Description Quarter Acre
We?re your lords and masters,
Renowned for elocution;
We?ve derived a formula
Defining destitution:
You rent a quarter acre
So you cannot be poor,
Though bailiffs and the famine fever
Pound upon your door.
And no one will protect you
Unless he is a Quaker.
Starve and die. You occupy
A quarter of an acre.
My name is William Gregory,
M.P. for Dublin city;
I need a flutter now and then
So there?s no room for pity.
My horse turned lame at Ascot ?
I fear it cost me dear,
And I don?t give a bugger
If your bairns have diarrhoea.
We?re your lords and masters,
We?ve got it all worked out.
We?ve pushed it through our Parliament
So there?s no room for doubt.
Your Saviour made it plain to you:
?To God and Caesar render.?
You want assistance? Quit the land,
Be abject, and surrender.
This ruling it is law, you know,
There?s no room for debate:
Precisely what?s required
For clearing my estate.
Yes we have done with charity;
It opens up the sluice.
You can?t survive without my help?
Then you?re no bloody use.
And no one will protect you
Unless he is a Quaker.
Starve and die. You occupy
A quarter of an acre.
Lyric by Giles Watson, 2010. This song is not an exaggeration of the opinions of William H. Gregory, Conservative M.P. for Dublin city between 1842 and 1847. It was he who suggested the infamous and practically genocidal Quarter Acre Clause which stipulated that the destitute were not eligible for famine relief if they occupied more than a quarter of an acre of land. Families found it necessary to surrender their homes as well as their lands in order to make themselves eligible for assistance, and the end result was mass homelessness and mass death. When Gregory defended his proposal in the Commons, he remarked that many M.P.s had ?insisted that the operation of a clause of this kind would destroy all the small farmers. If it could have such an effect, he did not see of what use such small farmers could possibly be.? (See James S. Donnelly Jr., The Great Irish Potato Famine, Stroud, 2001, p. 102.) Gregory himself inherited a large Galway estate, but frittered away its wealth on gambling in the late 1840s and early 1850s: in the same period, in other words, when a million people starved to death in Ireland. One of the few institutions, secular or spiritual, to come out of the famine years with a commendable record was the Society of Friends, colloquially known as Quakers, which established life-saving soup-kitchens (and courageously manned them at the height of Famine Fever) long before the British government set up watered-down versions of its own.
