ABSTRACT
The Ballygombeen Bequest tells the story of an English absentee landlord and his relationship with a family which lives in a cottage on the estate he has inherited in Ireland. The estate consists of the cottage and a bungalow. The landlord, Lt-Col Holliday-Cheype, uses the bungalow as a holiday home for rich tourists, and the O’Leary family act as unpaid caretakers. Eventually, he swindles them out of any rights they may have had to the cottage the family has lived in for more than a century, and, when the husband, Seamus, grows too old to be useful, orders the family to leave, intending to sell the whole property to a development company. When the son, Padraic, tries to organize resistance, the Official ira offers help. With the help of a local contractor, Hagan, they blow up the bungalow. But a British intelligence agent, tipped off by Holliday-Cheype, and an agent of the Dublin Special Branch bait a trap for Padraic. They persuade him to go north of the border to sell ponies, and there he’s arrested by the British army. He dies under questioning and is dumped back across the border, where his death is attributed to internecine strife between branches of the ira. But in the meantime, Hagan, the contractor, has pointed out to Holliday-Cheype that nobody’s going to buy his property now that the ira has put its mark on it. Hagan gets the property cheap, while the English landlord says he’ll move on to Europe to see what pickings there are there.
