity which has been kept by one Preceptor from the beginning of time.
CHAPTER XV.[25]
* * * *—Mrs. Kavanagh was quite right when she told me at Borris in March that this country should be seen in June! The drive to this lovely place this morning was one long enchantment of verdure and hawthorn blossoms and fragrance.
I came over from London to bring to a head some inquiries which have too long delayed the publication of this diary. My intention had been to go directly to Thurles, but a telegram which I received from the Archbishop of Cashel just before I left telling me that he could not be at home for the last three days of the week, I came directly here. Nothing can be more utterly unlike the popular notions of Ireland and of Irish life than the aspect of this most smiling and beautiful region: nothing more thoroughly Irish than its people.
* * * who is one of the most active and energetic of Irish landlords, lives part of the year abroad, but keeps up his Irish property with care, at the expense, I suspect, of his estates elsewhere.
From a noble avenue of trees, making the highway like the main road of a private park, we turned into a literal paradise of gardens. The air was balmy with their wealth of odours. “Oh! yes, sir,” said the coachman, with an air of sympathetic pride, “our lady is just the greatest lady in all this land for flowers!”
And for ivy, he might have added. We drove between green walls of ivy up to a house which seemed itself to be built of ivy, like that wonderful old mansion of Castle Leod in Scotland. Here, plainly, is another centre of “sweetness and light,” the abolition of which must make, not this region alone, but Ireland poorer in that precise form of wealth, which, as Laboulaye has shown in one of the best of his lectures, is absolutely identical with civilisation. It is such places as this, which, in the interest of the people, justify the exemption from redistribution and resettlement, made in one of a series of remarkable articles on Ireland recently published in the Birmingham Post, of lands, the “breaking up of which would interfere with the amenity of a residence.”
* * * relations with all classes of the people here are so cordial and straightforward that he has been easily able to give me to-day, what I have sought in vain elsewhere in Ireland, an opportunity of conversing frankly and freely with several labouring men. For obvious reasons these men, as a rule, shrink from any expression of their real feelings. Their position is apparently one of absolute dependence either upon the farmers or the landlords, there being no other local market for their labour, which is their only stock-in-trade. As one of them said to me to-day, “The farmers will work a man just as long as they can’t help it, and then they throw him away.”
I asked if there were no regular farm-labourers hired at fixed rates by the year?