The tenant being out of his holding, the agent wishes to put another tenant into it. But the holding is "boycotted." Several tenants are anxious for it, and would gladly take it, but they dare not The great evicted will neither sell any tenant-right he may have, nor pay his arrears and costs, nor give up the place to another tenant. To put Property Defence men on the holding would cost the landlord £2, 10s. a week, and do him no great good, as the evicted man "holds the fort," being established in a house which he occupies on an adjoining property, and for which presumably he pays his rent. It seems as if Mr. Sweeney were inspired by the example of another tenant, named Barry, who, before the passing of the Land Act of 1881, gave up freely a holding of 20 acres, on a property managed by Mr. Kough; but as he was on such good terms with the agent that he could borrow money of him, he begged the agent to let him retain at a low rent a piece of this surrendered land directly adjoining his house. He asked this in the name of his eight or nine children, and it was granted him. The agent afterwards found that the piece of land in question was by far the best of the surrendered holding. But that is a mere detail. This ingenious tenant Barry, living now on another estate just outside the grasp of the agent, has systematically "boycotted" for the last nine years the land which he gave up, feeding his own cattle upon it freely meanwhile, and keeping all would-be tenants at a distance! "He is now," said the agent, "quite a wealthy man in his way, jobbing cattle at all the great markets!"
"When the eviction of Sweeney took place," said the agent, "I was present in person, as I thought I ought to be, and the result is that I have been held up to the execration of mankind as a monster for putting out a child in a cradle into a storm. As a matter of fact," he said, "there was a cradle in the way, which the sheriff-Officer gently took up, and by direction of the tenant's wife removed. I made no remark about it at all, but a local paper published a lying story, which the publisher had to retract, that I had said 'Throw out the child!'"
"Two priests," he said, "came quite uninvited and certainly without provocation, to see me, and one of them shouted out, 'Ah! we know you'll be making another Coolgreany,' which was as much as to say there 'would be bloodshed.' This was the more intolerable," he added, "that, as I afterwards found, I had already done for the sake of the tenants precisely what these ecclesiastics professed that they had come to ask me to do!