First
Can we drop the hostility please
My suggesting the good and great were not angels seem to have trodden on a few toes - good - it was intended to
Plenty more where that came from

"by his Housekeeper in the form of her letter dismissing the allegations"
How can this be considered any more "evidence" than the dozens of local reports or the twenty-odd songs describing his bad behaviour ?
How can someone testify that something "never happened" unless the accusations are specified?
Her statement amounts no no more than "'is lordship would never do such a thing"
Her accusation that the women were to blame for getting themselves into trouble and making it up amount's to little more than the common reaction to all rapes "she 'ad it comin' to 'er your hounors - she wuz a bad lot all round" - classic cap-doffing
What else is a woman who relies on sucking up to the gentry for her living going to say?
Nobody seems to want to discuss the actual surroundings of the situation and the power of (virtually) life and death these people wielded and the proven way they used it to exile millions and evict many more millions to homelessness and permanent exile
Nobody has responded to his feller's reputation as described by his fellow peers - if they said he was bad in the circumstances that prevailed at the e time - he must have been vicious prick.
It was a fairly common suggestion that the landed gentry liked to dip their quills in the local inkwells - why not Leitrim?

Buck House meeting
T.P. O'Connor was a gofer for the National Party and was instrumental, along with the Journalist, Joe Devlin, in setting up the meeting
I put it in my original library notes but the staff must have considered it superfluous for an Irish audience
"I now note is not an excellent example encapsulating an actual historical event, but a satirical view of an actual historical event."
If you believe that satire cannot be "an excellent example encapsulating an actual historical event" then you obviously haven't read Swift's recipe for cooking dead children to feed the poor, or Jaroslav Hasek's 'Good Soldier Schweik' showing how a supposed idiot-soldier used his idiocy to survive a devastating war - or many other such works that use humour to accurately recreate bureaucracy or the waste of human life or military incompetence - Catch 22 is still a classic in my opinion.
This song does exactly that - it deals with some of the most complicated stumbling blocks of Home Rule by poking fun at the surroundings of the conference - in seven verses   
Brilliant in my book

I have steered clear of the Grapes of Wrath argument - I've read and heard too much of the whitewashing of The Great depression to be bothered, just as I have, as a worker, been expected to take whatever shit a boss throws at us for as little as he cares to pay, and end up being the criminal when we bother to complain
I put up what I believe to be a fair description of the period - if nobody is going to discuss it, it remains the reliable document I believe it to be.
If anybody hasn't come across it, MacColl and Seeger published a fascinating monograph entitled 'Shellback' based on interviews with Ben Bright, a welsh seaman who jumped ship in the thirties and became an I.W.W. activist, working with such people as T-Bone Slim and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn - fascinating and inspiring stuff
PM me if you have a problem getting it
Jim Carroll