Ireland nearly 10,000
"houses" with one room and one window apiece, wretched cabins inhabited
by about 40,000 people, the peat smoke from the fire in which escapes
through a hole in the thatch, gives some idea of the miserable
conditions existing in parts of the West of Ireland. Of the quarter of a
million of cottages in the second class of the Census--those, that is,
with from one to four doors and windows--a large number also no doubt
are quite unfit for habitation, and do much in the way of leading to the
asylum or to emigration. It is to secure the replacement of these by
cheap sanitary and comfortable cottages that the Labourers' Acts, ever
since the first of the series introduced by the Irish Party in 1883,
have been passed. By them Boards of Guardians, and by the Local
Government Act, Rural District Councils, may build such cottages. In
1905, 18,000 cottages had been built under existing Acts, and they are
let to tenants at rents of from 10d. to 1s. a week, but the difficulty
had always been to effect the improvements sufficiently rapidly owing to
the costly and elaborate procedure which involved an appeal to the Privy
Council and a heavy burden on the rates of a poverty-stricken community.
The Act of 1906 has simplified procedure by replacing the appeal to the
Privy Council by an appeal to the Local Government Board, and that it
was needful is seen from the fact that under Wyndham's Act only 25
cottages were built. It is hoped thereby to circumvent the apathy of
District Councils, and their parsimony is to be appeased by the fact
that the funds, which are largely derived from economics in the Irish
Executive are advanced at a rate of interest, not as heretofore of 4-7/8
per cent., but, as in the case of land purchase advances, of 3-1/4 per
cent., repayable in a period of 68-1/2 years. The urgency of the problem
is obvious. The bearing of this state of affairs in rural housing on the
fact that in 1904 two out of every thirteen deaths were due to
tuberculosis shows that it is impossible to overestimate its importance,
and I think that this condition of things, put side by side with the
other economic facts with which I have dealt, are a sufficient reply to
those who declare that conditions in Ireland would appear _couleur de
rose_ were they not seen through the jaundiced eyes of a discontented
people.

If the catalogue of Acts of Parliament which have been found necessary
to effect the transformation of the system