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Pat Smyth, a civil servant with the National Assistance Board in West Tyrone from the 1930's to the 1950's, recalls his memories, experiences and the larger than life personalities he encountered on the way.
Many of the wee farms with which we were concerned at our office in Omagh were unable patches of mountain land. Often the occupiers had no idea how they stood about title unless, perhaps, a dispute had arisen with a neighbour about trespass or something of that nature when solicitors would have had to tease out problems over intestacy, wills not proven, and that sort of thing.
We avoided many minefields of that kind by charging the occupiers with the profits worked out with the yardstick given in the code, which was based on dates provided by the then Ministry of Agriculture.
The official figures were of course, 'cuckoo' in this context. An acre of potatoes required £x of labour and fifty sheep, ditto, according to the book, but our clients had their own way of working and it certainly was not as the Ministry men expected.
There was more neglect than good husbandry. However, we did the best we could, even writing-off labour against sheep dogs when need arose. The skulduggery practised by a minority of well-heeled rogues in West Tyrone in order to grab ownership of a few acres of semi-worthless land from a poor uneducated neighbour was an eye-opener.
The usual ploy was to lend money to some poor creature until they could not afford the interest, then pressurising the victim to assign title, maybe with a caveat, 'subject to right or residence' in the small cabin, was commonplace.
Sometimes the grazing of a goat or permission to keep a dozen or so fowl was written into the deed. We met poor widows who were being hounded out by letting a roof fall in around them, or even so harassed over trespass of a goat or fowl, that they had had to give up livestock.
The loss of a crop of sweet milk and/or fresh eggs was a sore blow to some old person living alone at the back of a mountain obviously did not worry the buckos who did the deprivation, but it did make one's blood boil, especially where the miscreant was posing as an aristocrat, which was not unusual.
Pat Smyth, 2001
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