Rensselaer Republican, Volume 20, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 December 1887 — ON THE WILD IRISHCOAST. [ARTICLE]

ON THE WILD IRISHCOAST.

How the Peasants of Bmtry Bay Toil Unremittingly for a Pittance. London Daily New*. ■ _ „ *’• Besides fishing np herring and hake the poor people at the head of Bantry Bay fish np sand. “Sand raising,”, as it is called, is as important an industry as catching fish. This kind of sand is known sometimes as “coral sand,” is used for farm manure, and' costs from eight to nine shillings a boat load—a poor price considering the toilsome character of the work and the cost of the* boats required to carry it on. A sand boat costs J 65 when new and M a year n repairs. The utmost a boat owner er owners in a boat can do in a day is to bring to shore two boat loads. The proceeds have to be. divided among a number of workers, while the working season lasts for a portion of the year only. In spite of all their lifelong labor from morning to night, in winter and summer and in calm and storm, these crofter fishermen are in a state of chronic poverty. They do not live by their scrappy patches of holdings. They earn with difficulty from the sea barely enough to buy sleeping rcom and a foothold on the land. They even do more than that; they partly create, with the help of tbe Bea, the very soil for which they pay rent. The calcareous deposit, which they call “coral sand,” they have used to reclaim these shores of rock and bog. They have used the seaweed for the same purpose, cutting it np from the deep water with a primitive machine

which may be described as a marine scythe; and the seaweed has to be paid for, if not as a separate item, then as included in the holding. Coral sand, sea weed, tbe refuse of honse and pig sty, and basket loads of soil found among the boulders, these are the ingredients out of which, after years of work, the crofter fishermen have produced the tiny green patches which dot innumerably the rocky shores and the graybrown sides of the incomparably picturesque mountains that surround Olengariff the beautiful. And the dwellings of these hard-working people! They are more fit for the pigs that go grunting and snouting in and out of them than they are for beings created in the inage of God. A dry stone box with earthen floor and without windows, two or three recesses stuffed with straw for beds, and the whole filled with peat reek, such is the ordinary house where a fisherman and his wife live with half a doxen or more children. In one each house which I visited there were seven children. - -