Extracts from 59. Did you think of making any of your boys soldiers?—I have another boy up to sixteen years, and I would not have him here if he was fit to go. 60. Are you able to give them an education ?—I have one girl who had her learning; she teaches him, and she breaks the little boys. We are not allowed to send them to the free school: the priest will not allow it, which is a great loss to us,-he will not let us send them to Major Ross's school, nor the national school. 61. Will not the priest let you send them to the national school?No. There is a school half a mile from us. 62. Are they taught well there?—There is a power of children there. 63. When does the little girl that has the learning teach the children?-In the morning when they first rise; at five or six in the morning she teaches them, and in winter time at night; or when I get a holiday I attack them, and mind them when I am about home. 64. Does she write?-Yes, of course. 65. Have you any learning yourself?—No, I never learnt a word. I have two sons in the Dublin police; they have been there two years. 66. Have they any learning?—Yes; one of them is a sergeant; he had a character from Mr. Ross and the parish priest. 67. Do the boys at Dublin ever send you down some money to help you?—Yes, they do send a little money to the mother to help them; but they are married men or they would give a good deal more, only their women are not willing to part with the money. 68. Are the cattle you take to Dublin entrusted entirely to your charge ?—Yes. 69. Did you ever lose any of them by the way?—No; nor never got any damages of any sort. 70. How are the beasts sold when you get there; do you go to a salesman ?—Yes, and he sells them. The buyer comes and asks who sent me, I tell him the name, and he goes to the salesman and asks the price of such a quantity of sheep, and he sells them. I send the market note by post, and walk home myself. 71. Do you bring the money home with you?—No, not a penny; only the clerk asks me if I want any for charges; but my master always gives me more than I want; I often return him 15s. out of what I received. I never had any occasion to raise a shilling in the office at all. 72. Was the land you have spoken of drained?—Yes. 74. What would be a fair rent for it now, to take it for twentyone years?—I would be very glad to give 40s. ; but it is so hard for a poor man to get it: for a gentleman would take it and give £4 for it, and put a little cabin upon it. Mr. Harman King has thousands of acres set at 4s. 6d. under old leases, for lives renewable, and the middleman sets it at 40s. It is the middle landlord that I mean that is charging the big price. 75. Is any of the land that is held under Mr. Harman King at 4s. 6d., set again to under-tenants ?-No; they do not set it again except they set an acre. Evidence. 76. What do they get for that?-Not less than £4, and that Extracts from would be just the same as like a shank of a skin of leather, which a man would cut off when he would not want the bad part, and keeps the kidney to himself. I have seen many acres set round about me in that way. 77. How do you get your fuel? We got a little bit of turf bank from the master for nothing; but it is cut out now, and I have to pay for fuel elsewhere. 78. What do you pay for it ?—I should say about 3s. a perch for the turf got home; it is two or three miles away, and it will cost me something to draw it home. We burn about fifty kish in the year. We cut as far as the bottom and the water will allow us. 79. Have you to draw off much of the top?-Yes, about three feet of white dirt on the top. 80. How many spit deep do you go?-Twenty spit deep there is a bog here near the town forty spit deep. Sir John Macneill, civil engineer and land proprietor. Louth. 11. Then there is a lower class, who are employed as day 14, Q. 11–14. labourers? There are some few that work, and have a cottage and garden, for which I understand they pay from £2 to £3 a year. I have some of these men in the work, they all work well. I never found men more anxious or desirous to be employed than the lower orders in that neighbourhood, both the day labourers and those who have carts and horses and a small portion of land; nothing tends to make the labourer so contented, happy, and anxious for employment as having a small portion of land; they would be content with even an acre; it gives occupation to their children in many instances, and gives the man himself a feeling that he has a house-a feeling which he cannot have if he is a mere cottier or lodger in a cabin from year to year. 12. Do they receive money wages from you?—Yes; they are paid about once a fortnight or once in a month. The men who take potato ground allow part of their wages to run on for rent until the end of the year; in many instances they are paid trifles in advance, and repay it weekly as they can by their work. I never have any complaint of them; they sometimes ask for a little advance to purchase meal at a particular season, or sometimes a horse, if they have lost one by accident, but they always repay it by their work. They are always exceedingly desirous to take work by task; I have a great deal of work of that kind in the quarrying of stone, which is all let by task-work. The burning of lime is also let in the same way. The carrying of lime is generally let by the barrel, and the carting of culm from the quays, and taking it out of the vessel, is all done by the piece; and I found the greatest anxiety to take it at very low rates, often under-bidding one another; but I pay them what I think a fair price, and if they send in an offer to do it at less than I know it can be done for, and which is often the case, I do not take it; this observation also applies to masons, carpenters, and smiths' work. 13. How long have those works been in operation?—I think since 1815 or 1816. During the greater portion of that time I was in England, they were carried on in the same way as at present. I Extracts from have a printed form, by which I know the work done each day; an Evidence. account is sent to me by the clerk. 14. Did you find that the people there declined working by task?—No, not at all. I introduced it from my knowledge of the benefit arising from such a system of works. I do not think in many cases private gentlemen could do it with the same advantage, unless they knew the value of the work; but from my professional knowledge I can do it in almost every instance. For forming drains, they will generally contract by the yard, or the perch, or the rood, and also for fencing; they will contract in almost any part of the country. 21. Do you find that persons who have been working upon public works as labourers improve in their condition;-when they have worked for some time and got good wages, do they improve in their dress or condition generally-We find wherever public works are carried on the people improve. When they come to the work they are in general in great distress; they are badly clothed and badly fed. 22. What public works have you been recently engaged in ?— The Dublin and Drogheda railway is the most recent; it is now going on. We have from seven to eight thousand men upon these works. I am also employed in improving the harbour of Dundalk, where we have from four to five hundred men. On the Lough Swilly embankment we have lately had a great many men; that is in Donegal. In Derry we have the Lough Foyle embankment; and in Belfast I have been employed to bring water into the town. This work employed seven or eight hundred men for a length of time. 23. You are the superintending engineer of those works?—Yes; and I am also consulting engineer to the Grand Canal Company, and have seen a good deal of the works going on under their management in the midland counties of Ireland. 24. In the course of those works I need hardly ask whether you have had to employ and engage a great number of men?-Not of myself. I am an engineer, not a contractor; but I see great numbers of men employed. The contractors engaged in the different works have employed a great many men, and I have seen the effects of it, and I can state that they have been most beneficial. In England public works are very different in the effect they produce upon the population compared to what they do in Ireland. In England the farming classes or those holding land very seldom engage in public undertakings; their carts and horses are sometimes employed, but not very often. Such works are generally done by men who do nothing else; they follow the contractors from work to work. There are very few instances of farming labourers going into works in the immediate neighbourhood where they are carried on in England; but in Ireland it is very different; every man runs to the contractor to get his name put upon the list. It is extraordinary the avidity with which they seek after it, and desire to be employed. Many of these men have small farms, some of them only cottages. They do not run to other works at a distance; they will take any work near them, by the piece or by day's wages. They get much better wages from contractors than they are in the habit of getting Evidence. in the county; they work harder and get better pay. These obser- Extracts from vations apply to the labourer who has some little holding in land; those who have not frequently go a distance to get work, just as they do to the harvest in England or Scotland. When the work is done they have saved a little money, and it improves their condition. They see the manner in which the works are carried on in a systematic and regular manner by the contractor, and in a better way than they have been accustomed to. The overseers by whom they are employed can put them in a better mode of using the spade and shovel, to which they are so much accustomed; and I have little hesitation in saying, that a man accustomed to our works will produce a much greater amount of work, and do it much better than he could do before; besides, the habit of being obliged to eat better meat (and they cannot work in the way that is required if they do not) improves their condition. They endeavour to go on afterwards in the same way, and will save in other things to get better clothes and meat; they work harder and better, and their labour is of more value. 25. You consider there is a great distinction in this respect between England and Ireland; that the public works give employment to a vast number of the neighbouring poor, whereas in England they are undertaken by strangers ?-Yes, entirely by what we call tramps. Sometimes they are called navies or navigators; they are known all over the country as tramps; they go from contractor to contractor, and they know the rate of wages every contractor is paying throughout the country; they have a regular system. We have men now working with us who came from Algiers a short time ago; they are at work upon the Dublin and Drogheda railway. They went from England to France to work upon some of the railways there, from France they went to Algiers. They had heard from some of their companions that we were giving what are considered very good wages in Ireland, and being Irishmen themselves, they returned, and are now in work upon that railway. This may seem a contradiction to what I have just stated; but these men are professional tramps, brought up on public works in England. In Ireland it is totally different; the works are mostly executed by nen in the immediate neighbourhood where they are carried on. It is true that there are men from several of the inland counties on the Dublin and Drogheda line, but these amount to but a small per centage on the whole. 38. Do you find the improvement of the labouring capabilities of 14, Q. 38. a man in the public works pretty rapid?—Yes, we find in a month's training, after a man gets sufficiently strong from better meat, he is able to compete with the best in wheeling a barrow, which is the point their companions try him upon. When they first come to work upon scanty meat, they have not the physical strength necessary. Sometimes they are knocked up from that and get ill; in other cases where they have the means, and eat meat, not being accustomed to it before, they are also made ill; so that in general, for a few weeks when they first commence to work, they are unable to do much. This I have observed both in England and Scotland; but they get round, and afterwards work exceedingly well. 39. Do you find that there is an improvement in their habits, Evidence. Extracts from corresponding with the improvement in their condition?—Yes, decidedly so, as far as I am able to judge; and they improve in their moral habits. As soon as an Irishman gets a little better in his circumstances, and gets out of the state of misery they are generally in, they commence to get clothes a little better than they have been accustomed to; and when they get tolerably well dressed, they become totally different characters, and they are men you can trust and depend upon. There are, when this takes place, few quarrels among them. I do not know of a single instance in which there has been any serious dispute among the workmen upon the Dublin aud Drogheda railway. 40. Is it your opinion that the power of bettering themselves by these public works has a tendency to create the strongest desire for improvement?—Yes, the strongest desire; it is visible in their cottages; they have attempted and have succeeded in making them better and more comfortable. They are better clothed themselves, and their children are better clothed. 41. Among those who have learned to work better, do you detect any thing like listlessness or carelessness?—No, nothing of the kind. An Irishman is the most active fellow possible if remunerated for his work there is no idleness among them if they can turn their work to a fair remuneration. 42. Do you attribute that improvement to the stimulus of increased wages?—Yes, that is one cause; but it is also the effect of a man feeling a little independence; he is anxious to continue to improve his condition and that of his children. No man will do more, or undergo more hardship, for the sake of his children, than an Irishman. 43. Have you found much difficulty in settling the price of work with them? Not at all; and they seldom strike for an increase of wages. 44. Can you state whether any provision has been made in the public works you are connected with for supporting those who suffer by accidents upon the works?-Yes, upon the Dublin and Drogheda railway there is a fund of that sort; the company gives something towards it, but not near so much as they should; each labourer gives two pence a week; and when an accident occurs, they are paid a certain portion. It has acted exceedingly beneficially. 45. Has there been a willingness among the labourers to contribute to that fund?—I have never heard of the least objection to it, except by some of the tramps, as they are called, who have no families, or families that they do not care about; and those men have in some instances objected. 46. Is a payment made out of that fund to the widow of a man who may be unfortunately killed?-Yes, but not in my opinion nearly as much as it should be. 47. It is a benefit fund among the men themselves ?—Yes. 48. That institution is under the direction and management of the directors of the company?—Yes, and carried into effect by the resident engineer upon each district, who knows the men; and there are not many instances in which men have been hurt in which they have endeavoured to impose upon the company by remaining on the fund after they have been enabled to work; there are a few, no doubt. |