Landlord, Rent, Eviction, Emigration.

This unique letter dated 1912, housed in the little museum in LetterMullen in Connemara, provides a very personal glimpse into the minutiae of our social history. Our modern society ironically resembles this early 20th century vignette, more than we might care to admit.
Today, as in 1912, renting is the norm. Back then, it was a rented house and farm, today an apartment or house. Today, so many renters are in financial difficulty, from covid19, or more likely, from an underlying social inequality, unemployment, refugee, single parent family. Our social services and charities strive to provide some support for those families, much as did this priest (and many other benevolent people), helping a family keep a roof over their head and stave off eviction.
Today it’s the banks, investors and hedge funds who are the landlord class, back in 1912, the landlord class had morphed from primarily Anglo-Irish landed estate, to a merchant and investor middle and upper class, who took advantage of the encumbered estates fire sale (think NAMA).
The old landlord system was bankrupted by the famine, tithe tax and the Land League, and were bailed out by the British Government (think NAMA). They had even less empathy and familiarity with their tenants, and the cautionary tone at the end of this letter reflects that distancing of tenant and land owner. That generational clan and community system was all washed away by 1912, with the arrival of the carpetbagger opportunist landlord and his ‘Agent’, as is the case here.
Connemara had rolling famines. Crop failure after crop failure, bad summer after worse winter. Emigration was their only escape. Most Connemara farms were in arrears. This agent had an unenviable and impossible task, which by 1921 became academic.
Lastly, the tenant's debt while small by our standards, was insurmountable by his. A ticket in third class on Titanic in 1912, the same year as this letter, was £7-10s., just shy of his overall rent arrears of £8-5s. So, I think that I will finish on a hopeful note. Sometimes the family had foregone paying rent in order to save up and pay the passage to America for one of the children.
Perhaps owing to the sacrifice of his or her family in 1910 and 1911, that young emigrant managed to save some money in Boston and paid off the family’s debt, avoiding eviction and eventually buying out the family farm in Rosmuc. Wouldn’t that have been a good end to a very sad, but not uncommon tale. Brian Nolan. Walking Tours of Galway