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
'No person can be at a loss to understand the misery and suffering that
arises from a state of crime; but perhaps all persons in the community
do not equally understand one form of consequence to material prosperity
that results from it. I have before me a document that contains most
terribly significant evidence of mischief, alike to all classes of the
community, that results from crime and a state of social disturbance. I
have a return of malicious injuries which form the subject of
presentment at these Assizes, in number, I understand, exceeding all
former precedent. There are no less than eighty-six presentments,
representing all forms of wicked outrage upon property, a tempest--I
might say without exaggeration, a tempest--of violence and crime that
has swept over a considerable portion of this county. The claims amount
to L2700, with the result that the Grand Jury had presented upon a
certain part of this county L1250, exercising apparently the greatest
care and discrimination in reducing the amount of the claims, and this
L1250 was not put upon the whole county, but on certain parts of the
county, and the amount at the very least aggravated in a most serious
degree the weight of taxation that falls upon the ratepayers of the
County Kerry, deepening the difficulties that all classes alike must
experience from the depression of the times, and from the other burdens
they have to meet in providing against the demands that are made upon
them.
'But, of course, you can easily understand that these things do not at
all give you any idea of other forms of material injury that arise from
crime and disturbance, in the loss of employment and the discouragement
of capital, the injury to trade, and the multiplied consequences of all
kinds detrimental to the community that arise from insecurity to
personal property and life. And to all those evils we have to add
another, and perhaps the worst of all--that of which you are all
conscious, of which experience and observation reaches you every day in
all the forms of social life--a system of unseen terrorism, a system of
terror and tyranny that the well-disposed class of the community ought
to detest and abhor, and in reference to which, on all sides, I have
heard, in this county and other counties, one universal expression of
desire--that some means should be found to put an end to it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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