1925

Agrarian trouble

Patrick McNeill, a large landowner, of Rathville, Dunsandle, Athenry, while motoring home from Mass on Sunday last, was fired on from behind a wall on the roadside by several men who were concealed behind the wall as he passed.

At the moment he appeared, a fusillade of four or five shots rang out, and one struck Mr. McNeill on the neck, inflicting a nasty wound. Notwithstanding this, however, Mr. McNeill drove on while several shots rang out after him, striking the back and sides of his car and shattering it.

Mr. McNeill reported the matter to the Civic Guards at Bookeen, and Sergeant Quinn and other Guards proceeded to the place, and subsequently arrested a young man belonging to the district, who was remanded by Peace Commissioner P. C. Callinan, Craughwell, to the next District Court at Loughrea.

Agrarian trouble is said to be the motive.

1950

War over meat

Our Dublin Correspondent writes: – I think the victuallers are on the war path. Nobody watching their meeting here on Sunday, when representatives of the trade from all over the country gathered to make a mass protest against the barbed wire with which the Minister for Industry and Commerce has surrounded them and to ask them to remove it, could come to any other conclusion.

This year, they hope, is to be their year of liberation. They want control to end.

They undoubtedly regard themselves as being the most harassed section of important traders there are. They deal in a commodity which is the only agricultural product for which there is a very good price when exported, and they are now buying on a rising market. The farmers, they say, are not obliged to sell cattle at a fixed price and the same farmers are also able to say that they will not accept less than a certain price for milk, and nobody dare say nay.

The victuallers believe they should be able to follow the farmers’ example. They think that the time has arrived when they should be able to assert their rights, either through increased prices for meat, decreased prices for the fat stock, or lower wages to employees, or all three.

Pictured: A selection of the crowd and winners at the Castlepark Talent Competition on September 8, 1988. The Liam McCarthy Cup was in attendance just days after Galway had won the All-Ireland, overcoming Tipperary to take the title for the second successive year