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322 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
contributions. Furthermore, even in parishes where no Protestants resided, except maybe for the clergyman and his sexton and their families, all Catholic residents of that parish still had to pay their tithe to the aforementioned clergyman and keep his church in good order and repair. It is recorded tht the average annual income of the Protestant Church at this time was about £600,000 of which £400,000 was tithe.
An organised resistance to the payment of these tithes began about the year 1830. Con- sequently the Tithe Proctors had to seek the support of the police, and in some cases the military, to assist them in making seizures from those who refused to pay. They seized cattle, if the people had them, or their household utensils, their bits and pieces of furniture, their beds, blankets, in fact anything that the proctors could later sell at auction was taken in lieu of the tithe. Unsurprisingly, conflicts, sometimes resulting in loss of life frequently took place between the peasantry and the forces of the Crown. Thirteen individuals were killed in an encounter at Newtownbarry, county Wexford; eleven policemen died in a disturbance at Carrickshock, county Kilkenny, while over fifty people were killed and wounded while resist- ing a joint force of police and military at Rathcormack, county Cork.
The serious loss of life finally forced the Government to deal with the tithe agitation and they did so in three measures:
(1) A drastic “Coercion” Act which was passed in 1833; (2) The Church Temporalities Act of 1833 which reduced the number of Protestant Archbishops and Bishops and abol- ished the Church Rate, the rate levied for the maintenance of Protestant Churches; and (3) The Tithe Bill (1838), which converted the tithes, reduced by one-fourth, into a charge on the land payable by the landlords-this simply meant that the landlord instead of the Tithe Proctor now collected the reduced tithes. In other words, the tenant gained nothing by this change, as the landlord added the tithes to the rent.
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