Ireland as It Is, and as It Would Be Under Home Rule. Robert John Buckley
women stand about frowsy and unkempt, with wild Irish eyes, all wearing the shawl as a hood, many in picturesque tatters, like the cast-off rags of a scarecrow, rags and flesh alike unwashed and of evil odour. The children look healthy and strong, though some of them are almost in puris naturalibus. Their faces are washed once a week; one of them said so, but the statement lacks confirmation, and is opposed to the evidence of the senses. Scenes like these greet the visitor to Old Tipperary, that is, Tipperary proper, if he enter from Limerick. The town is said to be old, and in good sooth the dunghills seem to possess a considerable antiquity. In this matter the Tipperary men are sentimental enough—conservative enough for anything. At Tipperary, of all places, the brutal Saxon will learn how much has been bequeathed to Irishmen by their mighty forefathers.
The eastern side is better. A grand new Roman Catholic church has just been built at a cost of £25,000, and in front of the gilded railings—for they are gilt like the railings of Paris—were dreadful old women, like Macbethian witches, holding out their skinny hands for alms. Smartly dressed young ladies, daughters of publicans and shopkeepers, passed in jauntily, took a splash in the holy water, crossed themselves all over, knocked off a few prayers, and tripped merrily away. The better parts of the town belong to Mr. Smith-Barry, the knock-me-down cabins to Mr. Stafford O'Brien, whose system is different. As the leases fall in the former has modern houses built, while the latter is in the hands of the middlemen, who sub-let the houses, and leave things to slide. The laissez-aller policy is very suitable to the genius of the genuine Irish, who may be said to rule the roost in Tipperary.
I interviewed all sorts and conditions of men, but every individual bound me down to closest secrecy. And although nobody said anything approaching high treason, their alarm on finding they had ventured to express to a stranger anything like their real opinion was very significant. The conversations took place last evening, and this morning before breakfast a young man called on me at the Station Hotel, Limerick Junction, three miles from Tipperary, "on urgent business." "Me father thinks he said too much, an' that ye moight put what he said in print, wid his name to it. Ye promised ye wouldn't, an' me father has confidence, but he wishes to remoind ye that there's plinty in Tipperary would curse him for spakin' wid an Englishman, an' that dozens of thim would murther him or you for the price of a pot of porter." Another messenger shortly arrived, bearing a letter in which the writer said that any mention of his name would simply ruin him, and that he might leave the country at once. And yet these men had only said what Englishmen would account as nothing.
New Tipperary adjoins the old, to which it is on the whole superior. All the descriptions I have seen of the Land League buildings are untrue and unfair. Most of them were written by men who never saw the place, and who paraphrased and perpetuated the original error. It was described as a "mile or two from Tipperary," and the buildings were called "tumble-down shanties of wood, warped and decaying, already falling to pieces." The place adjoins and interlocks with the old town; it is not separated by more than the breadth of a street, is largely built of stone, and comprises a stone arcade, which alone cost many thousands. Some of the cottages are of wood, but they look well, are slated, and seem in good condition. The butter mart, a post and rail affair, with barbed wire decorations, is desolate enough, and nearly all the shops are shuttered. Enamel plates with Dillon Street and Emmett Street still attest the glory that has departed, but the plate bearing Parnell Street escaped my research. The William O'Brien Arcade is scattered to the winds, save and except the sturdy stone walls, which (à la Macaulay's New-Zealander) I surveyed with satisfaction, sketching the ruins of the structure from a broken bench in Dillon Street.
A full and true history of the New Tipperary venture has never been written. As in the present juncture the story is suggestive and instructive, I will try to submit the whole in a form at once concise and accurate. The particulars have been culled with great pains from many quarters and carefully collated on the spot, and may be relied on as minutely exact and undeniable. Everyone admits Mr. Smith-Barry's claim to the title of a good landlord, an excellent landlord, one of a thousand. Before the casus belli was found by William O'Brien all was prosperity, harmony, and peace. Mr. Smith-Barry owns about 5,000 acres of land situate in the fat and fertile plain of Tipperary, known as the Golden Vale, with the best part of the county town itself. Tipperary is a great butter centre. The people are ever driving to the butter factory, which seemed to be worked in the Brittany way. Donkey-carts driven by women, and bearing barrels of milk, abound on the Limerick Road. The land is so rich, grand meadows, and heavy dairy-ground, that the place prospered abundantly, and was by commercial men reckoned an excellent place for business. But they have changed all that. The Tipperary folks were once thought as good as the Bank of England. Now they dislike to pay anything or anybody. Their delicate sense of meum and tuum is blunted. They take all they can get, and pay as little as they can. They affect dunghills and dirt, and have a natural affinity for battle, murder, and sudden death. How did all this come about?
First, as to Mr. Smith-Barry's character. The most advanced Nationalists, the Fenian papers, the Catholic clergy, all concurred in blessing him. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Cloyne, Canon Hegarty, P.P., and Tim Healy spoke of him in the character of a landlord in highest terms. Sir Charles Russell, Tim Harrington, Mr. O'Leary (Chairman of the Clonakilty Town Commissioners, a violent Nationalist), and Canon Keller (R.C.) unanimously agreed that Mr. Smith-Barry must be exempted from the general condemnation of Irish landlords. They said he was the "kindest of landlords," and that his tenants were "comfortable, respectable, and happy." They proclaimed his "generous and noble deeds," declaring that "there have been no cases of oppression or hardship, and the best and most kindly relations have existed." All these sayings are gathered from Nationalist papers, which would supply thousands of similar character, and up to the time of O'Brien's interference, none of an opposite sort. But, as Serjeant Buzfuz would have said, the serpent was on the trail, the viper was on the hearthstone, the sapper and miner was at work. Thanks to the patriot's influence, the Paradise was soon to become an Inferno.
A Mr. Ponsonby wanted his rents, or part of them. His tenants had lived rent-free for so long—some of them were seven years behind—that they naturally resented the proposed innovation. Mr. Smith-Barry and others came to Mr. Ponsonby's assistance, and, endeavouring to settle the thing by arbitration, proposed that the landlord should knock off £22,000 of arrears, should make reductions of 24 to 34 per cent. in the rents, and make the tenants absolute owners in 49 years. This was not good enough. Judge Gibson thought it "extravagantly generous," but the Tipperary folks resented Mr. Smith-Barry's connection with such a disgracefully tyrannical piece of business, and, at the instance of William O'Brien, determined to make him rue the day he imagined it. They sent a deputation to remonstrate, and Mr. Smith-Barry, while adhering to his opinion as to the liberality of the proposition, explained that he was only one of many, and that whatever he said or did would not change the course of events. The Tipperary folks required him to repudiate the arrangement, to turn his back on his friend and himself, and—here is the cream of the whole thing, this is deliciously Irish—they soberly, seriously, and officially proposed to Mr. Smith-Barry that in addition to the 15 per cent. abatement they had just received on their rent he should make a further remittance of 10 per cent. to enable them to assist the Ponsonby tenants in carrying on the war against their landlord, on whose side Mr. Smith-Barry was fighting. They said in effect, "You have given us 3s. in the pound, to which we had no claim; now we want 2s. more, to enable us to smash the landlord combination, of which you are the leader." This occurred in the proceedings of a business deputation, and not in a comic opera.
Mr. Smith-Barry failed to see the sweet reasonableness of this delightful proposition, and then the fun began.
O'Brien to the rescue, whirroo!
He rushed from Dublin, and told the Tipperary men to pay Smith-Barry no rent. If they paid a penny they were traitors, slaves, murderers, felons, brigands, and bosthoons. If they refused to pay they were patriots, heroes, angels, cherubim and seraphim, the whole country would worship them, they would powerfully assist the Ponsonby folks in the next county, they would be saviours of Ireland.
And besides all this they would keep the money in their pockets. But this was a mere detail.
The people took O'Brien's advice, withholding Mr. Smith-Barry's rent, keeping in their purses what was due to him, in order that somebody's tenants in