Ireland as it is, and as it would be under Home Rule

by Robert John Buckley

A man of few words said:—"Under Home Rule the landlords may take their hook at once. Their property will disappear instanter. The tenant has already more lien on the land than the fee-simple in toto is worth, and with a Nationalist Parliament he would pay no rent at all. The judges would not grant processes, and if they did their warrants could not be enforced. The destruction of the landlord class means the destruction of English influence in Ireland. A short time ago two men were talking together. One was doubtful, and said, 'Michael Davitt says we must have only five acres of land. Now you have twenty-five acres, you'll lose twenty.' 'Ye didn't read it right,' said the other. ''Tis the landlords and them that holds a thousand and two thousand acres that'll be dispossessed, and their land divided among the people. In six years we'll have the counthry independent, and then we'll do as we like. Every Saxon will be cleared out of the counthry. Only keep yer tongue between yer teeth. Be quiet and wait a bit till ye see what happens.'

"'But,' said the objector, 'them Ulster fellows'll give us no peace. They have arms, and I'm towld they have a lot of sojers among them, and that they're drilled, and have officers, regular military officers. Sure, how would we do as we liked, wid an army of them fellows agin us? And they're devils to fight, they say.'

"'Arrah now, sure, ye're mighty ignorant, thin. Sure, they say they'll not pay taxes. Thin the sojers comes in and shoots them down, and you and I stands by wid our tongues in our cheeks. 'Tis no consarn of ours. We have nothin' to say to it, one way or another. The Orangemen can shoot the troops, and the troops can shoot the Orangemen, and they can murdher each other to their heart's contint, and fight like Kilkenny cats, till there's nothin' left but the tail. And good enough for the likes of them. Sure, twill be great divarshun for them that looks on. And that's the way of it, d'ye mind me?'"

This worthy politician must have been a perfect Machiavelli. His favourite saying was doubtless 'A plague on both your houses,' and with equal certainty his favourite quotation the bardic 'Whether Roderigo kill Cassio, or Cassio kill Roderigo, or each kill the other, every way makes my gain.' His theory of Nationalist progress was four-square and complete, and showed a neat dovetailing of means with the end. There is some justification for his simple faith. He has seen Mr. Gladstone and his supporters, converted en bloc, including the great Sir William Harcourt, styled by the Parnellite sheet "the new-born, emancipator of Ireland," the unambitious and retiring Labouchere, the potent Cunninghame Graham, the profound Conybeare, and the pertinacious Cobb—he has seen these great luminaries throwing in their lot with the sworn enemies of England, and doing all that in them lies to disintegrate and destroy the Empire, and the rude peasant may be pardoned for expecting that the British army will, at his call, complete what these worthies have so well begun. To narrow loyalist liberties, to tax loyalist industry, to create a loyalist rebellion, and to have the loyalists shot by other loyalists is an excellent all-round scheme. This is indeed a high-souled patriotism.

Continuing, my friend said:—"A Romanist neighbour of mine had promised to vote for Lord Frederick Hamilton, for, as he said, he had no confidence in any Irish Parliament. Just before the battle he called and said he must vote the other way, for Father Somebody had called on him and said, 'I hear you are going to vote for Lord Frederick Hamilton.' Admitted. 'Then you may call in Lord Frederick Hamilton to visit you on your death-bed. You can get him to administer the Sacraments of the Church.' 'What could I do?' said the farmer. 'I couldn't go against the priest. I could not incur the anger of my clergy without imperilling my immortal soul. Besides that, I'd be made a mark and a mock of. Perhaps I'd be refused admission to Mass, like the men in South Meath who voted contrary to the orders of the priest. So to save my soul I'll have to vote against my conscience. No use in telling me we will vote by ballot. Them priests knows everything. They fix themselves in the polling booths, and they can read what way ye went in your face. Sure, they know us all inside and out, since we were So high. We couldn't desave them.' Then they always act as personation agents, and they order people who can read and write to say they can't do either. So they have to declare aloud whom they will vote for, and the priest hears for himself. This is the true explanation of the fearful illiteracy of Donegal, as revealed by the voting papers. Is it likely that in one quarter of Donegal—that is, in one-fourth part of one county—there should be more illiterates than in the whole of Scotland? Yet according to the election returns, it was even so. The fact that the people declared themselves illiterate at the orders of the priest, when they were not illiterate, shows how degraded are the people, and how completely they are under the thumb of the priests."

A Protestant clergyman on his holidays, and not belonging to these parts, was very eloquent on the subject of political popery. In all my journeyings I have never interviewed a Protestant parson, save and except Dr. Kane, whom I met in the Royal Avenue, Belfast, along with the Marquess of Londonderry and Colonel Saunderson, as recorded in an early letter. I was disposed to believe that the English public might regard their evidence as being prejudiced, and therefore of little value. But my Raphoe acquaintance was a singularly modest and moderate man, upon whose opinion you at once felt you could rely. He said:—"My Catholic neighbours were friends until lately. Nobody could have been more kind and obliging. There was no sensible difference between us, except that they did not come to church. They would do anything for me and my family; we would do anything for them. Lately they have changed their manner. They have grown cold. Their children playing with mine have let out the secret. Through them we learn that the days of the Protestants are numbered. Father says this, and mother says that. My land is disposed of among my Papist neighbours. All my congregation have similar experiences. This makes things very unpleasant, and nothing can ever bring back the kind, neighbourly feeling of old. The Papist clergy are the cause of it all. Their church is nothing if not absolute, and dominancy is their aim. The Protestant party will get no quarter. I do not say we shall be murdered, or even personally maltreated. But when the large majority of a district want to see the back of you, with the idea of dividing your farm or your Church lands, they have many ways of making things so unpleasant that you would soon be glad to go. For my own part, I should endeavour to leave the country at the earliest possible moment. And that is what 999 Protestants out of 1,000 would tell you. The clergy are inimical to England. Here and there you find a Conservative, and, strange to say, the scholarly men, what you might call the gentlemanly party, are against Home Rule. These, unhappily, are very few. The Maynooth men are violently against England." This cleric called attention to the opinion of Dr. Wylie, of Edinburgh, who has made a special study of the matter. The learned professor says the more palpable decadence of Ireland dates from the erection of Maynooth. Before the institution of this school the Irish priests were educated in France, then the least ultramontane country in popish Europe. They could not be there without imbibing a certain portion of the spirit of "Gallican liberties." It was argued that by educating them at home, we should have a class of priests more national and more attached to British rule; at least we would have gentlemen and scholars, who would humanise their flocks. These have since been shown to be miserable sophisms. "Maynooth is a thoroughly ultramontane school. We have exchanged the French-bred priest, illread in Dens, with low notions of the supremacy, and proportionally high notions of the British Crown, for a race of crafty, Jesuitical, intriguing, thorough-trained priests of the ultramontane school, who recognise but one power in the world—the Pontifical—and who are incurably alienated from British interests and rule. The loud and fearful curses fulminated from the altar, which come rolling across the Channel, mingled with the wrathful howls of a priest-ridden and maddened people, proclaim the result. These are your Maynooth scholars and gentlemen! These are your pious flocks, tended and fed by the lettered priests of Maynooth! Better had we flung our money into the sea, than sent it across the Channel, to be a curse in the first place to Ireland, and a curse in the second place to ourselves, by the demoralising and anti-national sentiments it has been employed to propagate. The better a priest, the worse a citizen. And whom have Government found their bitterest enemies? Who are the parties who have invariably withstood all their plans for civilising Ireland? Why, those very priests whom they have clothed, and educated, and fed."

Such, according to an expert, are the men who now manipulate the voting powers of the Irish people. The priests do not deny that they have this full control; they merely say they have a right to it. Bishop Walsh, of Dublin, says that as priests, and independent of all human organisations, they have an inalienable and indisputable right to guide the people in this momentous proceeding, as in every other proceeding where the interests of Catholicity as well as the interests of Irish nationality are involved. He suggested, and the suggestion was adopted, that at all the political conventions held in the various Irish counties an ex-officio vote should be given to the priests! This embodied the principle that if Home Rule became law the Irish priesthood would have privileges which would make them absolute rulers of Ireland. Cardinal Logue says:—"We are face to face at the present moment with a great disobedience to ecclesiastical authority." This was in view of the Parnellite rebellion against priestly dictation. "The doctrines of the present day," said the good Cardinal, "are calculated (horror!) to wean the people from the priests' advice, to separate the priests from the people, and (here the Cardinal must have shivered with unspeakable disgust) TO LET THE PEOPLE USE THEIR OWN JUDGMENT." These are Cardinal's words, not mine. To make any comment would be to gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume o'er the violet. Well might Mr. Gladstone say nineteen years ago:—"It is the peculiarity of Roman theology, that by thrusting itself into the temporal domain, it naturally, and even necessarily, comes to be a frequent theme of political discussion." Archbishop Croke was the inspirer of the Tipperary troubles, worked out by his tools, Dillon, O'Brien, and Humphreys. Dr. Croke helped to found the Gaelic Athletic Association, which is well-known to be the nucleus of a rebel army. Dr. Croke gave £5 to the Manchester Murderers' Memorial Fund, and accompanied the gift with a letter stating that the men who murdered Police-sergeant Brett were "wrongfully arrested, unfairly tried, barbarously executed, and went like heroes to their doom." It was Dr. Croke who supported a movement to raise a pension for James Stephens, the Fenian Head-centre, the famous Number One, the general of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. We are asked to believe that this gentleman and his crew of subordinate clergy are eminently loyal, and that the moment a Home Rule Bill puts it into their power to injure England, from that very moment they will become friendly indeed, will cease to do evil and learn to do well, and that the altars from which England is now every Sunday hotly denounced will in future vibrate with the resonant expression of sacerdotal affection.

These gentlemen must have a wonderful opinion of the gullibility of the great Saxon race. But as they see a certain portion believe in Mr. Gladstone they may expect them to believe in anything. To swallow the G.O.M. plus Harcourt, Healy, Conybeare, Cobb, O'Brien, and the Home Rule Bill is indeed a wonderful feat of deglutition.

Raphoe, (Co. Donegal), July 25th.