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Updated: May 18, 2025
If the National League is as well off as it is reputed to be, it might go into this business open a new and remunerative industry to the people of a "congested" district, and earn dividends large enough to enable it to pay the expenses of the war against England at Westminster, without drawing on the savings of the servant-girls in America, The only person likely to suffer would be the "Gombeen man," if the peasantry earned enough to pay off their debts to him, and stop the flow of interest into his coffers.
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.
For some time past the game of credit has been going on gaily; but since the commencement of the present agitation both banks and gombeen men have distinctly narrowed their operations, and the landlord is now the almost universal creditor.
Over the doorways of most of the shops appear the names of various members of the family of Sweeney, all of them, I am told, brought here and established within a few years past by the head of the sept, who is not only the great "Gombeen man" of the region, but a leading local member of the National League, and Her Majesty's Postmaster.
"Paddy Gallagher up in Dungloe in the Rosses will give you an idea of the poverty of the Irish countryside, of the extent that the poverty is due to the gombeen men, 'the bosses of the Rosses, and of the ability of the co-operative society to develop and create industry even in such a locality. "Societies like Paddy Gallagher's are springing up all over Ireland.
The arts as well as the crafts, the graces equally with the utilities must stand up in the marketplace and be judged by the gombeen men. The only house near to her father's was that occupied by Bessie Hannigan. The other few houses were scattered widely with long, quiet miles of hill and bog between them, so that she had hardly seen more than a couple of men beside her father since she was born.
I'm barricaded up, Simon, with two men prowling around the house trying to effect an entrance. Jolly, Mr Dedalus said. Who is it? O, Father Cowley said. A certain gombeen man of our acquaintance. With a broken back, is it? Mr Dedalus asked. The same, Simon, Father Cowley answered. Reuben of that ilk. I'm just waiting for Ben Dollard.
"Let your da' not worry," said the fat gombeen man pompously to Paddy. Paddy had brought the ticket that his father had obtained by a week's work to exchange for twenty-eight pounds of corn meal. "I'll keep famine from the parish. Charity's not dead yet."
This poor innocent was charging just 60 per cent., but his terms were lavishly liberal as compared with those of the gombeen man.
As the peer, who would never have put his hand into his own pocket to pay for improving his property, suddenly awakes to the value of drainage when the Government offers a million and a half at one per cent., so did the gombeen man, who would never have dreamed of lending more than a pound at a time to a peasant, extend his credit four or five fold when the Land Act of 1870 gave him the first instalment of proprietary right in the land he occupied.
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