Page:The Irish land acts; a short sketch of their history and development.djvu/12

6  in the richer parts of Tipperary, Limerick, Waterford and Cork; and (2) mixed tillage and dairying—the tillage being subservient to the dairying—in the poorer parts of Cork and Kerry. Clare is largely pastoral in character.

IV. Connaught—with the exception of East Galway, Roscommon, and the plains of Mayo—is a province of poor holdings, with small and struggling peasants, living on the margin of subsistence. The holdings are chiefly used for rough grazing, tilled where possible, and as a rule small in size. Roscommon and East Galway are largely devoted to the grazing of store cattle, and act as feeders to the fattening farmers of Leinster.



We can best understand Ireland of to-day by comparing it with Ireland of yesterday; by measuring the present by the past. We can thus judge of the social and economic problems that had to be faced and the difficulties that had to be overcome. No more suitable date for purposes of comparison can be taken than the Famine in the middle of the last century. That was the turning point in Irish economic history.

The Ireland of 1850—and I take that date as representing the state of the country at the close of the Famine period—was very different from the Ireland of to-day. In 1845 the population was nearly double what it is now. Local or county government was in the hands of a few of the better-off inhabitants, who were selected by arbitrary, as opposed to representative, methods. The Land Laws recognised no rights of ownership in the occupier beyond what his agreement with the landlord gave to him, and the economic state of the country was wretched in the extreme.

The old order of things then gave way before the combined influence of the potato failure and the introduction of Free Trade in England. The effect of these forces was immediate. An enormous emigration commenced, and pasture took the place of agriculture over a great part of the country. New conditions were thus created, and new problems had to be faced. One result of this changed order of things was that people were set thinking. The miseries and misfortunes of the country that