Absentee Landlords in the West of Ireland
The reason for Mass Evictions and the tragic results
Jun 11, 2009
The Gregory Clause
In the Poor Law Act of 1847 , a clause called the Gregory Clause was included at the behest of the largest landowners in Ireland. This clause stated that no tenant holding more than a quarter of an acre of land could be eligible for public assistance. The Landlords felt if they were to be held responsible for their tenantry, they wanted a reason to move tenants from unworkable plots of land.
Absentee Landlords
These included Lord Palmerston, The Foreign Secretary of the British Government,Lord Clanricarde, the PostMaster General, Denis Mahon of Strokestown, The Marquis of Sligo and The Earl of Lucan, all of whom had many of their tenants evicted and forced into emigration.
The Earl of Lucan , who owned over 60,000 acres in County Mayo , evicted over 2,000 tenants and the ground cleared for grazing cattle.
Not only were families evicted. Their poor hovels were often levelled or burned to prevent them taking shelter in the shell. A major concession made in 1848 was that Evictions would not happen before sunrise or after sunset and not on Christmas Day or Good Friday.
Denis Mahon
Ironically , Strokestown House, the home of Denis Mahon , is now the home of the Famine Museum.
He was murdered in November 1847. He had by then evicted over 3,000 of his tenants. On the advice of his agent , he offered his tenants the opportunity of assisted emigration to Canada. The choice of Canada was quite simple; it was cheaper, three pounds to Quebec , five pounds to New York.
Unfortunately for his tenants, the ships he chartered to bring them to Canada were in worse condition than the hovels they were leaving. Already suffering from malnutrition and without supplies of food or water, almost a quarter of his tenants died on the voyage.
Mahon shipped out a total of 981 tenants on four ships. On two of these , The Naomi and The Virginius , there were 464 deaths. On the other two ships; The Erin's Queen and the John Munn there were 100 and 55 of Mahon's tenants respectively. Twenty of these died on each ship. In total , of the 981 Strokestown tenants, 511 died en route to Canada.
Lord Palmerston
Tenants from Lord Palmerston's estates were described as refugees when they arrived at Grosse Isle , the quarantine station outside Quebec. Nine vessels carrying his tenants arrived at Grosse Isle in such desperate conditions that official complaints were made to the British Government. On the Ashburton bound out of Sligo , 174 of his tenants arrived at Grosse Isle. Virtually all of them were naked and almost half of them had to receive clothes from charities before they could leave the ship without offending public decency. Even though he was a Senior Member of the Government , Palmerston was forced to face questions in Parliament. He blamed his Land Agent for the situation.
Over a quarter of a million people were evicted between 1849 and 1854.
Endpiece
' It's hard not to grieve for an age long gone by
When the choice of our people was to leave or to die
And their tumbled down homes still lie bare to the sky
As proof how our country has bled.'
Sources:
Poirteir Cathal Famine Echoes ( Gill & MacMillan) 1995
Gray Peter H. British Politics and the Irish Land Question 1843 -1850
(Ph.D Dissertation, Cambridge University 1992)
Durkin Michael ; All of the Cowboys were Irish ( Song) 1983
