Protesters backed by Sinn Fein have occupied the Duke of Devonshire’s bookshop, after claims that sheep farmers on his historic Irish estate faced rent increases of about 900 per cent.
The disturbance at Heywood Hill, in Mayfair, central London, could be catalogued under history, politics, the Easter Rising, aristocracy and economics. It was directed towards the shop’s owner, Peregrine Cavendish, 81, the 12th Duke of Devonshire, who has a 3,237-hectare estate at Lismore, Co Waterford, in the south east of Ireland.
Sheep farmers in the rugged Knockmealdown Mountains claim that some of their rents are being increased from €520 (£454) per hectare to €5,200.
Thomas Fitzgerald, who traces his family’s involvement in sheep farming in the Knockmealdowns to the 1600s, told The Journal:
We’re getting nowhere with it and we want to negotiate on it, so the lads then in London asked what could they do. They knew the duke has a bookshop in London so they did a sit-in protest to draw attention to it, to say to the duke that this is not just a local story.
He said that a “small number” of the protesters hailed from Lismore . . .
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