Ireland and the Home Rule Movement

by Sir Michael McDonnell

"Mr. Moore hopes that when Mr. Bailey publishes the correspondence he will make it clear that Mr. Moore's reply was directed to a disloyal attack by Mr. Bailey on one of his colleagues in his letter to Mr. Moore. This is all that was omitted from Mr. Moore's reply."

The next step in this discreditable incident occurred

[88]on July 23rd, on which day Mr. Moore denounced Mr. Bailey in the House of Commons for his partisanship towards the Nationalists, and gave a graphic picture of the private letter which Mr. Bailey had written to him to protest against his personal attacks. Mr. Redmond rose and asked that Mr. Russell should read to the House Mr. Moore's reply, and Mr. Russell thereupon read the second of the letters given above, upon which Mr. Balfour, regardless of his own share in the partial suppression of the Wyndham-MacDonnell dossier a few years before, demanded the production of the whole correspondence. This was done on July 26th, when Mr. Moore read the letters in the order given above. In his personal explanation he represented it as an extremely suspicious circumstance that Mr. Bailey had been seen in the Lobby in conversation with the Nationalists. "That may be legitimate," he said, "but I think it very undesirable," and in the very next breath he confessed that another of the Commissioners was a particular and personal friend of his own, to whom he would have shown the first letter from Mr. Bailey if it had not been marked private.

The comment of the Times—in which Mr. Moore as a rule finds an active admirer of his political methods—is interesting:—

"Mr. Bailey is a public servant entrusted with certain quasi-judicial functions. That a member of Parliament, whatever may be his opinions of the conduct of such an official, should inform him that he had been appointed 'to see fair play' between his colleagues, and that he had not seen it, and should couple this charge with a promise to press for an inquiry into the working of the department whenever there should be a change of Government, is indefensible."

The whole incident is worthy of attention as showing the atmosphere of suspicious hostility with which the Orange faction in Ireland surrounds every act even of Civil Servants and Executive Officers who are not

[89]as active supporters of the ascendancy as they would wish.

Of further legislation dealing with the laws of tenure, the Town Tenants Act of 1906, which Mr. Balfour denounced as highway robbery, gives tenants in towns compensation for disturbance so as to prevent a landlord making a vexatious use of his rights. An attempt was made by the House of Lords to limit the compensation so paid to one year's rent, but the rejection of the amendment by the House of Commons was acquiesced in, and no such limitation exists in the Act.

With regard to the question of the agricultural labourers, the fact that the last Census Report discloses that there are in Ireland nearly 10,000 "houses" with one room and one window apiece, wretched cabins inhabited by about 40,000 people, the peat smoke from the fire in which escapes through a hole in the thatch, gives some idea of the miserable conditions existing in parts of the West of Ireland. Of the quarter of a million of cottages in the second class of the Census—those, that is, with from one to four doors and windows—a large number also no doubt are quite unfit for habitation, and do much in the way of leading to the asylum or to emigration. It is to secure the replacement of these by cheap sanitary and comfortable cottages that the Labourers' Acts, ever since the first of the series introduced by the Irish Party in 1883, have been passed. By them Boards of Guardians, and by the Local Government Act, Rural District Councils, may build such cottages. In 1905, 18,000 cottages had been built under existing Acts, and they are let to tenants at rents of from 10d. to 1s. a week, but the difficulty had always been to effect the improvements sufficiently rapidly owing to the costly and elaborate procedure which involved an appeal to the Privy Council and a heavy burden on the rates of a poverty-stricken community. The Act of 1906 has

[90]simplified procedure by replacing the appeal to the Privy Council by an appeal to the Local Government Board, and that it was needful is seen from the fact that under Wyndham's Act only 25 cottages were built. It is hoped thereby to circumvent the apathy of District Councils, and their parsimony is to be appeased by the fact that the funds, which are largely derived from economics in the Irish Executive are advanced at a rate of interest, not as heretofore of 4-7/8 per cent., but, as in the case of land purchase advances, of 3-1/4 per cent., repayable in a period of 68-1/2 years. The urgency of the problem is obvious. The bearing of this state of affairs in rural housing on the fact that in 1904 two out of every thirteen deaths were due to tuberculosis shows that it is impossible to overestimate its importance, and I think that this condition of things, put side by side with the other economic facts with which I have dealt, are a sufficient reply to those who declare that conditions in Ireland would appear couleur de rose were they not seen through the jaundiced eyes of a discontented people.