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Between 8 and 10 April, John George Adair carried out the Derryveagh evictions in north-west Donegal. Adair, a wealthy land speculator from Queen’s County, had assembled a mountain estate from smaller purchases during the late 1850s. After the unresolved murder of one of his shepherds, and amid a worsening feud over hunting rights and estate authority, he held the tenants collectively responsible for hostility and alleged concealment of the culprit. The evidence does not justify treating the evictions as a simple response to a proven crime: appeals had been made on behalf of the tenants, including one supported by both the Catholic parish priest and the local Church of Ireland rector.
The year must be placed carefully in its wider setting. The Famine’s acute crisis had passed, yet its demographic and social effects were ongoing. The 1851 census recorded an Ireland dramatically reduced from the population counted in 1841; emigration did not stop once hunger receded, but became an enduring feature of Irish life. The great departures of the previous decade had altered households, labour markets and expectations. Young adults, particularly from poorer rural communities, increasingly looked across the Irish Sea or Atlantic rather than towards subdivision of a family holding at home.
