1887
The Coolgreany Evictions
The Plan of Campaign was a national rent strike: tenants would pool a reduced rent, offer it to the landlord, and if he refused, withhold rent entirely. The Brooke Estate tenants adopted it in December 1886. The landlord, George Frederick Brooke - a Dublin wine merchant, High Sheriff and Justice of the Peace - refused to negotiate. From July 1887 the evictions began. Bailiffs, Emergency Men, RIC encampments in the fields. Around 300 people were put out of their homes. A Dublin photographer, William Lawrence, sent a man to document it and the resulting Coolgreany Eviction Album became one of the most reproduced images of Irish landlordism. Parliament debated the scenes in late July. The cricket bat that died for Ireland - Pat O'Brien's, broken at one eviction - became a relic of the resistance.
The landlord
The Brooke Estate
The man on the other side of those evictions was George Frederick Brooke of Castleknock, not a member of the old Wexford gentry but a Dublin businessman with property here. He held out for the full rent against a tenancy that had been hit by years of falling agricultural prices. The Plan of Campaign was a strategy of last resort and Coolgreany was where it turned into a set piece. The estate eventually passed under the Land Acts, as most of them did, and the tenants - or their grandchildren - bought the fields they'd been thrown off.
Croghan Kinsella, 1795
The Wicklow gold rush
In early September 1795 it became known that gold could be picked out of the river gravels on the northern slope of Croghan Kinsella, the mountain three miles north of Coolgreany on the Wicklow side. About 300 women, with crowds of men and children, were sifting the stream within weeks - Ireland's only gold rush. The Crown took over in 1796, passed a Goldmines Act in 1797, and over the next few years extracted 944 ounces at a cost greater than the gold was worth. Mining resumed in fits and starts through the 1800s. The river is still called the Goldmines River. Total recorded production since 1795 is around 300 kilos. Hobbyists still pan it.