Lord Palmer and Irish evictions

[guggenheim]

I watched last night's episode of 'Who do you think you are?' which featured the west of ireland,where some of my family are from. I knew a little about the evictions of the people from the land,and the great hardship it caused. I was fascinated by last night's program especially by the pictures showing police assisting the evictions by breaking family houses.

I can sort of understand that people are forced into making decisions and taking sides during times of hardship. Do you think that the police forces came from the local population or had they been drawn from other parts of ireland? Were they English? Perhaps they were well paid and that made the difference between being able to feed your family or facing starvation?

What I really struggle with is what on earth was going through the mind of Lord Palmer? Did he feel that he was 'upholding peace' in some weird and misguided way? Did he really have no empathy or feeling for the people at all? How could he possibly have justified the evictions?

I understand that this part of Ireland and this point in history was massively complicated but can anyone shed any light on how people thought or felt under these circumstances?

I think there was a certain amount of local families siding with the landowners probably purely in the name of survival. The period covered for Julie Walter's episode was shortly after the worst Irish famines so people knew what it was like to see whole families succombe to hardship, hunger and disease. There will always be those who seek to profit from other's hardships but I guess it is hard to judge them when the choice could be one of survival for you and your family.

That is why it was so brave of individuals to stick their heads above the parapet, joining the Land League and standing up to the all powerful landowners.

I think the landowners justified it by not really viewing the native population as wholly human. Similar to slavery or Nazi propaganda about Jewish people, gypsies etc. They saw the local population as a problem which could best be solved by whole families leaving so land could be cultivated for farming. It is hard to understand how people can be so cruel but many of these landowners were absent from their lands with little or no relationships with local people.

I know that in Ireland the high population meant that areas were designated as 'congested' ie too many people to live off their land so depopulation was seen as a solution.

The issues this has caused ring down the generations. It is why many several generation on families in the US etc still feel themselves to be Irish - a sense of injustice at being forced from home and a constant to-ing and fro-ing of families trying to make a living at home. Still an issue today although many of those 'congested' areas are now hugely depopulated.

Just my take on it from my understanding of what is a very tragic time in Irish history and an example of the damage wreaked by Empire on the poor and powerless.

I agree with that description.

About 25% of the RIC membership was drawn from various protestant denominations and 75% were Catholic. Catholics were constables for the most part, while officers tended to be protestant (this meant officers were mainly CofI). In areas where there were more protestants there would have been more protestant constables (mainly parts of Ulster but there were pockets in most other counties). Constables were moved around and weren't supposed to patrol in their own home county or get too close to those they policed. The pay wasn't much so there was probably an element of loyalty to Britain involved, or a desire to gain status in the community or be counted among the respectable. During the 19th century thousands of Irish men served in the British armed forces all over the Empire, for various reasons of their own.

Dublin was patrolled by the unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police, but the RIC was an armed force that wore military style uniforms. After 1922, its successor police force in the Free State, the Garda Siochana, was unarmed, a reaction against the idea that peace needed to be maintained by means of force. Older people still call Garda stations 'Garda barracks' a hangover from the days when the RIC were stationed in military style barracks and moved around from barracks to barracks. They sometimes worked in tandem with troops stationed in various localities, especially when martial law (aka 'Coercion Acts' of which there were about 199 passed between 1801 and 1922) was declared during the Land War and when the campaign for Home Rule seemed to be a threat to stability (property), and during eviction campaigns. They spied on those they policed and scuppered the Fenian insurrection hence the great bitterness with which the RIC was attacked during the War of Independence. In turn some RIC members were inside men for the IRA, especially when the Black and Tans were sent to Ireland.

The basic tenet of Palmer and he British administration in Ireland (and Britain) in Victorian times was that the rights of property must be upheld. The land was owned by the landlords, and if they wished to use the land for grazing then they had the right to, and tenants were forced off it. The police were there to protect the rights of property. Enclosure had been going on since the start of the 19th century and had contributed to the squeezing of tenants and the rural poor into small plots, forcing reliance on the potato.

100, not 199 (whoops)

Hi,Thank you for such thoughtful and intelligent answers : )
I intended to ask more back in August but life went tits up, as it does from time to time.

I'm ashamed of not knowing more about irish history- family didn't like to talk about the past much when I was little. I've spotted a course on irish history on one of the free learning sites- maybe OU,think you might just have encouraged me to take it.