The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1847-09-21 00:00:00

IRELAND.

INORMOUS POTATO PRODUCE.—Mr. Byrne, gardener
to William Furlong, Fsq., of Brooklawn, Blackrock, county
Dublin, whilst digging potatoes on Thursday the 16th
Instant, found under one stalk fifty sound potatoes varying
in size, and which weighed altogether one stone three
pounds. This enormous produce is from one potato,
planted whole. We believe they are called " lumpers."
THE MONSTER MEETING AT HOLYCROSS.-^Prepara-
tions on a gigantic scale, it is boasted, are making for the
contemplated gathering at Holycross in ostensible con-
nexion with the tenant league movement, in pursuance of
the manifesto issued by Mr. James F. Lalor. A meeting
of over three hundred of the tenant-farmers of the barony
of Eliogarty was held at Thurles on Sunday week, when a
series of resolutions were adopted.

The Ballinasloe star states that four men had been
arrested on suspicion of murdering Patrick Costelloe, a
driver, who was found lying dead in the road to Mount
Bellew, on Tuesday week. The murder seems to have
been perpetrated by striking their wretched victim with
stones. His chin was broken, his teeth knocked out, and
literally scattered on the road, and his ear cut in two ; his
nose was also broken, and his head dreadfully fractured.
RENEWAL OF THE O'CONNELL TRIBUTE.—A letter,
signed "Amiens Patrize," appears in the Freeman of
Saturday morning, suggesting " that as O'Connell left his
sons too slender a patrimony to support them in the patriotic
career which he and their own choice have marked out for
them through life," a fund of £lOO,OOO should be raised
to " secure to them a suitable independence, to enable
them to devote exclusively to our rights and our liberties
their talents and services."
THE IRISH CONFEDERATION.—This body—an off-shoot
from the repealers—seems to be composed of more warlike
members than the original association. At the last meet-
ing the Rev. Mr. Meahan urged the necessity of a move-
ment for the assistance of the Pope. He did not believe
in the coward doctrine. that the sword and the cross were
incompatible. The priests and the friars of Ireland were
ready to march to battle side by side with laymen. He
read a passage from an Italian work, to show that a former
Pope sent assistance to Ireland when she wanted it, in the
form of muskets, pikes, pistols, bayonets, powder, shot,
&c. (Cheers).

A MOST EXTRAORDINARY DECISION. —The Dublin
Journal of Friday records a most extraordinary and unac-
countable decision made by the Lord Mayor on Thursday.
The case involved a claim made upon Mr. Grogan, M.P.,
for £5 10s. on account of expense, incurred by William
White, of Eyrecourt, in coming to Dublin to vote at the
late election, for Mr. Grogan. The payment, by a member
of Parliament, or his accredited agents, of any such de-
mand, would constitute certain grounds for a petition to
unseat him. It would, in fact, be bribery. Nevertheless,
the Lord Mayor made an order against Mr. Grogan for the
amount claimed. This decision seems to us so strange
that we cannot but believe there has been some misappre-
hension on the part of the reporters.
The Cork Examiner gives the following description of
the mode of living adopted by a crowd of poor wretches
ejected from some land near Dungarvan :—" At one
quarter, where a band of stones run along a high road,
they have formed in it cells of a few feet wide. Here
whole families have been thrown promiscuously, whose
condition is an offence to the feeling of the community.
Pent up in such dens, fever preys incessantly upon the
bodies of those miserable creatures. It appears that the
magistrates, conscious of the disgrace of suffering the
peighbourhood to be barbarised by such spectacles, tried
to repress them by the powers of the new vagrant law;
but from the numbers to he dealt with, after the first dis-
play of legal severity, the attempt had to be abandoned as
absurd and inhuman.
REPEAL. —At the meeting on Monday, Mr. John
O'Connell adverted at some length to the affairs of Italy,
and expressed his regret that Ireland had not a domestic
legislature, which would not hesitate for a moment in es-
pousing the cause of the Pope. The Rev. Mr. Coghlan
expressed his opinion that Ireland should demand from
Government permission to make a demonstration in fa-
vour of his Holiness. If permitted, he bad no doubt but
an army of 50,000 men could at once be raised to fight
under the standard of independence in Italy, and protect
the sovereign Pontiff in his glorious career against oppres-
sion and tyranny. Mr. P. S. Butler, M.P., said that,
notwithstanding the abundant harvest, the labouring po-
pulation would be in a worse position during the ensuing
winter than they were at the same period last year. The
rent was £67.

THE LATE MELANCHOLY OCCURRENCE AT CASHEL.—
Mr. Francis O'Ryan, jun., has addressed a letter to the
Tipperary Vindicator, in the course of which he denies
in the most positive terms the horrid charge preferred
against him by his father as being totally at variance with
the real facts of the case. He says that on the night in
question he retired to bed early, suffering from toothache
and swelled face, that his mother-in-law, hearing his
groans as she passed his room, entered it, and that his
father, with whom he had been on bad terms for some
time, rushed into the room violently accusing both, on
which the lady retired, and Mr. O'Ryan, sen., locked his
son's door, taking the key with him. The latter called to
him for the key—their bed-rooms adjoining each other—
and was answered by a pistol-shot. The lady has been
married 9 years and has had two children by her husband.

SKIBBEREEN.-This ill-fated district seems
destined to preserve a melancholy notoriety. The North-
ern Whig publishes the following extract of a letter,
dated Sep. 7, addressed to a gentleman in Belfast by a
friend who lately visited Skibbereen :—" I have been for
a week past staying here, in the neighbourhood of Skib-
bereen, of famine notoriety. It is impossible to convey
to a stranger any adequate idea of the state of things
in the parishes about this quarter. It is, perhaps, a
low estimate, to say that one-fourth of the population
have perished. You may see house after house shut up,
all their former inmates being dead ; and there is scarcely
a farmer's family that has not been more or less thinned.
The mortality among children was terrific; infants died
in hundreds, their mother's breasts yielding them no
nourishment. The misfortune is, that whole districts are
lying waste and uncultivated, save only where the scat-
tered gentry, having got up some farms, have, by dint of
exertion, succeeded in getting them cropped. The pros-
pect is most alarming. What the famine and pestilence
did before, the present dread of ruinous taxation is now
doing. People are getting more and more indifferent
about agriculture, thinking they will only expend money
in raising harvests which the tax-collector will reap.
There is a complete reign of terror about here."