The Reminiscences of an Irish Land AgentHussey, Samuel Murray
History
The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent
Hussey, Samuel Murray
Country life -- Ireland; Hussey, Samuel Murray, 1824-; Ireland -- History -- 1837-1901
Kerry is divided into six Poor Law Unions, three of them--Kenmare,
Cahirciveen and Dingle--are very poor districts; but there was
practically not an outrage in them. Killarney, Tralee and Listowel are
rich by comparison, Tralee being the richest of the three, and
Castleisland the wealthiest portion of the district. There were nearly
as many outrages there as in the whole of the rest of the country, which
shows that poverty was not the cause.
I was in and out of Castleisland, but though I had a sheaf of
threatening letters, I never met with any insults or received a threat
to my face.
Only once did I overhear any hostile mutterings. This was when I was
driving out of Tralee, and my coachman stopped to give a message in the
dusk at a house on the outskirts of the town.
Suddenly two or three men came up, and one said:--
'Now's the time to settle old Hussey.'
Old Hussey--to use their accurate nomenclature--popped his head out of
the window, and also his right hand which held a most serviceable
revolver and invited them to come on.
They did not. In fact they scattered with a rapidity which proved they
had not imbibed enough whisky to affect their legs or give them courage.
This will show that my business--to collect what was due to the
landlords I represented--was not always agreeable work or always easy.
But my duty was to get in rents, and so I got them, whenever I could.
The tenants did not all pay direct, for many were far too frightened.
Quite a number, even of the Roman Catholics, used to send the money
through the Protestant clergy.
How they settled this in the confessional I do not know, possibly it was
a trifle they did not consider worth troubling the priest with.
Three tenants on Lord Kenmare's estate came into my office on one
occasion, and said they would like to pay their rent, but were afraid of
the Land League.
I treated their fears as arrant nonsense, but told them to come and
argue it out with me in my own room.
So soon as they could not be seen by any one they paid up.
Within a few days an armed party went to their houses and shot the three
in their legs.
One man's life was despaired of for some time, but finally they all
recovered.
This outrage was a rather late one, because the Land League latterly
decided to shoot objectionable characters only in the legs, because
though a fuss was made at the time, if a man was killed it was soon
forgotten afterwards, whereas a lame man was a lifelong testimony to
their power.
There is a man hobbling about Castleisland to this day, who was peppered
in this comparatively humanitarian way. I am quite sure he would say
such a comparison had proved odious.
Judge Barry very truly said that a thatched cabin on a mountain-side was
not much of a place of defence, and if the tenant was supposed to have
paid his rent, he would be told to run out with probably three men
standing at the door to shoot him. That was terrorism as inculcated by
the so-called friends of Ireland.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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