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From: "Joanne Mitchell" <>
Subject: Christmas on the Galtees 12
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 13:54:22 +1000


Hi All,

This is the last posting. Thanks for the appreciation shown by list
members. I hope everyone found "Christmas on the Galtees" as enlightening
as I did.

Cheers,

Jo Mitchell,
Geelong, Australia


William Sheedy farms 37 Irish acres, of mixed tillage and morass, upon which
the rent has been increased from £30 17s 6d to £39 12s. His is the seventh
generation of Sheedys that he dwelt and toiled there. Thirty acres of the
place are to this day in need of drainage. "But we are not able to lose a
farthing upon draining, unless whatever we can do ourselves when the food
and the rent are not troubling us." His mother, he said, an old woman of
86, was frightened into surrender by a notice to quit; "but ‘twas all the
same for her to go out then as to leave us pulling and dragging to pay a
rent we are not able for." As an illustration of what one of the most
comfortable farmers on the property can turn by husbandry, it is worth while
to examine his year’s operations. He sowed one acre of wheat; it would have
cost him £1 8s 4d at the market price. He had two horses employed for three
days in putting it down; and without allowing for the expenses of reaping
or threshing he sold the entire crop of £9. He was winnowing one acre of
oats when we called, and had not got two barrels out of the stack. The
potatoes could not have been worse if they had been grown in Liliputia. His
dairy stock consisted of nine cows (three of them strippers) and two calves.
He had made but 17 firkins of butter on ten cows during the season, at £3 to
£3 5s per three quarter firkin, had to buy £6 5s worth of hay for them and
had not his stock of fodder yet complete. Practical farmer, will be able
upon these figures to estimate for themselves the princely revenues
derivable form the primest lands in the valley.
>From Sheedy’s tidy farmhouse, however, to the hovel where his next
neighbour, the Widow English, lives to squeeze an all but trebled rent out
of her half-acre field, is once more to descend from a question of
trammelling industry to a question of bare sustenance. A goat and a few
hens are her whole livestock. Her one puddly field was divided between a
patch of meadow and a strip of potato ground too poor to be worth rooting,
even to her, and she paid 5s 9d for ten and a half stones of seed potatoes,
and a charitable neighbour made her a present of ten stone more. She was
already feeding on India meal, and only concerned for its continuance. She
got £2 from Denis Holy, a neighbour in better circumstances, for the hay,
upon which she had expended 9s in seed and 3s in labour "and it was not
worth that same only he took compassion on me." "Her cabin had not even a
hold for a window. "As there, I can’t afford a window nor less than a
window." Mrs English is asked to pay 30s where she paid 10s 6d before.
We were now well within the borders of Kiltankin, and were loaded at every
farm with details of the reclamation wrought by the tenants and their
fathers. I will not unnecessarily weary the reader by enumerating them.
Sufficient for the present to note, as I have done in every detail of this
revaluation, that where the tenant’s industry and frugality have been
greatest there the tax has been paid most heavily, and that reclaimed fields
and decent houses are invariably the passport to augmented burdens. A few
cases will illustrate my meaning. Pat Lyons has toiled all his life at
draining inveterate morasses. I saw one field that might have been in the
lap of the Golden Vein. The streams of water even yet coursing through its
drains bear testimony of what it was transformed from. Lyons says it cost
him £9 an acre to drain it. He had another field in process of reclamation,
and has altogether rescued seven acres from pestilential barronness. To
such a pitch of fertility has he reduced his fields that his ten cows
produced two firkins of butter a piece (though, of course, he last year
bought £20 worth of fodder to supplement the pasturage). En revanche his
rent was raised from £39 19s to £44 8s. Thomas Kearney, again, who has only
been 22 years on his farm, has in that time drained and fenced five or six
acres of what he himself calls "the wild mountbawn," and built at his own
expense a slated barn, which he could not finish today for £70. He drew
from 2,000 to 2,500 barrels of lime to fertilise the reclaimed places.
Every stone used in roofing the drains and in building the barn had to be
drawn miles away from the hills (for stones are in many parts of the valley
as grievous a desideratum as they are an incumbrance on the mountain).
Notwithstanding all this—possibly in consequence of it all—Mr Walker
increased his valuation from £20 15s 2d tp £26 11s 4d. Kearney refused
stoutly to accept the new tariff until a few weeks ago he was informed that
a process of ejectment was being filed for him and was advised that it would
be enforced. Upon last Saturday week he went to Mr Bridge, and told him of
what he had drained and built and fertilised. If all his farm were red
ground, he said he would not grumble at a fair rise; but great part of it
was still as wild as the day it was created. Mr Bridge did make a reduction
of 6s an acre upon the six wildest acres, reducing the increased rent to £25
1s 4d; but I saw the memorandum by which Kearney was charged with £12 18s
6d three years’ increase to March, 22nd, 1877 and £3 10s costs, including
(Kearney supposes) his proportion of the costs which Mr Bridge was adjudged
to pay the tenants on the dismissal of his first batch of ejectments.
Kearney was only able to pay an instalment of £10, but was not charged
interest on the remainder. He declared he would be perfectly satisfied with
the valuation of the Government valuator, or any arbitrator impartially
appointed, no matter what his award might be. When Mr Walker was inspecting
the land he pointed out its barrenness. "It would feed cattle right well,"
said Kearney; and he added, "I would have explained to him that the cattle
themselves would not have had a feed there only for me and the likes of me,
but I was in dread lest it would vex him more and more to raise the rent,
and I did not want to put him into too much bad humour." He has to house
and hand-feed his cattle from Michaelmas to May, and has almost every man on
the property. For the first time these 10 years he sowed half an acre of
oats for the seed of which he paid 26s and 14s for cutting it. So few of
the ears filled that he means to grind the crop for his own food. He would
not get 2s 6d a barrel for his oats, and his potatoes will not pay what they
cost. Of two cows which he sold during the year one fetched £3 18s and the
other £8 10s. We rode across his farm until the horses’ fetlocks were
impounded in quaking bog, and the dog which accompanied us set a snipe in
the very middle of what was by no means the worst field in the holding. For
miles beyond, a dismal moor, dotted with exhausted turbaries, and fields
overrun with tall bulrushes, bule-week, and that species of noxious
tree-edged grass which the natives call "fiong", extended under clouds of
exhalations to the horizon. A field next to us was choked with furxe and
rushes. Kearney told us he had drained and limed this to such effect that
when Mr Walker made his valuation not a rush grew on its surface. "I had n
o heart to touch it for the last three years, while the ejectment was
handing over me, and you see how it is now. I cut three loads of furze off
it this morning, the only crop0 it brought me this year. I promise you you
won’t catch me at reclamation any more until I see better before me."
Thomas Kelly is one of those doomed to ejectment. With a farm of 13a 3r 27p
and a family of six, his rent has been increased from £7 2s 1d to £10. His
dwelling is a squalid and rainbeaten one, "and only he does something in
coopering," said his wife, "we might as well fly long ago." The produce of
an acrea and a quarter of oats, which cost £2 14s in seed, and would have
cost an additional guinea in labour but for the loan of a neighbour’s horse
and plough, was sold to Mr Fitzgerald, Ballyporeen, for £2 8s. £2 worth of
special manure, beside a hundred loads of farm manure, expended on
three-quarters of an acre of potatoes; all but next year’s seed have
disappeared, and the family will subsist from this to August on a mixed diet
of oaten and Indian meal. Here again three cows produced two firkins a
piece. But Kelly’s condition is one of rank luxury compared with that of
his sub-tenant, the Widow Quinn, who has also been served with an ejectment.
Words of mine cannot picture the desolation and hideous misery of the abode
of this wretched old woman, deaf, palsied, and trembling on the brink of the
grave. If she does not find her grave under the ruins of her hut it will
not be the fault of the state of society which consigns human beings to such
a shelter. How a storm can pass it by without laying it in ruins at a
breath only a merciful Providence may tell. The weight of the three sides
of it which are of unmortared stone is crushing and bulging the fourth side,
which is of mud, and a frail wooden stake along keeps the leaning mass of
mud from a collapse. A midnight gloom lay on all within, one unglazed hole
in the wall kept the atmosphere from absolute asphyxin, but the dazed old
creature who breathed it might as well lived in a tomb. There was a
spinning-wheel which she had borrowed, a faint glimmer of fire, into which a
stream of rain-water was working its way; for the rest, stones, rags, and a
plate of stirabout.

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