United States or South Africa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The farmers are not business men. They offered more than the land could pay. You know the results. But why curse and blaspheme the landlords for what was in many cases their own deliberate act?" On Friday last I had a small object-lesson in Irish affairs. Colonel O'Callaghan, of Bodyke, went to Limerick to buy cattle for grazing on his estate.
Weldon C. Moloney, solicitor, of Dublin, was driving near Milltown, on the Bodyke property, when he was wounded from the ankle to the thigh by several simultaneous shots from both sides of the road, and the horse so badly injured that it must probably be destroyed. Mr. Moloney believes that he will be able to identify his assailants, and the police are sure they have the right men.
The tenants of the Bodyke property stigmatise Colonel O'Callaghan as the worst landlord in the world, and declare themselves totally unable to pay the rent demanded, and even in some cases say that they cannot pay any rent at all, a statement which is effectually contradicted by the fact that most of them pay up when fairly out-generalled by the dashing strategy of Mr.
This same gentleman said that at the Bodyke evictions, of which so much has been heard, the girls and women swarmed about the police using language so revoltingly obscene that the policemen blushed such language, he said, as was never heard from decent Irishwomen in the days of his youth.
If the Colonel refuses to speak I will interview his tenants. I have said I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil with the readers of the Gazette. Dixi. I have spoken! There is much shooting on the Bodyke estates, and in Ennis they say that sixty policemen are stationed there to pick up the game. Nobody has been bagged as yet, but the Clare folks are still hoping.
Just as the men of Bodyke are getting the rifles for which Mr. Davitt wished in order to chastise the Royal Irish Constabulary, by way of showing these "ruffians, the armed mercenaries of England, that the people of Ireland had not lost the spirit of their ancestors." Well may a timid Protestant of Gort say, "These men are deceiving England.
Perhaps ye have Gladstonian life-assurance offices in England? What praymium would they want for the life of a Bodyke man that paid his rint to the Colonel?" The "praymium" would doubtless be "steep." Boycotting is hard to bear, as testified by Mr. Dawson, a certain Clerk of Petty Sessions.
Strachan, of Tuam, would be torn to pieces, if without the three, or four policemen who watch over him day and night; the caretakers on the Bodyke estate would get very short shrift, once the sixteen policemen who guard the two men were removed. Blood discharged a labourer, Strachan bought a farm.
A man might fight it out if he only had himself to consider; but you see where the shoe pinches." A decent man in Ennis thus expressed himself anent the Bodyke affair. But their acts are bad, for they can pay, and they will not. No, I do not call the Colonel a bad landlord. We know all about it in Ennis; everybody agrees, too. The farmers meet in this town and elsewhere.
Stannard MacAdam, whose experience as a racing bicyclist seems to have stood him in good stead. The country about Bodyke has an unfertile look, a stony, boggy, barren appearance. Here and there are patches of tolerable land, but the district cannot fairly be called a garden of Eden.
Word Of The Day