Carew wished now to put up a wooden hut at Rossbane and endeavour to carry on alone; but Blake refused to let him go, and in the end he was persuaded, greatly against his will, to sell his lands by public auction.
The auction took place in Ballybor, the lands being divided into lots of a suitable size to suit small farmers; but the auctioneers did not receive a single bid—the I.R.A. saw to that.
Carew now determined to leave his lands waste, his home in ruins, and as soon as he received the money for his malicious injury claim, to go to British East Africa, there to await the return of better days in Ireland, when he intends to return and rebuild the home of his fathers. Will they ever come?
There are very few industries in the west of Ireland, and of these by far the most lucrative is the distillation of illicit whisky, or, as it is generally called by the peasants, poteen.
The average countryman would far rather make a fiver by sticking a stranger with a horse than £100 by hard honest work. Add an element of danger, and he is quite content. The making of poteen combines much profit with little labour and a good element of danger, in that the distiller may be caught by the police and heavily fined.
The beginning of poteen is lost in the mist of past ages, and the end will probably synchronise with the end of Ireland; the amount made varies with the demand, and the demand fluctuates with the price and supply of whisky.
During 1919, when whisky became weak, dear, and scarce, and the police for a time practically ceased to function, the call for poteen became so great that the demand far exceeded the supply, and for many months the whisky sold in the majority of publichouses throughout the west was made up of a mixture of three-quarters poteen and a quarter whisky.
At the beginning of the last century all poteen was made from malt in the same way as whisky is made, until some thoughtful man argued that if they could make beer from sugar in England, we could surely make poteen from the same material in Ireland; and as any one buying malt or growing barley was liable to attract the eye of the R.I.C., all poteen ceased to be made from malt, and the far simpler method of distilling from “treacle” continues to this day. Treacle is largely imported in barrels to Ireland, ostensibly for the purpose of fattening cattle and pigs.