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Updated: May 18, 2025
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.
I landed at Kingstown with Lord Ernest Hamilton, M.P. for North Tyrone, with whom I have arranged an expedition to Gweedore in Donegal, one of the most ill-famed of the "congested districts" of Ireland, and just now made a point of special interest by the arrest of Father M'Fadden, the parish priest of the place, for "criminally conspiring to compel and induce certain tenants not to fulfil their legal obligations."
He received me with much courtesy, and asked me to walk into his well-furnished comfortable study, where a lady, his sister, to whom he presented me, sat reading by the fire. I told Father M'Fadden I had come to get his view of methods and things at Gweedore, and he gave it to me with great freedom and fluency.
Sometimes its speed reached twenty-five miles an hour, but never more, and because of numerous curves and gradients for it was a narrow gauge and more or less a surface line the rate of progress was much less during the greater part of the journey. The work of the day was over. My companion and I had dined at the Gweedore Hotel, where we were staying for the night.
Colonel Dopping, I have heard, argued with an old woman one day who was telling him more yarns than were ever spun into cloth in Gweedore, till she picked up her cup of tea and threw it in his face. He flounced out of the cottage, and ordered the police to arrest her. That did him more harm than if he had shot a dozen boys."
He drew up a scheme, well thought-out and workable, such as a thorough business man might be expected to concoct, and sent down his agent to the districts of Gweedore in Donegal and Maam in Galway, with instructions to engage as many families as possible to work in the mills of the firm, noted all over the world for thread, yarn, and linen-weaving. An enormous affair, employing a whole township.
Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of the honest investment of alien capital in Irish land, and of the administration by the proprietor himself of the Irish property so acquired for the benefit alike of the owner and of the occupiers of the land.
But it certainly goes to confirm the estimates given me by Sergeant Mahony of Father M'Fadden's receipts at Gweedore, and the opinion expressed to me by Lord Lucan as to the average returns of an average Catholic parish, that the priest of Milford, a place hardly so considerable as Gweedore, should have acquired so handsome a property in the exercise there of his parochial functions.
If from the dwellings and clothing of the peasantry we pass to their food, there is no need of adding any thing to what was said on this point when describing the periodical famines. One detail, however, not yet mentioned, deserves to be recorded: "In the district of Gweedore," says Abbe Perraud, "our eyes were destined to witness the use of sea-weed.
"Oh, it's mainly the funeral-money that helps it up," he replied. "You see, sir, since Father M'Fadden came to Gweedore it's come to be the fashion." "The fashion?" I said. "Yes, sir, the fashion. This is the way it is, you see.
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