The Framework of Home Rule

by Erskine Childers

It is not part of my scheme to describe in detail the various movements, agricultural, industrial, economic, literary, political, which in the last twenty years have contributed to this national revival. Some have a world-wide fame, all have been excellently described at one time or another by writers of talent and insight.[46] My purpose is to note their characteristics and progress, and to estimate their political significance. In the first place it must be remembered that some of the most important of the modern legislative measures have been initiated and promoted by Home Rulers and Unionists, Roman Catholics and Protestants, acting in friendly co-operation and throwing aside their political and religious antagonisms. Such was the origin of the great Land Purchase Act of 1903, which Mr. Wyndham drafted on the basis of an agreement reached at a friendly conference of landlords and representatives of tenants. But a far more interesting and hopeful instance of co-operation had taken place seven years earlier. One of the very few really constructive measures of the last twenty years, the Act of 1899 for setting up the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, was the direct outcome of the recommendations of the Recess Committee brought together in 1895 and 1896 by Sir Horace Plunkett; a Committee containing Nationalist and Unionist Members of the House of Commons, Tory and Liberal Unionist peers, Ulster captains of industry, the Grand Master of the Belfast Orangemen, and an eminent Jesuit.[47] In its reunion of men divided by bitter feuds, it was just the kind of Conference that assembled in Durban in 1908, six years after a devastating war, to discuss and to create the framework of South African Union. That Conference was the natural outcome of the grant of Home Rule to the defeated Boer States. The Irish Conference, succeeding a land-war far more destructive and demoralizing, was brought together in spite of the absence of Home Rule, and the prejudice it had to overcome,[48] is a measure of the fantastically abnormal conditions produced by the denial of self-government. There lay Ireland, an island with a rich soil and a clever population, yet terribly backward, far behind England, far behind all the progressive nations of Europe in agriculture and industry, her population declining, her land passing out of cultivation,[49] her strongest sons and daughters hurrying away to enrich with their wits and sinews distant lands. There, in short, lay a country groaning for intelligent development by the concentrated energies of her own people.

"We have in Ireland," runs the first paragraph of the Report of the Committee, "a poor country practically without manufactures—except for the linen and shipbuilding of the north, and the brewing and distilling of Dublin—dependent upon agriculture, with its soil imperfectly tilled, its area under cultivation decreasing, and a diminishing population without industrial habits or technical skill."

The leeway to make up was enormous. To go no farther back than the institution of the Penal Code and the deliberate destruction of the woollen industry, two centuries of callous repression at the hands of an external authority had maimed and exhausted the country whose condition the Committee had met to consider. These facts the members of the Committee frankly recognized in that part of the Report which is entitled with gentle irony "Past Action of the State." Here, then, was a purely Irish problem, intimately concerning every Irishman, poor or rich, Roman Catholic or Protestant, a problem of which Great Britain, though responsible both for its existence and its solution, knew and cared little. The really strange thing is, not that representative Irishmen should have met together to consider and prescribe for the deplorable economic condition of their country, but that they should not also, like the South African Conference, have drafted a Constitution for Ireland, on the sound ground that a system of government which had promoted and sustained the evils they described could never, with the best will in the world, become a good government for Ireland. Yet for a brief space of time these men actually had Home Rule, and by virtue of that privilege they did better work for Ireland in six months than had been done in two centuries.

What is more, they used the Home Rule principle in their recommendations for the establishment of a Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. "We think it essential," they reported on p. 101, "that the new Department should be in touch with the public opinion of the classes whom its work concerns, and should rely largely for its success upon their active assistance and co-operation." Its chief, they added, should be a Minister directly responsible to Parliament, and on p. 103 they advocated a Consultative Council, whose functions should be—(1) To keep the Department in direct touch with the public opinion of those classes whom the work of the Ministry concerns; and (2) to distribute some of the responsibility for administration amongst those classes. Now these, in Ireland, were revolutionary proposals. The idea of any part of the Government "being in touch with public opinion" was wholly new. The idea of "distributing responsibility for administration" amongst the subjects of administration was startlingly novel. Ireland, both before and after the Union, had always been governed on a diametrically opposite principle. Since the Union, when Irish departmental Ministers, never responsible to the people, disappeared, not one of the host of nominated Irish Boards was legally amenable to Irish public opinion. Not one had a separate Minister responsible even to the Parliament at Westminster, which was not an Irish Parliament. A fortiori, not one relied on the co-operation and advice of the classes for whose benefit it was supposed to exist.

Proposed, nevertheless, by a group of representative Irishmen, the scheme for a democratically constituted Department of Agriculture passed smoothly into law as soon as the machinery for ascertaining public opinion on the matters at issue had been brought into existence. Mr. Gerald Balfour, the Chief Secretary, was engaged at the time upon his measure for the extension of Local Government to Ireland. This measure became law in 1898, and the Department Act in 1899. Under that Act, the duty was laid upon each of the new County Councils of electing two members to serve upon a Consultative Council of Agriculture, to which a minority of nominated members was added, and this Council in its turn elects two-thirds of the members of an Agricultural Board, and supplies four representatives to a Board of Technical Instruction, which, like the Council and the Agricultural Board, has a predominantly popular character.[50]

At the summit stands the Minister, or Vice-President, as he is called (for in accordance with ancient custom, the Chief Secretary is nominally in supreme control of this as of all other Irish Departments), and a large and efficient staff of permanent officials. He and his staff have a large centralized authority, but this authority is subject to a constitutional check in the shape of a veto wielded by the Boards over the expenditure of the Endowment Fund. What is more important, policy tends to be shaped in accordance with popular views by the existence of the Council and the Boards.

Here, then, is the germ of responsible government. At first sight a critic might exclaim: "Why, here is democracy pushed to a point unknown even in Great Britain, where Government Departments are wholly independent of Local Councils." That is in a limited sense true, and it is quite arguable that British Departments would be the better for an infusion of local control. But we must not be misled by a false analogy. Great Britain reaches the Irish ideal by other means. Her departmental Ministers are directly responsible to a predominantly British House of Commons where a hostile vote can at any moment eject them from office.[51] There is no Irish Parliament, nor any kind of predominantly Irish body which is vested with the same power. The Vice-President of the Irish Department of Agriculture, an institution concerned exclusively with Irish affairs, whether he sits in the House of Commons or not (and for two years Mr. T.W. Russell had not a seat at Westminster), could not be ejected from office even by a unanimous vote of Irish Members of the House, with the moral backing of a unanimous Irish people.[52] That is one of the anomalous results of the Union, and it was a recognition, though rather a confused one, of this anomaly, that inspired the ingenious compromise invented by the Recess Committee for introducing an element of popular control. But what a light the compromise throws on the anomaly which evoked it! Is it common sense to make these elaborate arrangements for promoting an Irish Department on an Irish popular basis while recoiling in terror from the prospect of crowning them with a Minister responsible to ah Irish Parliament? The consequence is that even in this solitary example of an Irish Department under semi-popular control we see the subtle taint of Crown Colony Government. Popular opinion, acting indirectly, first through the Council and then through the Boards, can legally paralyze the Department by declining to appropriate money in the way it prescribes, while possessing no legal power to enforce a different policy or change the personnel of administration. This is only an object-lesson. I hasten to add that such a paralysis has never taken place, though some acrimonious controversy, natural enough under the anomalous state of things, has arisen over the office of Vice-President. There is now only one means by which Irish opinion can, if it be so disposed, displace the holder of the office, and that is a thoroughly unreliable and unhealthy means, namely, through pressure brought to bear by one or other of the Irish Parliamentary parties upon a newly elected British Ministry.[53] But why in the world should the British party pendulum determine an important Irish matter like this? Why, a fortiori, should it determine the appointment to the office of Chief Secretary, the irresponsible Prime Minister, or, rather the autocrat of Ireland? It is the reductio ad absurdum of the Union.

The Department commands a large measure of confidence. It would command far greater confidence if it were responsible to an Irish Parliament; but Irishmen are sensible enough to perceive that as long as the Union lasts, everyone is interested in making the existing system work smoothly and well. The general policy as laid down in the first instance, by the first Vice-President, Sir Horace Plunkett, has been sound and wise;[54] to proceed slowly, while building up a staff of trained instructors, inspectors, organizers; to devote money and labour mainly to education, both industrial and agricultural, and to evoke self-reliance and initiative in the people by, so far as possible, spending money locally only where a local contribution is raised and a local scheme prepared. The last aim met with a fine response. Every County Council in Ireland raises a rate, and has a scheme for agricultural and technical instruction. I can only enumerate some of the multifarious functions which the Department evolved for itself or took over from various other unrelated Boards and concentrated under single control. It gives instruction in agriculture and rural domestic economy (horticulture, butter-making, bee-keeping, poultry-keeping, etc.) through schools, colleges, or agricultural stations under its own direction, through private schools for both sexes, and through an extensive system of itinerant courses conducted (in 1909) by 128 trained instructors. It gives premiums for the breeding of horses, cattle, asses, poultry, swine. It conducts original research, it experiments in crops, and, among other things, is slowly resuscitating the depressed industry of flax-growing, and starting a wholly new industry in the southern counties, that of early potatoes. It sprays potatoes, prescribes for the diseases of trees, crops, and stock, advises on manures and feeding-stuffs, teaches forestry, and gives scholarships at various colleges for proficiency in agricultural science. On the side of Technical Instruction it teaches and encourages all manner of small industries, such as lace-making. It superintends all technical instruction in secondary schools, and organizes and subsidizes similar instruction in a multitude of different subjects under schemes prepared by local authorities, while at the same time carrying on an important and extensive system of training teachers. It also superintends sea-fisheries and improves harbours.

The material results have been great; the moral results perhaps even greater. Just as we should expect, wherever education goes, and wherever men work together for economic improvement, unnatural antagonisms of race and religion tend to disappear. This is not the result of any direct influence wielded by the Department, which never finds it necessary to lecture people on the duty of mutual tolerance; it is the result of common sense and a small experience in Home Rule. High officials of the Department have informed me that their work, for all intents and purposes, is unhampered by local religious prejudices. A spirit of keen and wholesome rivalry permeates the people. County and Borough Committees in districts almost wholly Roman Catholic, with large powers of patronage, almost invariably appoint the best men, regardless of creed and local influence. Anyone who wishes to gain a glimpse of the real Belfast of the present and the future, as distinguished from the ugly, bigoted caricature of a great city which some even of its own citizens perversely insist on displaying to their English friends, a Belfast as tolerant and generous as it is energetic and progressive, should visit the magnificent Municipal Technical Institute, where 6,000 boys and girls, Roman Catholic and Protestant, mix together on equal terms, and derive the same benefit from an extraordinary variety of educational courses in a building furnished with lecture-rooms, laboratories, experimental plant, and gymnasia, of a perfection hardly to be surpassed in any city of the United Kingdom.

Here is something grand and fruitful accomplished in eleven years, and it is the outcome, be it remembered, of original, constructive thought devoted by Irishmen to the needs of their own country.