The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-11-10
oUHBR TH1NGss IN KE1RlRY.
Lord Kenmare and the Land Question
 Two Stange Islands.


 Lord Kenmare and the Land Question
 Two Stange Islands.
 Even in Killarney you cannot get wholly away from the land question, writes Sidney Brooks in Harper's Weekly. The great landed proprietor of the neighbohood is Lord Kenmare, who owns an estate of some one hun dred and fifty acres.
 Negotiations have been going on be- tween himself and his tenants-the tenants negotiating through four priests-with a view to the sale and purchase of the estate under theWynd- ham act. Both sides are anxious to make the deal, and the difference be- tween them, in point of money, is very small.
 But money Is not the only thing that counts in these matters, There are four or five evicted tenants on the Kenmare estate, and their position has to be settled before a sale can take place. The case of one of them is worth looking into.
 He rented a town farm at an annual rental of something less than one thou sand dollars a year, fell behind in his rent and was finally evicted. Tn Kerry and probably throughout all Ireland a farm from which a tenant has been evioted must be worked by the land lord or not at all. No one else will look at it, and a man who had the hardi- hood to take it would be shot or boy cotted within week.
 Lord Kenmare has offered to rein state this and the other evicted tenants on his estate on receipt of one years rent in discharge of all arrears. The Estates commissioners have found themselves legally unable to ratify the arrangement and the transaction there- fore still hangs fire.
 Lord Kenmare is the head of one of the oldest Catholic families in Ireland. He is also Lord Lieutenant of the county, and as such has the privilege of advising the Lord Chancellor in re- gard to appointments to the maglste- rial bench.
 heard it said more than once in the district that if he would only nominate te so and so to the bench the sale would quickly go through. 1 also found it a matter of common gossip that the evicted tenant I have alluded to, a master" of the first water, intends when reinstated to sell his farm at once. There is no doubt he will net a handsome profit.
 In the Kenmare river there are two islands that must be unique in these attitudes. One of them is owned by Lord DunraVen and the other by lo- cal justice of the peace. I have gone over both of them in a crescendo of wonderment, asking myself repeatedly whether I was in Kerry or Algeria. For, thanks to the Gulf Stream, these 1.-two islands, on which thirty or forty yeasr ago not a single tree was to be found, and which were mainly bog and moor, have been turned into semi-trop- ] ical paradises. Tree ferns grow there in the open air, palms, bamboo and eu- calyptus flourish there as though on , their native soil, and many plants and shrubs from Australia and New Zea- land do better, I am told, in these is- lands than in their own homes,
 To pass from the bleak mainland into | this growth of hothouse vegetation is to travel two thousand miles due south l in ten or fifteen minutes. Lord Lans- downe. who owns an estate near by, has, I am told, made even more of t than Lord DunraYen and his neighbor