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
'I need not dwell upon the most aggravated instance of all which this
calendar of crime presents--one that is quite recent, and within the
memory of you all--the murder of Cornelius Murphy, a humble man, but one
enjoying apparently the confidence and respect of all his neighbours,
who had done no harm to any person, who was not conscious of any
offence, whose house was invaded at a still early hour of the evening,
and before the daylight had departed, by a band of men that is shown to
have traversed a considerable distance of country, giving opportunities
of recognition to many, and with hardly the pretext of an offence on his
part, and in reality with the object of private plunder or private
hostility--one of those motives that always take advantage of a state of
disturbance in order to gratify private ends--slain in his own house in
the presence of his own family. Certain persons, it would appear, have
been arrested on a charge of complicity with this crime, and it may be
that this cruel and wicked crime may be the means of discovering other
crimes, and of leading in the end to the detection, if not to the
conviction, of persons who have been connected in them, and those who
rest in the supposed confidence of impunity may find the spell broken,
may find the light of information to reach them, and may find in the end
that the law will be able to prevail; because it must be in the
experience of many of you that it is unhappily in the power of a few
persons who engage in this system of nightly invasion of houses to
multiply themselves, apparently by means of terror and intimidation,
although at the same time there can be no doubt that, on account of
interval of distances, and for many such reasons, there must be many
such combinations in this country, acting entirely independent of each
other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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