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Updated: May 18, 2025
From the papers the figure turned to a heap as of bank-notes, and there was in the air the chink of money. For the name of this grisly and terribly real spectre is gombeen; which, in the Irish tongue, signifies usury.
"What do you want to know for?" asked the gombeen man, when at the end of Paddy's back-breaking six months, Paddy and his father brought him the fifteen dollars and asked how much they still owed. The gombeen man refuses accounts to everyone but the priest, magistrate, doctor and teacher. "What do you want to know how much you owe for? Unless you want to pay me all off?"
Of the three personages who take tribute of the people of Gweedore, the law intervenes in their behalf with only one the landlord. The priest and the "Gombeen man" deal with them on the old principle of "freedom of contract." But it is by no means so clear which of the three exacts and receives the greatest tribute.
Usury is the great nightmare of rural Russia, at present, an evil which seems to dog the peasant proprietor in all countries alike. The "Gombeen Man" is fast getting possession of the little Irish owners. A man who hires land cannot borrow on it; the little owner is tempted always to mortgage it at a pinch. In Russia he borrows to the outside of its value to pay the taxes and get in his crop.
When a man in these parts gets or keeps out of debt himself, he is mostly engaged in encouraging others to get into it. Often he has little or nothing himself, but acts after the Irish fashion as deputy gombeen man for the pleasure of the thing, and also for a commission well and duly paid.
It still remains obvious that, even after expansions, good, bad, or indifferent, of the policy of 1903, the total sum to be borrowed cannot exceed from £110,000,000 to £113,000,000, as the outside figure that need be contemplated, provided we refrain from the "economic insanity" of distributing eleven million acres of permanent pasture among shopkeepers and "Gombeen" men.
I am sure that the oldest inhabitant would agree with me that more changes for the better for farmers have taken place since the co-operative society was started than he could remember in all his previous life. The reign of the gombeen man is over. The farmers control their own buying and selling. Their organization markets for them the eggs and poultry.
When Paddy was seventeen he made a still bigger fight against debt. With the sons of other "tied" men, he went to work in the Scottish harvests. His family was not as badly off as those of some of the boys. Some had run so far behind that the gombeen man had served writs on them, obtained judgment against their holdings, and could evict them at pleasure.
I am familiar with a district in the northwest of Ireland. It was a most wretchedly poor district. The farmers were at the mercy of the gombeen traders and the agricultural middlemen. Then a dozen years ago a co-operative society was formed.
It did no good to say how much the father had paid for the same amount of meal. The gombeen man insisted that Paddy's father had given eighteen shillings, and Paddy was being charged just three shillings and three pence interest. Or only 144 per cent per annum! "Why do we buy from him? Why don't we get together and do our own buying?" asked the insurgent Paddy.
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