If you go into Dunderry graveyard and turn immediately right before the first row of graves and proceed to the end of that row you will come across a well kept plot beneath a weather worn headstone with the writing illegible to the unaided eye.This is the grave of Mc Keown,although some say he was called Mc Kenna,a matter I hope to clear up for once and all soon.
Anyhow he was a tramp and lived hereabouts in the nineteen thirties ,residing in a shed belonging to the Horan's the local publicans.He was a working tramp and when work was available he took it.
Things were bad for most people here in the thirties because of the so called Economic war with England.This was as a result of Dev's decision to stop paying the Land Commission annuities to England.
To elaborate further the Land Commission was set up in the late 1880's to buy out the English Landlords who owned the land of Ireland and redistribute it to the tenants.I recently had reason to investigate how this worked in practise and it went something like this in this area.
If a tenant could establish that he and his people were tenants of certain lands back to the 1850's to the satisfaction of the Land Commissioners and wanted to buy out the land ,then the Commissioners decided on the current market value of the land ,immediately paid the landlord this price,assigned the land to the tenant as "Freehold Registered"Land and charged the tenant with paying off the price to the State over a number of years as a Land Commission Annuity,which was charged on the lands until it was paid off entirely.The State kept the mineral rights under the land.
As a matter of fact I worked for some years in the Estate Duty Office and during that time had the job of investigating the historic title of lands the Land Commission acquired to establish if any claims for death duties arose on the title to ensure that any such claims were paid to the State before the proceeds were paid to the persons from whom they were acquired.
You will notice that the necessity to prove occupation spanned the great famine of 1845 to 1847 and this reassignment of title was achieved despite the halving of the population from 8 to 4 million over the 1845 to 1900 period through death from starvation and emigration.
Anyhow Dev decided in the 1930's that it was nonsense to send these annuities to England when this newly formed country needed them so badly.The Empire struck back by levying import charges on the importation of cattle and sheep into Britain so as to price them off the market there.This fecked up Ireland as the one thing we could do well then and still can is produce the best livestock in the world and Britain was our main market.The hole fell out of the market and valuable cattle became valueless.Many big farmers ,mainly blue shirts then and now,became impoverished overnight and these Fine Gael families still despise Dev and Fianna Fail over this.
Then as now poverty and hunger stalked the land.To help alleviate it in rural Ireland the Government introduced a grant for digging and clearing ditches on farmland.The bounty was ,I think 2 shillings and six pence a perch paid for each perch completed.The bigger farmers went for this and employed their poorer brethren to do the work at half the grant rate per perch ,with dinner thrown in.
Some of my uncles worked at this,as did Mc Keown.Pick ,spade and shovel were the implements employed and the work was brutal.For dinner most farmers dined at their own table in the dining room and a separate table was set up along the wall for the workers,just to let them know who was boss.Dinner was served simultaneously.
On one such occasion ,Mc Keown was at the side table for dinner when all save him was served two herrings and spuds ,he getting only one herring.He looked mournfully at his plate for a long time ,then asked the woman of the house ,pointing to his single herring,"where's his companion Mam?"
Given that ten percent of the population are suffering food deprivation (in layman's terms going hungry ),that over 80,000 people are fleeing the Country every year ,the highest since famine times,that hundreds of thousands are in despair over their inability to afford the cost of food and shelter,that our European "partners" are forcing every family in the country to repay the gambling losses of our own and pan European banks and that the embarrassing rolling over of our political representatives before the German controlled Union and the sucking up of Enda to Angel has so humiliatingly been rebuked ,the time has come to replicate the request of Mc Keown ,
And if we are not sorted properly to tell Angel and her cohorts to f... off.
Dev had the balls in the thirties and we survived it .Has Edna the balls to do it now?
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