“What wages do they get there?”
“Oh, it differs, but they do well; 9s. a week, I think, and their board, and straw to sleep on in the stables.”
“But doesn’t it cost them a good deal to go and come?”
“Oh no; they get cheap rates. They send them from Galway to Dublin like cattle, at £2, 5s. a car, and that makes about 1s. 6d. a head; and then they are taken over on the steamers very cheap. Often the graziers that do large business with the companies, will have a right to send over a number of men free; and they stowaway too; and then on the railways in England they get passes free often from cattle-dealers, specially when they are coming back, and the dealers don’t want their passes. They do very well. They’ll bring back £7 and £10. I was on a boat once, and there was a man; he was drunk; he was from Galway somewhere, and they took away and kept for him £18, all in good golden sovereigns; that was the most I ever saw. And he was drunk, or who’d ever have known he had it?”
“Do the farmers build houses for the labourers?”
“Build houses, is it! Glory be to God! who ever heard of such a thing? The farmers are a poor proud lot. They’d let a labourer die in the ditch!”
All that this poor man said was corroborated by another man of a higher class, very familiar with the conditions of life and labour here, and indeed one of the most interesting men I have met in Ireland. Born the son of a labouring man, he was educated by a priest and educated himself, till he fitted himself for the charge of a small school, which he kept to such good purpose that in eighteen years he saved £1100, with which capital he resolved to begin life as a small farmer and shopkeeper. He had studied all the agricultural works he could get, and before he went fairly into the business, he travelled on the Continent, looking carefully into the methods of culture and manner of life of the people, especially in Italy and in Belgium. The Belgian farming gave him new ideas of what might be done in Ireland, and those ideas he has put into practice, with the best results.
“On the same land with my neighbours,” he said, “I double their production. Where they get two tons of hay I get four or four and a half, where they get forty-five barrels of potatoes I get a hundred. Only the other day I got £20 for a bullock I had taken pains with to fatten him up scientifically. Of course I had a small capital to start with: but where did I get that? Not from the Government. I earned and saved it myself; and then I wasn’t above learning how best to use it.”
He thinks the people here—though by no means what they might be with more thrift and knowledge—much better off than the same class in many other parts of Ireland. There are no “Gombeen men” here, he says, and no usurious shopkeepers. “The people back each other in a friendly way when they need help.” Many of the labourers, he says, are in debt to him, but he never presses them, and they are very patient with each other. They would do much better if any pains were taken to teach them. It is his belief that agricultural schools and model farms would do more than almost any measure that could be devised for bringing up the standard of comfort and prosperity here, and making the country quiet.
It is the opinion of this man that the people of this place have been led to regard the Papal Decree as a kind of attack on their liberties, and that they are quite as likely to resist as to obey it. For his own part, he thinks Ireland ought to have her own parliament, and make her own laws. He is not satisfied with the laws actually made, though he admits they are better than the older laws were. “The tenants get their own improvements now,” he said, “and in old times the more a man improved the worse it was for him, the agent all the while putting up the rents.”