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It appears from this table that the deposits in these Savings Banks increased in the aggregate from £20,329, 15s. 11d. in 1880 to £32,347, 9s. 7d. in 1887, or almost 60 per cent, in seven years. They fell off in only one case, at Bunbeg, and there only to a nominal amount. At Youghal they much more than doubled, increasing about 133 per cent.
The potatoes, I had heard, were doing well this year. "No! they wouldn't keep the people; indeed, they wouldn't. There would have to be relief." "Why not manure the land?" "Manure? oh yes, the sea-stuff was good manure, but the people couldn't get it. They had no boats; and it cost eighteenpence a load to haul it from Bunbeg. No! they couldn't get it off the rocks.
The tenant's wife, for whom in 1838 a single shift was a social superiority, in 1852 went shopping at Bunbeg for the latest fashions from Derry or Dublin. Whatever "landlordism" may mean elsewhere in Ireland, it is plain enough that in the history of Gweedore it has meant the difference between savage squalor and civilisation.
It was crowded with poor people from the surrounding country and from the island of Arranmore, who were crying with hunger and cold; the next market town was thirty miles from them, and the nearest place where food could be obtained was Lord George Hill's store at Bunbeg, some twenty miles distant.
There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse, nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed region. He put up storehouses, built a little harbour at Bunbeg, established a dispensary, got a doctor to settle in the district, and finally put up the hotel in which we are. He advanced money to tenants disposed to improve their holdings.
Errigal, which in this mountain atmosphere seems almost to hang over our hotel, but is in reality three or four miles away, stood out superbly against a clear azure sky, wreaths of soft luminous mist floating like a divine girdle half way up his bare volcanic peak. I walked up to the Bunbeg road with Lord Ernest to call upon some peasants whom he knows.
Go down to the store at Bunbeg, and see what they buy and go in debt for! You won't find in any such place as Bunbeg in England such things. And even this don't measure it; for, you see, two-thirds of them are not free to deal at Bunbeg." "Why not? Is Bunbeg 'boycotted'?" "No, not at all. But they are on the books of the 'Gombeen man' Sweeney of Dungloe and Burtonport.
By her side sat a man with his cap on, who might have been the "young Pretender," or the "old Kaiser," so far as his looks went towards indicating his age. He never rose or welcomed us, being, as we afterwards found out, only a visitor like ourselves, and a kinsman of Mrs. M'Donnell, the head of the house. "Mrs. M'Donnell," he said, "is gone to the store at Bunbeg."
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