The dark days of 1877 in the Golden Vale

A classic of Irish journalism: William O’Brien’s ‘Christmas on the Galtees’ from the grim winter of 1877 by Felix M Larkin

In the days after Christmas 1877, The Freeman’s Journal published a series of five articles that are generally acknowledged as the earliest piece of investigative journalism in Ireland.

Entitled ‘Christmas on the Galtees’, they were written by William O’Brien, then only in his mid-20s, but already the Freeman’s star reporter. He was later an Irish Party MP at Westminster and a prominent agrarian leader in the Land War in the 1880s.

The articles were described by O’Brien as “the investigation of a historic agrarian struggle on an estate around the Galtee mountains”. The estate in question was “a poor mountainous estate” in Co. Tipperary that had been acquired by a wealthy English manufacturer, Nathaniel Buckley.

He raised the rents – in most instances, by a factor of two or three – and resistance to this impossible burden escalated to the point where a bailiff was killed, and the estate agent and a policeman wounded, in a gun attack.

Plight

The plight of the tenants on the estate was first highlighted in letters from a prominent local Fenian, John Sarsfield Casey, published in the Freeman and in The Cork Examiner. This resulted in a libel suit against Casey. When the suit failed and Casey was vindicated, the Freeman decided to pursue the matter further.

O’Brien was dispatched to Tipperary with, in his own words, instructions “to see for myself; to avoid heated and exaggerated language; and to tell the plain truth, whatever it might be, without fear or favour”.

The first of his articles was dated Christmas Eve, and appeared in the Freeman on December 27. The remaining articles were published at intervals between December 29 and January 5. All five articles were gathered together in a pamphlet soon afterwards.

The Freeman was owned at this time by Edmund Dwyer Gray, and the Buckley estate was located in the constituency for which Gray had recently been elected MP. The candidate he defeated was the same John Sarsfield Casey who had drawn attention to conditions on the estate.

A mess of Indian meal was in the pot for dinner. The family, of course, slept in one room”

In his Recollections, O’Brien recalls that Gray personally gave him the commission to write the ‘Christmas on the Galtees’ articles. In doing so, Gray was clearly taking steps to avoid being outflanked in his political backyard.

What makes O’Brien’s articles extraordinary is the quality of the analysis that underpinned his exposition of the wretched circumstances of the tenants – “the shameful scenes which passed under my own eyes”, to quote O’Brien – and its focus on the experience of individual tenants. In this regard, O’Brien writes:

The inquiry was original in this sense, that it was, so far as I know, the first time when, in place of general statements, there was substituted a house-to-house visitation, telling in detail the story of every family – their crops, their stock, their debts, their struggle for life – from documents examined on the premises, and in words taken down in shorthand from the peasants’ own lips.

Approach

A good example of O’Brien’s approach is his account of visiting the farm of Johanna Fitzgerald, one of the tenants on the estate. O’Brien remarks upon “her bare feet and course petticoat”, and he tells us that her “husband has gone to England as a labourer to earn bread for her four children”. He continues:

The rain streaming through the thatch, the out-offices tumbling to ruin; the whole furniture miserable and scanty beyond description”

“A mess of Indian meal was in the pot for dinner. The family, of course, slept in one room […]. Mrs Fitzgerald said she had not heard from her husband these five weeks, and a shilling was all the money she had in the world.

“Her rent was raised from £2 10s 4d to £4 4s. Her stock of potatoes was out this month past, ‘except a handful of seed’, and from this to August yellow stirabout must be bought on credit. […] Two geese and some hens made a total of her livestock.”

This woman’s husband was a great-uncle of the late Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

Of another tenant, the Widow Condon, O’Brien says that she “had eight children feeding on dry Indian meal stirabout when I entered her cabin, and the floor was pounded into a gelid mass of filth quite six inches in depth; the rain streaming through the thatch, the out-offices tumbling to ruin; the whole furniture miserable and scanty beyond description”.

He adds: “Within this desolate rookery, Widow Condon spent her Christmas night, having begged a meal of bread and tea from her neighbours as her Christmas dinner – not the poorest scrap of meat even then.”

In the second article in the series, part of which was dated Christmas Day, O’Brien recalls that “not a sprig of holly was to be seen in any house I visited”.

He observes: “It would be almost a levity to speak of the ordinary Christmas adjuncts of merry making. […] As I drove past the base of the hill after nightfall, when no cheerful twinkle lighted the cabin windows, and when a snowstorm breaking over the Galtees overspread it like a shroud, there seemed to be few spots in Christendom that had less business with a happy Christmas.”

O’Brien visited a total of 226 holdings during his sojourn in Co. Tipperary. His precise and vivid reporting of the results of his investigations makes the ‘Christmas on the Galtees’ articles a perfect specimen of the new genre of journalism – the so-called new journalism – just emerging in Britain and associated with the legendary WT. Stead.

The articles also display the passionate advocacy that was so much a part of the new journalism. The final one thus concludes with an appeal to public opinion, which, with its implicit assumption that the articles would galvanise public opinion, is characteristic of the new journalism:

One wave of that English opinion, before which Cabinets have fallen and nationalities been raised up – one generous impulse, such as was at the call of undeserved human misery in Bulgaria – would either end this unhappy strife or sweep away for ever the law that allows it.

1876. WT. Stead, as editor of the Darlington Northern Echo, had played a central role in publicising atrocities in Bulgaria in 1876. By linking his exposé of conditions on the Buckley estate with that controversy, O’Brien was very deliberately identifying himself with the new journalism. *

O’Brien notes in his Recollections that the publication of his articles was “not without perils for the proprietor of a great newspaper” – specifically, the risk of a libel action.

Courage

Edmund Dwyer Gray showed great courage in publishing the articles in the Freeman. He was also extraordinarily prescient in bringing the land question to public attention at this early stage; the articles appeared almost 20 months before the founding of the Land League by Michael Davitt.

Moreover, they set the tone – a crusading tone – for the later press coverage of the Land War. Courting public opinion through the press would be an integral part of the strategy adopted first by the Land League and later, in 1886, in the Plan of Campaign.

Indeed, the Plan’s manifesto stated that “the fullest publicity should be given to evictions” – and accounts and pictures of evictions and other outrages were used quite explicitly for propaganda purposes both at home and abroad. O’Brien’s ‘Christmas on the Galtees’ articles blazed a trail in this regard.

Who can be surprised if, in the cabins among the Galtee Mountains, there was sometimes a weary suspicion that the only effective force of public opinion lay in the crack of Ryan’s blunderbuss?”

But did the articles have any effect? O’Brien concedes in his Recollections that they did not. He states that “no relief came to the Galtee estate, or to any other, until, a couple of years later, the Land League Revolution shook the earth”.

The failure of his ground-breaking journalistic effort leads him to ask this awkward, somewhat despondent question: “who can be surprised if, in the cabins among the Galtee Mountains, there was sometimes a weary suspicion that the only effective force of public opinion lay in the crack of Ryan’s blunderbuss?” Ryan was the name of the man who had killed the bailiff on the Buckley estate.

[*Editor’s note – The Bulgarian atrocities took place in May and June 1876 and were widely reported by, among other, the Irish-American journalist JA. MacGahan. In the attack in upward of 100,000 Christian civilians were massacred by tribal auxiliary forces of the Ottoman, or Turkish army. The international outcry led to a war in 1877 between Russia and her Balkan allies with the Ottoman Empire which ended in the defeat of the Turks and initiated the long drawn out of the expulsion of the Ottoman from Europe and the eventual fall of the empire after the Great War.]

This essay, from Christmas and the Irish: A Miscellany, is reprinted by permission of the editor Prof. Salvador Ryan of St Patrick’s Pontifical University and the publishers Wordwell. It was reviewed by J. Anthony Gaughan in our issue of December 14.