They declared they could only pay L3, 15s., or a half-year's rent, and this only if they got an abatement of 15s.

Yet these same tenants were then paying Mr.Richardson L50 a year for a grass farm, and about L12 for meadows, as well as L30 a year more for a grass farm to an adjoining landlord.
Another tenant who held a farm at L13, 5s.

a year declared he could only pay L6, 12s.6d., or a half-year's rent, if he got an abatement of L1, 6s.6d.A very short time before, this tenant had taken a grass farm from an adjoining landlord, and he was so anxious to get it that he showed the landlord a bundle of large notes, amounting to rather more than L300 sterling, in order to prove his solvency! The same tenant has since written a letter to Mr.Richardson offering L50 a year for a grass farm! All these campaigners, Mr.Richardson says, "with one noble exception, the wife of a tenant who was ill, declined to pay a penny of rent beyond November 1st, 1886," stating that they were "absolutely unable" to do more.

So they all left the May 1887 rent unpaid, and the hanging gale to November 1887, which, however, they were not even asked to pay.
The morning after the settlement many of the tenants who, when they were all present in a body on the previous evening, had declared their "inability" to pay the half-year's rent due down to May 1887, individually came to Mr.Richardson unasked, and paid it, some saying they had "borrowed the money that night," but others frankly declaring that they dared not break the rule publicly, having been ordered by the League only to pay to November 1886, for fear of the consequences.

These would have been injury to their cattle, or the burning of their hay, or possibly murder.
Of the country about Kilkenny, I am told, as of the country about Carlow, that nearly or quite seventy per cent, of the labourers are dependent upon the landlords from November to May for such employment as they get.
The shopkeepers, too, are in a bad way, being in many cases reduced to the condition of mere agents of the great wholesale houses elsewhere, and kept going by these houses mainly in the hope of recovering old debts.