The term “congested districts” is used to describe those wild and rocky sections on the west coast of Ireland where fertile land is scarce and insufficient to support the population, who are compelled to eke out a miserable living by fishing and other employment. The population is not “congested” as we understand that word, but it is too numerous to be supported on that kind of soil, and the government is trying to remove a sufficient number of families to other sections of Ireland, where fertile farms can be found for them. In the newspapers and public documents these families are usually referred to as “congests.”

As one might naturally infer, the advent of parties of “congests” into localities where they do not belong is not welcomed by the local residents. On the contrary, there is a bitter and determined resistance from that class known as the “landless,” which is composed of the sons of farmers who are ambitious to have farms and homes of their own and cannot obtain them either because there are none to be bought or they, unfortunately, lack the price. Instead of dividing up the big estates in such localities among the “landless,” who consider themselves entitled to them because they are natives of the community and their families have lived there for generations and their ancestors once owned them, the government commissioners are giving preference to “congests.”

To ignore the claims of the “landless” means a fierce fight over every attempt at migration. The cattle-driving you read of in the newspapers is the latest method of persuading the landlords to sell, and the “landless” class—the young farmers who want farms of their own—is responsible for these outrages. Anyone who remembers the terrible passions which have been aroused over the land question in Ireland can imagine what may happen when “congests” from other portions of the island are forcibly brought into a community and placed upon farms which the former owners have been compelled to sell to the government in order that these aliens may have homes and be able to earn a living.

What is called the Congested Districts Board was created in 1891 to improve conditions on the west coast, where the standard of living is at the lowest point and the people are in a chronic state of famine because of the inferior quality of the soil. This district consists of the province of Connaught, the counties of Donegal, Kerry, and Clare, and the districts of Bantry, Castletown, Schull, and Skibbereen in the County of Cork. The land in those localities is very poor and is estimated at an average of eighty cents an acre, while farm lands in the rest of Ireland have an average value of $3.12 an acre. The majority of the people live on small plots, where they manage to raise a few potatoes and cabbages and keep a few cows, goats, pigs, and sheep of worn-out breeds, which they drive wherever they can find pasturage. Most of them try to earn a little more money by going to other parts of the kingdom to work as laborers for a portion of the year or by weaving homespun, fishing, gathering seaweed, and other home industries.

The act empowers the board to aid migration to other parts of Ireland, to assist in the improvement of live stock and the breeding of horses, cattle, sheep, donkeys, and swine, to encourage poultry farms, bee-keeping, basket-making, lace-making, knitting, and the manufacture of carpets, rugs, and other things that can be made at home, and to encourage the fishing industry by constructing piers and harbors and furnishing boats and gear.

Mr. James Bryce, British Ambassador to Washington, is the author of the act of parliament which authorized a loan of $22,500,000 to build laborers’ cottages in Ireland, and under it, according to the latest official returns, 22,500 comfortable new homes have been provided in different parts of the island, and are now occupied by families of farm laborers and other workingmen in the rural districts. Each cottage has from an acre to an acre and one-half of land for a garden. Some of them have barns and other outhouses. They are built of stone and brick of the most substantial character, with roofs of slate or tiles. Most of them have four rooms, two rooms upstairs and two downstairs, with large windows furnishing plenty of light and plenty of ventilation. The cost varies from $750 to $1,000 for a cottage, and is paid by the government with funds derived from the loan mentioned. The tenants pay an average rental of £4 17s. 6d. a year, which is equivalent to about twenty-four dollars in American money or two dollars per month, which covers the interest upon the cost of the cottage, and an installment which will cancel the indebtedness at the end of sixty-eight years. If the tenant owner for whom the cottage is built desires to pay for the property and get a fee simple, he is at liberty to do so at any time, but I did not hear of any such case. Most of the tenants are willing to let their indebtedness run along indefinitely. They can sell, lease, or dispose of the property in any way at any time. The incumbrance goes with the property and not with the man, and is assumed by the purchaser.

It is difficult to overestimate the vast amount of good this movement has accomplished. It is gradually changing the standard of life among the laboring classes throughout Ireland. It has not only furnished comfortable and decent homes for more than twenty-three thousand families, who have been living in miserable, filthy cabins for generations, but it has done much to improve their health. It will strengthen the physical constitutions of the coming generations by placing them in sanitary homes and clean surroundings.

Mr. John Redmond, in a speech in the House of Commons, said that “the agricultural laborers of Ireland had been living under conditions which were absolutely fatal to health and the habits of cleanliness, and which, in almost any other country in the world, would have proved fatal to religion and morality as well. But the Irish agricultural laborers are a remarkable race of men, highly intelligent, keen and brave, patriotic, and self-sacrificing in their patriotism. They have preserved through poverty and squalor a deep religious, spiritual feeling, and the highest possible standard of morality.”

The Congested Districts Board devotes its attention entirely to the people living in the bleak mountain lands on the west coast of Ireland, and its agencies are established at different points from the extreme south to the extreme north of the island. The poverty, the privation, the suffering, are chiefly found within a few miles from the coast, where the territory is divided into vast estates of almost worthless land, and where it is very difficult for any person to earn a living. The same conditions have existed for ages. The west coast of Ireland has never been prosperous, the soil has never been fertile, the people have never had any more comforts than they have to-day, but they have continued to live there, century after century, clinging to the rocks and suffering from the weather and the lack of food, which has been their inheritance, refusing to leave their wretched hovels for a more favorable climate and better opportunities of making a living.

It cannot be said that they remain there in ignorance, because thirty thousand or forty thousand men from the congested districts leave their cabins, their wives, and their families for several months every year and go to England and Scotland to supply the demand for labor in those countries. The migratory labor system has been going on for generations, and many of the men have gone to the same jobs generation after generation, spending half their time earning good wages in England and the other half looking after their little gardens and cattle and goats in Connaught Province, in Clare, Kerry, Galway, Sligo, and Donegal counties. It is one of the strangest phenomena in human life that they should cling as they do to their desolate, comfortless, filthy stone huts in these bleak mountains; but, be it ever so humble, be it ever so comfortless, there is no place like home.One of the functions of the Congested Districts Board is to remove as many as possible of these families to localities where they can make a living with less labor and find more of the comforts and happiness of life; but the most pitiful and difficult part of its task is to persuade them to go. Mr. O’Connor, the solicitor of the board, told me of a wizen-faced old peasant who occupied a leaky stone hut on the mountain side, without the slightest comfort within or attraction without. He had a few acres of sterile soil, on which, with the greatest difficulty, he was able to produce enough cabbages and potatoes to keep his family from starvation, and a small herd of goats, lean and gaunt, that were trying to find sustenance in the heather and the mosses on the rocks; and yet, even in this condition, the old man stubbornly refused to move. No inducement could persuade him to abandon the worthless, filthy habitation, because it was his home. With the pride of a prince he defied the inspectors of the board, charging them with some malicious intent of depriving him of property that had been the home of his family, he declared, for nine hundred years. And nothing could induce him to leave it for a comfortable cottage and a productive farm fifty miles in the interior.

They told me, too, of a girl about eighteen years old, who, being injured by an automobile, was picked up and carried to the nearest hospital, which happened to be twenty miles or more from the place where she lived and the scene of the accident. She was being tenderly cared for in a neat, sunshiny ward, in a comfortable bed, with sheets and pillow cases of linen, with a nurse to attend her and every delicacy that could be furnished to eat, and yet she moaned and cried and begged to be taken home. Finally the Americans who had been in the automobile at the time of the accident, and had left a deposit of money to pay for every comfort and surgical attention that the girl could possibly need, consented to her removal, because the doctor said she was fretting herself into a fever. So they brought the automobile to the hospital, placed her carefully in a bed of pillows in the tonneau, and carried her back into the mountains to her “home,” a one-room cabin of the most repulsive and wretched sort, which, as my friend told me, he wouldn’t have kept his horse in. The walls were of rude stone piled one on another without mortar and the roof was made of straw. There was no floor but the earth, no furniture but a hard wooden bench, a table, and a three-legged stool. There was no window, and the only light that there was came through the door, which opened into a loathsome barnyard, where the filth was ankle deep and the stench almost insufferable. And yet when they laid the poor creature on the earthen floor she gave a long sigh of relief and satisfaction and thanked them for bringing her “home.” It is true the world over that people prize things that are worthless if they happen to be all they possess. The less we have the more valuable it becomes; the more we have the less we value it. This trait may be found in the mountains of Switzerland, in Lapland, in Norway, and other countries where people enjoy the least blessings and comforts and where living is a constant struggle.

The Congested Districts Board consists of Sir Antony MacDonnell, under secretary for Ireland, who has recently been elevated to the peerage as Lord MacDonnell of Swineford; Sir Horace Plunkett, a well known agriculturalist; Rev. Dennis O’Hara, a Catholic priest of County Clare; Henry Dorran, the chief inspector and executive officer in actual charge of the work, and Mr. O’Connor, the solicitor in charge of the office work. The board is constituted by an act of parliament and has a large staff of agents and officials in the field.

The work of the board may be classified as follows:

1. The purchase and division of estates into small farms and placing thereon families who are unable to earn a decent living in their present surroundings.

2. The enlargement of holdings by the purchase of neighboring property for those who cannot be moved.

3. The construction of decent and comfortable cottages for the poor, in the place of the wretched cabins they now occupy, and the repair of their present homes as far as possible.

4. The construction of public works, road building, the draining of swampy lands, and other undertakings that will furnish work and wages to the poor.

5. Aiding fishermen along the coast by furnishing boats and equipment and by securing them a market.

6. Instruction of the women in industries that can be carried on in the home, such as weaving, lace-making, and knitting.

7. Schools of housewifery for the training of mountain peasant girls for domestic service.

8. Loans of money to farmers to purchase cattle, sheep, and other means of self-support.

9. General improvement and repair of homes and the relief of individual distress through parish committees.

In 1907 the board purchased 121,213 acres for the sum of £161,684, which it is now cutting up into small farms and moving to them families which are unable to make a living in the mountain districts. Thus far 544 families have been moved in this way and placed in comfortable homes at an average cost of $435 per family, not including the price of the land; 1,372 dwelling-houses have been erected, and 1,266 buildings on these and other farms already occupied have been erected at the expense of the board. In addition to furnishing a farm and a cottage the board gives its protÉgÉs, wherever it is necessary, cows, goats, pigs, and chickens. All this is paid for by money advanced from the public treasury, which is reimbursed by the beneficiary at the rate of 3½ per cent a year. Of this 2¾ per cent is interest upon the investment, and three-fourths of one per cent annually goes into a sinking fund to redeem at maturity the bonds issued to furnish the money. The average annual payment by the families which have thus been removed is £17 10s. or $87.50 in our money. The people who have been benefited can sell their new homes or dispose of them by inheritance so long as the interest is paid promptly, but they cannot divide them.I have before me a statement showing each transaction, and find that the following figures represent the number of acres given:

These figures illustrate the size of the farms that are being provided, and the acreage varies according to the fertility of the land. The board intends to give each of its protÉgÉs what is called “an economic holding”; that is, sufficient land to support his family and produce a surplus sufficient to enable him to pay his interest and lay by a little something for a rainy day.

During 1908 it has moved eighty families from County Galway to County Roscommon and placed them all upon fertile farms, in comfortable new cottages of four rooms each, at an average cost of one thousand dollars, not including the price of the land. In addition to this most of the families have been granted loans varying from twenty-five to sixty dollars as working capital, to provide tools, implements, necessary furniture, and other articles.

In addition to this general work in more than eight hundred parishes in counties Kerry, Clare, Galway, Mayo, Donegal, and Sligo, local committees have been appointed consisting of the parish priest, the Church of Ireland rector, the parish doctor, and one of the magistrates, who have immediate supervision over local conditions and make recommendations for the application of small sums of money for the improvement of the comforts and health of the people. These local committees are authorized to repair and improve the homes of farmers, fishermen, and other workingmen where it can be done economically, and to erect new homes for them whenever it is necessary, upon certain conditions, which involve a radical change in the habits of most of the Irish peasants. In order to secure benefits of this kind the family is required to remove the dunghill from its usual place in front of the door, to clean up all around the cabin and keep the place in order, to keep the pig, the cattle, and the chickens out of the house, and to keep the interior in a state of sanitary cleanliness. Materials are furnished to cottagers who are willing to make these improvements for themselves.

It is astonishing that so many peasants will fight such improvements and often resist attempts that are made to clean up their places and make them more comfortable. The dunghill has always been in front of the door and the offal and garbage from the house have been dumped upon it for generations. They are accustomed to the sickening stench and, as one of the inspectors told me, they find it difficult to get along without it. “They wouldn’t be happy unless there was a bad smell,” he remarked. But in most cases the conditions are cheerfully accepted and the improvements appreciated. Last year 1,193 cottages were improved in this manner at a cost of £31,812.

During the greater part of the year more than three thousand men are employed by the Congested Districts Board in the counties along the Atlantic coast, roadmaking, draining lands, fencing, building houses, bridges, and other improvements, and in planting larches and other trees that grow in this climate. This has not only kept them busy at good wages, but has made important permanent improvements. The total area of land drained last year was 12,089 acres at a cost of £11,391.

The amount of money spent on roads, bridges, piers, docks, and other public works during the year was £7,102.

One of the most interesting features of the work is the fisheries. There is an abundance of fish all along the coast and there is always a demand for them in the London market, either fresh or cured, but the peasants until recently have had no boats or nets and were unable to raise the money to provide them. The villages on the shores of the coves and bays had no landing places for boats, no facilities for storing or curing fish, and all of these things the board is now trying to provide. It has several methods of doing so. Wherever necessary docks have been constructed with warehouses, packing-houses, and cooper shops, and the board has agencies for furnishing salt, ice, and other necessaries for the fishing business at cost prices. Docks have been built at a dozen places costing from $500 to $15,000, which are free to the public and bring no return.

The board will furnish boats, nets, and the rest of an outfit to a fisherman, to be paid for in five annual installments, and it has gone into partnership with the fishermen, in three hundred cases furnishing the outfit at an average cost of £350 and dividing the proceeds into nine shares. Six of these shares go to the crew and three to the government to pay the interest on the investment and create a sinking fund. When that fund has reached the total of the investment, the entire property is handed over to the crew. Nearly four hundred thousand dollars is invested in such partnerships by the government. The Congested Districts Board finds the market and supervises the sale of the fish. It also furnishes experts to instruct fishermen in the business and show them how to make their own barrels.

In other chapters I have told you about the schools for lace-making and for training the peasant girls for house servants. There are altogether eighteen schools for servants and forty-three schools for lace-making and embroidery, besides crochet work, knitting, and weaving. I observe in the annual report of the board concerning the “domestic training schools” this sentence: “The pupils can very easily find situations in this country as domestic servants, and it is a mistake to suppose that the greater portion of them go to America after the course of training.”

The following table shows the amounts of money expended in this benevolent work by the Congested Districts Board since its organization in 1891 up to 1907:

This expenditure is equivalent to $13,478,600 in American money.

Denis Johnston, assistant secretary of the United Irish League, gave me several photographs which illustrate in a striking manner what is being done for the improvement of the poor peasants in the west of Ireland. He shows with the accuracy of the camera the appearance of the cabins in which human beings have lived for generations, and in one case from which they were driven out because they were too poor to pay the rent even for such a hovel as appears in the picture. On the other hand, he photographs the neat and comfortable cottage of artificial stone with slate roof which has been recently erected in its place by the Congested Districts Board. It is now the home of the same family that formerly lived in the miserable shack which was occupied by the fathers and grandfathers for several generations before them.

These are not exceptional or isolated cases. They are types of habitations that once existed and in a large measure still exist on the large estates in the west of Ireland, and the second photograph shows the improvements that are being made as rapidly as the funds will permit. I have seen similar cabins, for many of them still exist, and are still occupied as homes by human beings. In some of them large families are crowded, six, eight, and often ten people, in a single room. I was told by a friend of one wretched, loathsome hovel that he found in County Kerry where nineteen human creatures were living. These photographs of Mr. Johnston show what has been and is being accomplished and illustrate the methods and purposes of the Congested Districts Board.“All this has been done by the pressure brought upon the government by the Irish parliamentary party,” said Mr. Johnston; “and its members are entitled to the credit of what has been accomplished. Every concession that has been made, every reform that has been ordered, every dollar that has been voted for those improvements, has been obtained by threatening revolution, and the government has been compelled to yield.

“In 1880 it was quite within the power of the landlords of Ireland to evict tenants from their holdings by merely serving them with a notice to quit. The Irish parliamentary party, with the organized forces of the Irish race behind them, in 1881 secured the passage of the Land Act of that year, which reduced the rents by nearly $10,000,000. Under this measure the tenant farmers of Ireland were first vested with a right in their farms. They had the power to enter a land court constituted under that act for the purpose of having fair and reasonable rents fixed upon the property they occupied at intervals of fifteen years, and they were practically secured from the interference of the landlords or their agents so long as such rents which were called ‘judicial rents,’ were paid.

“In the following year, 1882, the Arrears of Rent Act was secured by the Irish parliamentary party under the leadership of Parnell, and that measure wiped off the slate in some cases ten years of unpaid rents and in others less. The act certainly benefited the people of Ireland to the extent of at least $15,000,000. Thus the rent question was placed upon a fair judicial basis and extortion was impossible as long as the tenant could appeal to a tribunal constituted for that very purpose against unfair and unjust claims by his landlord. What are known as ‘judicial rents’—that is, rents fixed by such courts and based upon the quality, the value, and the productive capacity of the land—have since prevailed very generally throughout Ireland, and they are now being used as the basis for calculating the selling price of the farms that are being purchased by the tenants on the big estates under the Land Act of 1903.

“In 1883 was passed what is known as the Act for the Building of Cottages for the Laborers of Ireland. The benefits of that measure can never be calculated. Under its authority nearly twenty-five thousand comfortable and neat cottages have been built for laborers throughout the whole country, and the miserable habitations, hovels of stone with leaky straw roofs, in which thousands of honest, hard-working peasants have been compelled to live, have been torn down and replaced with such buildings as you see in the picture, with walls of cement and roofs of slate. In addition to the improvement in their habitations, an acre of land is given with each cottage on which it is possible for the laborer to raise vegetables sufficient for his household. No estimate in money can possibly be made of the benefits that the people of Ireland have enjoyed from that act.

“In 1885 the Irish party secured the passage of the first Land Purchase Act and followed it up by winning the acts of 1888 and 1891, which went farther and still farther and benefited the country to the amount of at least one hundred and forty millions of dollars.

“Next came the Act for the Establishment of the Congested Districts Board,” continued Mr. Johnston, “expressly to deal with what are known as the congested areas of Ireland. These districts are not thickly settled, like Belgium, as one might have comparatively few population, but altogether more than the land will support. These are mountain districts along the rocky shores of the Atlantic Ocean where it is possible to raise a few cattle and goats that can find pasture in the narrow little valleys and up the mountain sides, but where there is seldom enough arable soil in a single patch to support an ordinary family. For these reasons it is difficult for the most industrious men to make a living there, and the inhabitants are the poorest, the most ill-nourished, and the most miserable in all the land.

“The Congested Districts Board was instructed to buy all the lands it found necessary in such places, moving some of the inhabitants to other sections of Ireland, where they would be able to make a living, and distributing the lands among those that remained in allotments sufficiently large to enable them to live. In deserving cases the board is authorized to build comfortable houses to replace the wretched hovels, to restock the farms, to purchase implements where they are needed, to provide seed, and do whatever is necessary to give the family a fair start and enable them to enjoy the results of their labors. The board is also empowered to build new houses upon the locations selected for the families which are moved, and has done so in many cases. You will see in these photographs the character of the cabins that were formerly occupied by the poor people in the congested districts and the character of those which have been built to replace them, by the board.”

Mr. Johnston showed me an object lesson in the form of a photograph of a cottage in County Meath for which a rental of fifteen dollars a year has been paid by the tenant for many years. It has a single room, a mud floor, a thatched roof of straw, and is entirely without the simplest conveniences or comforts. He showed me another photograph of a cottage built under the Laborers’ Act of 1906, which is now occupied by the same family with the same rent of fifteen dollars a year, with an acre of ground attached to it as a garden. It is a one-story structure of four rooms, with two fireplaces, three windows on each side, a slate roof, and walls of concrete.

He also showed me a picture of the miserable hovel from which Bernard King was evicted in 1902. It stands on the De Freyne estate, near the town of Feigh, County Roscommon. King made a stubborn defense of his home, but the police finally ejected him. The Estates Commissioners have put him back, and in place of the miserable hut from which he was evicted, they have built him a neat two-story six-room cottage that is good enough for anybody to live in. There could not be any better illustration of the benefits of the evicted Tenants’ Act, and this is a type of some two thousand cases.

This humane work will be continued as long and as rapidly as the funds furnished by the British parliament will permit, and it is difficult to conceive of more direct and comprehensive benevolence. Ireland is thus being gradually redeemed, and although conditions are by no means ideal, the improvement during the last decade is a matter of congratulation to every Irishman and every sympathizer of the Irish race.

THE END

INDEX

• of the O’Neills, 238.