Of Mr. Burke, the evicted tenant here, Mr. Crawford, the Protestant clergyman at Portumna, told me that he was abundantly able to pay his rent.  The whole debt for which Burke was evicted was L115; and Mr. Crawford said he had himself offered Burke L300 for the holding.  Burke would have gladly taken this, but “the League wouldn’t let him.”  When his right was put up for sale at Galway for L5, he did not dare to buy it in, and he is now living with his wife and children on the League funds.  Lord Clanricarde’s agent offered to take him back and restore his right if he would pay what he owed; but he dared not accept.  This farm comprises over one hundred and ten English acres, which Burke held at a rent—­fixed by the Land Court—­of L77, the valuation for taxes being L83.

To call the eviction of such a tenant in such circumstances from such a holding a “sentence of death,” is making ducks and drakes of the English language.  Mr. Crawford’s opinion, founded upon a thorough personal knowledge of the region, is that there is no exceptional distress in this part of Ireland, and that over-renting has nothing to do with such distress as does exist here.  The case of a man named Egan, one of the “victims” of the Woodford evictions of 1886, certainly bears out this view of the matter.  Egan, who was a tenant, not at all of Lord Clanricarde, but of a certain Mrs. Lewis, had occupied for twenty years a holding of about sixteen Irish acres, or more than twenty English acres.  This he held at a yearly rental of L8, 15s., being 9d. over the valuation.

In August 1886 he was evicted for refusing to pay one year’s rent then due.  At that time the crops standing on the land were valued by him at L60, 13s.  He also owned six beasts.  In other words, this man, when he was called upon to pay a debt of L8, 15s. had in his own possession, beside the valuable tenant-right of his holding, more than a hundred pounds sterling of merchantable assets.  He refused to pay, and he was evicted.

This was in August 1886.  But such are the ideas now current in Ireland as to the relations of landlord and tenant, that immediately after his eviction Egan sent his daughter to gather some cabbages off the farm as if nothing had happened.  The Emergency men in charge actually objected, and sent the damsel away.  Thereupon Egan, on the 6th of September, served a legal notice on Mrs. Lewis, his landlady, requiring her either to let him take all the crops on the farm, or to pay him their value, estimated by him, as I have said, at L60, 13s.  Two days after this, on the 8th of September, more than a hundred men came to the place by night and removed the greater portion of the crops.  Not wishing a return of these visitors, Mrs. Lewis, on the 16th of September, sent word to Egan to come and take away what was left of the crops; one of the horses employed in the nocturnal harvest of September 8th having been seized by the police and identified as belonging to Egan.  Egan did not respond; but in July 1887 he brought an action against his landlady to recover L100 sterling for her “detention of his goods,” and her “conversion of the same to her own use “!