3-070-723 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches in Ireland: Property Defence Association: digging potatoes at Woodgyft, Co. Kilkenny, 1881. Engraving from a sketch by '...our Special Artist, Mr. A. O'Kelly [depicting] some volunteer gentlemen potato-diggers, members of the Property Defence Association, labouring to save the produce of a field belonging to a "Boycotted" agriculturist...We regret to observe that there is scarcely any apparent decrease of the frequency of agrarian outrages; and some of them are so ferocious and dastardly as to justify the sternest indignation - not only against their perpetrators, who have legally deserved the gallows or penal servitude, but against the Land League agitators, whose moral guilt is scarcely less...Incendiary fires have taken place in the county of Meath and other parts of Ireland, to destroy the property of farmers who disobeyed the orders of the Land League; and cattle have been mutilated. The service of legal notices of eviction, by the sheriffs and sub-sheriffs, has been obstructed by riotous mobs; and two members of the Dublin Ladies' Land League, Miss Reynolds and another, have taken a conspicuous part on these occasions, exhorting the tenants not to pay their rents'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.