Note (return) — Chapter X

From Cloondadauv to Loughrea we had a long but very interesting drive, passing on the way, and at no great distance from each other, Father Coen’s neat, prosperous-looking presbytery of Ballinakill, and the shop and house of a local boat-builder named Tully, who is pleasantly known in the neighbourhood as “Dr. Tully,” by reason of his recommendation of a very particular sort of “pills for landlords.” The presbytery is now occupied by Father Coen, who finds it becoming his position as the moral teacher and guide of his people to be in arrears of two and a half years with the rent of his holding, and who is said to have entertained Mr. Blunt and other sympathising statesmen very handsomely on their visit to Loughrea and Woodford,15 “Dr.” Tully being one of the guests invited to meet them.16 Not far from this presbytery, Mr. Tener showed me the scene of one of the most cowardly murders which have disgraced this region. Of Loughrea, the objective of our drive this morning, Sir George Trevelyan, I am told, during his brief rule in Ireland, found it necessary to say that murder had there become an institution. Woodford, previously a dull and law-abiding spot, was illuminated by a lurid light of modern progress about three years ago, upon the transfer thither in the summer of 1885 of a priest from Loughrea, familiarly known as “the firebrand priest.”