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

by Robert John Buckley

"Englishmen have no idea what a splendid fellow the Irish peasant really is when his mind is not poisoned and his unfortunate ignorance exploited. I could give you instances of fidelity, affectionate self-sacrifice and devotion which would astonish you. Not isolated or sporadic cases, but arising from the average level of the Irish character. After considerable travel, and a painstaking study of the characteristics of various nations, I have come to the conclusion that, taking one consideration with another, I prefer Paddy, ignorant as he is. For after all his ignorance is not his own fault. He sees no newspapers except an occasional local sheet, which is almost certain to be a wretched, lying, priest-inspired rag. If he were seen looking at any other it would be bad for him. But newspapers are practically unknown in the agricultural districts. And men do not meet in crowds as in England. They have not the attrition which wears away the angularities. They live solitary among the mountains, or away in the fields, and they never hear lectures, have no Institutes, get no chance of improvement. The priest is their Clan Chieftain, their spiritual adviser, their temporal adviser, their newspaper, their only channel of superior information." At this point a tall, red-bearded man who was passing touched his hat to the Colonel, who said, "My gamekeeper. A fine, rough-coated Scotsman. Came over here a mad Gladstonian. Pinned his faith to the G.O.M. Followed him blindly, and owned he was content to do it. Get into conversation with him. Observe the change, the decided change in his opinions."

Soon I had Velveteens in full cry. His opinions were indeed decided. Having admitted that they had boxed the compass during a six months' residence in this down-trodden country, he went on to say, "The only way ye could cure the discontent is to make no attempt at it. Then the agitation would stop. The people are the biggest fules I ever saw. Instead of returning a sound, advanced Radical like Emerson T. Herdman, a man who pays them thirty or forty thousand a year, and who spends all his money in their midst, the fules go and vote for a thing like Arthur O'Connor, who never was here but once, and who never did them the compliment of issuing an address. When Mr. Herdman came to Stranorlar the people stoned him and his friends. And yet nobody ever said, or could say, a word against the Herdmans, who are among the most popular people in Ireland, and who deserve the best that can be said of them. O'Connor costs these poor folks two hundred pounds a year. They raise it in the constituency. Mr. Herdman would have cost them nothing, and might have spent even more than he does at present. He has opened up the greatest industry in the North-west of Ireland, keeps a whole country-side going, and is an out-and-out Liberal. The greatest exertions were made to secure his return, and the Catholics promised to vote for him. He stumped the country, and left no stone unturned. The Nationalist candidate never came here till the last moment, and, as I said, issued no address. The people knew nothing of him, and had never heard of him. But they voted as the priests told them, and they would have voted for a stick. Ought such people to have the franchise?

"What would I do to settle the Irish question? I've heard that somebody proposed sinking the country for twenty-four hours. That might do. Or you could withdraw the police and military, and in every market town open a depôt for the gratuitous distribution of arms and ammunition. In ten days there would only be a very small population, and you could then plant the country with people who would make the best of it, and mind their work, instead of spending their time standing about waiting for Home Rule to make them rich without work. Or you could make a law which required every priest in the country to clear out in twenty-four hours, on penalty of death. That is as impossible as sinking the island, but it would be quite as sure a cure. Those are my opinions, and those must be the opinions of every man who has lived here and looked about him for a reasonable length of time. The Scots Gladstonians are very decent folk. They mean well, and they are friendly to Ireland. Their only fault lies in following their hero, and in thinking that he cannot do wrong. If they knew what I know, they would be of my mind. For I was as great a Gladstonian as any of them."

A Presbyterian farmer said:—"On this estate the whole of the tenants are Presbyterians. The agent told me that early in June the whole of the rents up to May were paid, and that he would think that there was not such another case in Ireland. How is that? Well, if the tenants had been Romanists they would have so many things to pay. The priests live like fighting cocks. Father McFadden, of Gweedore, makes from a thousand to fifteen hundred a year. That is the man on whose door-step Inspector Martin was murdered. The crowd beat out his brains with palings, and when he tried to get into the priest's house, the door was shut in his face. The clergy live well, and drink like troopers. The easiest job in Ireland, and—if your conscience would allow it—the best in every way. You are treated with great respect, you have great influence, you have nothing to do, and you are extremely well paid for it. Sometimes I think that humbug pays better than hard work. The priests do not look after the poor. They do not work among the destitute and ignorant after the fashion of the English clergy. They are always extracting, extracting, extracting. The poor are ground down by their exactions till they can't pay their rent. And that is why the agent said that probably no other estate in Ireland could show such a record as ours.

"Home Rule will not satisfy the people. An Irish Parliament will do them no good, no, nor fifty Irish Parliaments. They are unfriendly to England because she is Protestant. People of the only true faith cannot bear to be governed by a heretic nation. The laws are all right, and they know it, but their animosity is excited by stories of wrong-doing in their forefathers' days, and while on the one hand they feel that they might easily be better off, on the other they are told that the brutal Saxon keeps them poor. All this is done by the priests. They actually admit that the English laws are excellent, but then they fall back on the allegation that their administration is corrupt. In vain you point to the Roman Catholic judges. In vain you go over England's successive attempts to pacify Ireland by conciliatory measures. The priest ruins all, for while your friend seems to agree with you—they are so easily led—yet the priest will secure his vote to a certainty. So long as a heretic power is at the head, so long Ireland will be discontented. If the country were under the rule of a Roman Catholic power, the people of Ireland would be satisfied with any laws whatever. They would not grumble at anything. The only alternative is the spread of education, and that goes on very slowly in Ireland. We are very, very backward in Donegal, but not nearly so bad as in the south and west. We have a bad name for poverty and ignorance, but we do not deserve it in the same degree as the Munster and Connaught folks. We dislike the Connaught people just as much as you do in England. We hate dirt, and lawlessness and disorder, and therefore we claim to be superior to the rest of the poor counties. This is, of course, the civilised part of Donegal. But wherever you go, you see nothing like the dirt of counties Galway and Mayo.

"We want railways to open up the country. Balfour was building them for us, and his institution of the Congested Districts Board did wonderful things for us. Why, if he had done nothing but improve the breed of fowls he would still have been worthy of remembrance as a benefactor of this country. Before the Congested Board Committee introduced superior breeds of fowls, the chickens were like blackbirds. You could sit down and eat half-a-dozen of them. They were no bigger than your thumb. But now we can get fowls equal to anything you have in England. The same may be said of the horses, the pigs, the cows, and all kinds of domestic animals and poultry. The fishing industry has saved whole districts from starvation, and has done good all round. When we get an Irish Parliament the grants for all these purposes will be discontinued, and the tide of progress will be checked. The poor folks are quite unable to see that by sticking to England we have a wealthy neighbour to borrow from, and that this is an inestimable advantage to a poor country like Ireland. Not long ago I mentioned this to a priest, but he said, 'When we have a Parliament of our own we'll not need to borrow money, for we'll have more than we know what to do with. Did not Mr. Gladstone say we should have a chronic plethora of money? John Bull certainly sends some money over here, but he had it from here to begin with. He stole it from Ireland, and he is only like a thief whose conscience urges him to restore a portion, a very small portion, of the stolen goods. When we get Independence—he used the word Independence—we shall be in a position to lend money instead of needing to borrow!' The person who said all this is the most influential politician of this district. His word to his flock is law. Not one of them dare for his life vote otherwise than as he tells them. They do not think this a hardship. They have no political convictions, and would just as soon vote any one way as any other."

A Donegal Home Ruler said that the poor folks were quite right in following the priests, and wanted to know if they would be right in following the Tories. He said:—"They are no more ignorant than the British working men, and not less independent. Don't the working classes follow their leaders, voting in heaps, just as they are told, without any notion of the Empire's greatness, and entirely with a view to their own interests? Could anybody be more stupid, more totally incapable of giving a valid reason for his action than your vaunted British workman? Why, if the specimens we get over here are any guide, if the samples are anything like the bulk, you might as well poll a flock of sheep as a crowd of British working men. I say the Irish peasantry are superior in intellect, conduct, and chayracther, and that in following the priest they are acting as reasonable as your British working-man, who follows his strike leaders and trade agitators, and is perpetually cutting off his nose to spite his face. No, we shall not get Home Rule now, but we must have it later on. Then we shall demand more. Every time we have to ask we shall want more and more. We shall wring it from England, and we shall make her pay for the trouble she gives. She must be charged a sort of war indemnity."

The Dundalk press is on my track. I heard of this in Newry, but the Dundalk papers do not reach the next town to Dundalk, and not a sheet could be had for love or money. A friend having told me that the Gazette was reviled, great efforts were made to obtain the reviling print, but in vain. At last I saw the Dundalk Democrat, which in a two-column comment on its colleague's maledictions of your humble commissioner cleared me of the charges brought by the original thunderer, which I have not yet been able to see. One of the said charges is based on the statement that I asked to be allowed to be present at the meeting, which permission was readily accorded. The meeting was public and was placarded from one end of Dundalk to the other. The public were invited to assemble in their thousands, and to join in the onward march to freedom. Not more than twenty people answered to the call, and the meeting was therefore a dead failure. The idea of asking leave to be present at a public meeting is absurd. The vituperative print says that I was not asked to deliver an address, but was told that I could "do so if I liked." The truth is manifest by the admitted fact that I declined, as being no speaker. Such is the minute hair-splitting of Irish argumentation. The quips and cranks of Tipperary Humphreys will be remembered, the paltry quibbles by which he sought to establish a case, and his final retreat under cover of the statement that he could not have believed that "such a state of things was possible." The Dundalk marchers to freedom (to the number of twenty) were not precisely the pick of the local respectability, and my escape must be regarded as providential. As to their outpourings of abuse, my philosophy resembles that of the old whipper-in of the Meynell-Ingram Hounds:—"I bain't a cruel chap, I bain't. But when I puts the lash among the hounds I dew like to hear 'em yowl; I dew like to see 'em skip, and writhe, and look mad. For if ye don't make 'em feel, and if ye can't hear 'em yowl, there's railly no pleasure in thrashin' of 'em."

Donegal, August 1st.