One word that still frays the nerves of most Irish people

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m not sure whether it’s in our genes or whether it’s the legacy of Irish history from our primary school days, but I’d say that almost everyone I know seems to feel the same way when it comes to the eviction word.  It just strikes a raw nerve chord with Irish people, many of whom are only three or four generations from a time in Ireland, when many farm families across rural Ireland were evicted from their homes because they couldn’t afford to pay the rent to their English landlord.

Times have of course moved on and thankfully evictions are now rare enough events and they usually occur when individuals have racked up huge debts, on loans that they probably should never have been given in the first place.

Eviction orders, by all accounts, are quite difficult to secure in terms of high court proceedings and in the case of the eviction earlier this month of three siblings from the Strokestown area of Roscommon, it came at the end of a lengthy legal process.

And yet despite all that, there was still something very disturbing about seeing these people being thrown out of their homes quite unceremoniously by security personnel who took their pieces of silver to do the dirty work for KBC bank.

What followed last Sunday when an organised gang of about 20 people took the law into their own hands and administered a dose of their ‘own medicine’ on the security personnel, has been condemned by politicians big and small, including Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

But on the ground, among ordinary people I spoke to, individuals who by any yardstick couldn’t be described as prone to violence, there was not even a morsel of sympathy for the fate of the security personnel who were involved in the repossession of the Strokestown farmstead at Falsk. The suggestion that some of the people involved in the initial eviction were not from this jurisdiction also helped to fan the flames of anger against those involved in the operation.

For more read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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