“Those torchlights.”
Committee—“Put out those torchlights. Do you see anything else illegal?”
“You had better disperse.”
Committee—“Do you tell us, now, that you came here with your authority and your armed force to tell us that we must not walk through the streets of Skibbereen?”
“I do not.”
The committee ordered the band to play up “Garryowen” and march on. The boys did so; the magistrates moved aside; the police behind them opened way, and the procession marched twice through the streets, and ended the demonstration by the reading of an address.
The marriage of England’s Prince of Wales, in ’63, came on a few nights after we had the Polish sympathy meeting in Skibbereen, and some of the loyal people of the town illuminated their houses. There was a public newsroom in the “Prince of Wales’ Hotel,” and as the loyalists had paid the proprietor seven pounds for illuminating the house, those of them who were members of the newsroom held a private meeting, and passed a resolution that the windows of that room be illuminated too.
So they were illuminated. But some of the committee of the Polish procession were members of the newsroom, and when they heard that it was aflame with loyalty, they went to the room; called a meeting; pointed to one of the rules which excluded politics from the place, and denounced those who held a hole-and-corner meeting to introduce them there that day. A crowd was outside the hotel listening to the fight inside; they cheered and groaned, according as the several speakers spoke. One of the loyalists inside said it was “a mob meeting” they had in the room. “Then we may as well have mob law,” said I, and making for the windows, I tore down the transparencies, the fil-dols and the English flags, and threw them into the street.
The I. R. B. movement generated a spirit of manhood in the land that the enemy could not crush, and cannot crush, if we do not prove ourselves dastards. Acts of hostility, similar to those I speak of, were occurring everywhere; and if the people only had arms to back their spirit, they would do something worthy of them.
The Gladstones know this, and use all their ingenuity to keep the dangerous weapons from the people, “lest,” as one of them said lately, “the people would hurt themselves.” But, “beg, borrow or steal” them, we must have arms before we can have our own again.