"Ireland offers opposition in the person of the 'gombeen man.'

"Paddy Gallagher up in Dungloe in the Rosses will give you an idea of the poverty of the Irish countryside, of the extent that the poverty is due to the gombeen men, 'the bosses of the Rosses,' and of the ability of the co-operative society to develop and create industry even in such a locality.

The gombeen man told them.

"Let your da' not worry," said the fat gombeen man pompously to Paddy.

Paddy, full of desire to banish the brooding discouragement from the room, hastened to repeat the words of the gombeen man.

His father had confided to him that they were in great debt to the gombeen man.

Well worth twelve dollars the six months!" "What do you want to know for?" asked the gombeen man, when at the end of Paddy's back-breaking six months, Paddy and his father brought him the fifteen dollars and asked how much they still owed.

The gombeen man refuses accounts to everyone but the priest, magistrate, doctor and teacher.

Some had run so far behind that the gombeen man had served writs on them, obtained judgment against their holdings, and could evict them at pleasure.

One day he and his father shopped at the gombeen store together.

But the gombeen man presented him with a bill for twenty-one shillings and three pence.

The gombeen man insisted that Paddy's father had given eighteen shillings, and Paddy was being charged just three shillings and three pence interest.

There was doubt on the faces of those tied to the gombeen man.

But the gombeen man wasn't "taking it lying down."

When Paddy became the political rival of the gombeen man for the county council, there was a joint debate.

He said: "It used to belong to the gombeen man."

Dungloe men wanted to fish, but the gombeen man would never lend money to promote industry.