The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent Part 40

John M'elligott.

Henry Gentleman.'

As for those really concerned, people tell me that the three implicated in the dynamite business are all dead in America, and if the information is accurate no local person was connected with the explosion, though the miscreants were, of course, housed in the immediate vicinity.

There was one delicious incident.

The local branch of the Land League at Castleisland refused to pay any reward to the dynamiters because we had not been killed, and the leading miscreant actually fired at the treasurer. Eventually the pa.s.sages to America of all the triumvirate were paid, and they thought it discreet to quit the country, cursing their own stingy executive even more deeply than they blasphemed against the Law and execrated me.

A man from the neighbourhood subsequently wrote to me from London that he could tell me who perpetrated the Edenburn outrage.

I told him to call on me at the Union Club, of which I was then a member, and informed him--his name was...o...b..ien--I would arrange with the Home Office, in the event of his information being valuable, that he should get a reward.

He replied that his life was in danger in London from another Fenian.

I went to the Home Office and saw Mr. Jenkinson on the subject. He asked me to send O'Brien down to him and he would settle matters, adding that he had reason for believing that the story of threats from another scoundrel was true.

I saw O'Brien and told him to call on Mr. Jenkinson.

He answered that he would go, but he never did, and Mr. Jenkinson subsequently told me that the Land League scented he was going to prove a troublesome informer, so they practically outbid the Government by paying O'Brien a large sum, which was handed to him on the steamer as it was starting for America.

From that time, until I have been recalling the incidents of the explosion for this book, I have never given a thought to the affair and not mentioned it half a dozen times in the twenty years that have elapsed.

CHAPTER XXI

MORE ATROCITIES AND LAND CRIMES

I brought my family back to Kerry in the following summer, and after I had rebuilt Edenburn I lived there until I gave it to my elder son, who has it to this day and resides there in peace.

Matters were very different to that state of idyllic simplicity in the critical times on which I am still dwelling.

One night, while in London, I was at the House of Commons, and the London correspondent of the _Freeman_, being presumably extremely short of what he would term 'copy,' he proceeded to make observations about me after this fas.h.i.+on:--

'Over here Mr. Hussey is something of a fish out of water. It would be hazardous to say that if he was to begin his career as an agent again he would eschew the system that has made him famous, but his present frame of mind is unquestionably one of doubt as to whether, after all, the game was worth the candle.'

That young man will go far as a writer of fiction.

I received, among more pleasant welcomes on my return to my native land, the following delightful blast of vituperation from the _Irish Citizen_, and beg to tender the unknown author my profound thanks for the diversion his ink-slinging afforded me:--

'Here is something about a man who ought to have been murdered any day since 1879--indeed we don't know that he should have been let live even up to that date, and as for his family, their translation to the upper regions by means of a simple charge of dynamite, which n.o.body of any sense or importance would even think of condemning, has been most unaccountably deferred to the present year. This man is Mr. S.M. Hussey, the miasma of whose breath, according to a well-informed murder organ in Dublin, poisons one-half of the kingdom of Kerry. Let any man read the speeches delivered in Upper Sackville Street, and the articles in _United Ireland_ against Mr. Hussey, and he must ask why the fiend incarnate has not been murdered long since. The infamy of persistently turning hatred on a man like Mr. Hussey, and then escaping the consequences of having thereby murdered him, has no parallel in any country in the world. Inciting to murder is practically reduced to a science in Ireland. That Mr. Hussey has not been murdered years ago is not the fault of the scientist, but the watchfulness of the police.'

My experience while in England had been that few people I met really appreciated what boycotting was like, so how are my readers of twenty years afterwards to do so? Yet when I went back to Ireland, it seemed to me even more cruel than when I had grown comparatively accustomed by sheer proximity to it.

Mr. Parnell had himself given the order in a public speech:--

'Shun the man who bids for a farm from which a tenant has been evicted, shun him in the street, in the shop, in the marketplace, even in the place of wors.h.i.+p, as if he were a leper of old.'

This was done with the thoroughness which characterises Irishmen when back-sliding into unimaginable cruelties. Should a boycotted man enter chapel, the whole congregation rose as with one accord and left him alone in the building. Considering the sensitive and pious disposition of the average Irishman, such ostracism was even more poignant than it would be to an Englishman.

Only two families in Kerry, possibly in Munster, at Christmas 1885, had the courage to resist the National League police, commonly called moonlighters. These two were the Curtins and the Doyles. The Curtins had to be under constant police protection, were insulted wherever they went, and their murdered father was openly called 'the murderer.' As for the Doyles, the Board of Guardians was urged to hara.s.s his unfortunate children, who were both deaf and dumb.

The same Board of Guardians was most lavish in its relief to any man evicted for declining to pay his rent. In one case they gave a man fifteen s.h.i.+llings a week--or treble the ordinary out-of-door relief--for over six years.

Sir James Stephen, a man of acute discriminations, who has done more justice to the Irish problem than any one else, wrote:--

'The great difficulty the Land League and the National League have had to contend with is that of hindering the neighbouring farmers, peasants, and labourers from frustrating the strike against rent by taking up vacant farms, however they came to be vacant. Boycotting never succeeded unless crime was at its back. The Crimes Act cut the ground from under the feet of the boycotters, not so much by its direct prohibitions of the practice as by making it unsafe to commit outrages in enforcing the law of the League. The Land League and the National League were nothing else but screens for secret societies whose work was to enforce the League decrees by outrage and murder.'

Whenever the 'History of Modern Ireland' comes to be written, that glowing outburst of truth ought to be quoted.

There were some evictions carried out at Farranfore on the estate of Lord Kenmare, by the sub-sheriff, Mr. Harnett, and a force of military and police numbering about one hundred and thirty.

During the eviction of one Daly, horns were blown and the chapel bell set ringing. These appeals drew about three thousand people to the place, who groaned and threw some stones, besides growing so menacing that the Riot Act had to be read, upon which the whole crowd moved off.

This brought a characteristic effusion from _United Ireland_:--

'We remember the time when Kerry was a county as quiet as the grave, when its member, Henry A. Herbert, in the debate on the Westminster Act of 1871, was able to rise in his place and boast that in purely Celtic counties like his there was no crime, and that agrarian outrages was confined to districts infused with English blood, like Meath and Tipperary. What has changed it? Princ.i.p.ally the malpractices of a couple of agents ruling over half its area, whose bloated rentals grow swollen under their hands with the sweat of dumb and hopeless possessors.'

Whatever else he possessed, that writer had not one vestige of truth with which to cover the indecency of his misrepresentations.

He did not mention that Mr. Matthew Harris, a Member for Galway, had publicly observed that if the tenant farmers of Ireland shot down landlords as partridges are shot in the month of September, he would never say a word against them.

It is a fact that the convulsion of horror at the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish alone prevented an organised campaign for the 'removal' of Irish landlords on a systematic and wholesale scale.

By the way, according to his son, it was quite by chance that Professor Mahaffy--that ill.u.s.trious ornament of Trinity College--was not also murdered. He had intended to walk over with poor Mr. Burke after the entry of the Viceroy and Chief Secretary, but he was detained by an undergraduate and so found it too late to catch the doomed victim before he started. Had he walked with them, it is questionable if the murderers would have attacked three men: on the other hand, he might, of course, have been added to the slain.

There was a meeting of Lord Kenmare's and Mr. Herbert of Muckross's tenants at Killarney addressed by Mr. Sheehan, M.P., who advised them, as the landlords refused 70 per cent, only to offer 50 per cent., and nothing at all in March (1887), as by that time the new Irish Parliament would have allotted the land free to the present holders, without any compensation to the landlords.

Despite the efforts of traitors on both sides of the Channel, that Irish Parliament has not yet been summoned.

The parish priest, Mr. Sheehy, stopped the Limerick hunting, and so took 24,000 a year out of the pockets of the very poor. That man did more harm than the landlords, who alone gave the poor work, and there is no doubt that many of the worst crimes were instigated and indirectly suggested from the altar.

At this point I want to interpose with one word to the reader to beg him not to regard this as either a connected narrative of crime, much less a regular essay with proper deductions--the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs to the joint--but only a series of observations as I recall events which impressed me, and which I think may come home with some force to a happier generation that knew neither Parnellism nor crime. To write a consecutive and connected history of these atrocities would be to compile a volume of horrors. I prefer to give a few recollections of outrages, and to let the direct simplicity of these terrible reminiscences impress those who have bowels of compa.s.sion.

A gentleman named Nield was killed in Mayo, simply because he was mistaken for my son Maurice. This was in broad daylight, in the town of Charlestown. It was raining hard at the time--a thing so common in Ireland that no one mentions it any more than they do the fact of the daily paper appearing each morning--and the unfortunate victim had an umbrella up, so the mob could not see his face. They shouted, 'Here's Hussey,' and tried to pull him off the car, but the parish priest stopped this. However, before he could reduce the villains to the fear of the Church, which does affect them more than the fear of the Law, they gave poor Nield a blow on the head, and, though he lived for six months, he never recovered.

Another time, when returning to his house in Mayo from Ballyhaunis, on a dark night, my son Maurice found a wall built, about eighteen inches high, across the road, for the express purpose of upsetting him. It was only by the grace of G.o.d--as they say in Kerry--and his own careful driving, that he was preserved.

In those same Land League times, my son was a prominent gentleman rider.

At Abbeyfeale races he rode in a green jacket and won the race, which produced a lot of enthusiasm, the crowd not knowing who it was sporting the popular colour. They only heard it was my son after he had left the course, whereupon a mob rushed to the station, and the police had to stand four deep outside the carriage window to protect him, to say nothing of an extra guard at the station gates.

The cordiality of my fellow-countrymen also provided me with another disturbed night at Aghadoe, which I had leased from Lord Headley.

To quiet the apprehensions of my family, and also to relieve the mind of the D.I. from anxiety about my tough old self, there were always five police in the house, and two on sentry duty all night.

On this particular date, about two o'clock in the morning, we were aroused by hearing shots fired in the wood below the house, the plan of the miscreants being to draw the police away from the house. As this did not succeed, a second party began a counter demonstration in another quarter. The theory is that a third party wanted to approach the house from the back in the temporary absence of the constabulary, and disseminate the house, its contents, and the inhabitants into the air and the immediate vicinity by the gentle and persuasive influence of dynamite.