Ireland and the Home Rule Movement

by Sir Michael McDonnell

It was James Anthony Froude who said that the absenteeism of her men of genius was a worse wrong to Ireland than the absenteeism of her landlords. This evil the Union accentuated by reducing Dublin from the seat of Government, which in the middle of the

[93]eighteenth century had been the second only to London in size and importance, to the status of a provincial city from which were drawn the leaders of that liberal school of Protestantism the rise of which was the marked feature of Irish politics at the end of the eighteenth century.

The dividing line between parties in England has never been one of caste or of creed, still less of both combined. In the past the Whigs could claim as aristocratic and as exclusive a prestige as could the Tories. In point of wealth there was little to choose, and, most important of all, in respect of religion, though the minor clergy were very largely Tory and the Dissenters were allied to the Whigs, yet the Anglicanism of the great Whig families, and their appointments when in power to the Episcopal bench and to other places of preferment, saved the Church of England from being identified in toto with either party in the State.

In Ireland, unfortunately, the case was far different, for there property and the Established Church found themselves ranged side by side in the maintenance of their respective privileges against the democracy, which, as it happened, was Catholic, and which for many years after the Union did not recover from the long and demoralising persecution of the Penal Laws.

The aristocracy resisted emancipation, in spite of the fact that it was advocated by all the greatest statesmen and orators of two generations, and it did so quite as much because it was emancipation of the masses as because it was emancipation of the Catholics. The Church of Ireland at the same time dreaded the reform since it had the foresight to perceive that the outcome would be an attack upon her prerogatives and an assault upon her position. The anticipations of both were well founded. Nine years after the Emancipation Act, tithe, which an English Prime Minister had declared was as sacred as rent, was by Act of Parliament commuted into a rent-charge

[94]no longer collected directly from the tenant, but paid by the landlord, who, however, compensated himself for its incidence on his shoulders by raising rents. Forty years later the Church Act was passed, and almost simultaneously was begun the assault on the land system which had given support to, and received it from, the Church Establishment.

I have heard it said by Englishmen who have watched the course of politics for some years that the jingling watchword which Lord Randolph Churchill coined for the Unionists twenty years ago, that Home Rule would spell Rome Rule, if used again to-day would to a very great extent fall flat. They have based this view, not on the assumption that Englishmen love Rome more, but rather upon the opinion that they care for all religions less, and that hence the appeal to bigotry would make less play.

The fact, however, remains that one meets men in England with every sympathy for Irish claims who shrink nevertheless from the advocacy of the principle of self-government through fear lest the Protestant minority should suffer. This fear for the rights of minorities serves always as the last ditch in which a losing cause entrenches itself, and timid souls have always been found who hesitate at the approach of every reform on the ground that the devil you know may turn out to be not so bad as the devil you do not know. The legislative history of the House of Lords during the last century, if examples of this were needed, would provide them in large numbers; and as to the question of whether it is better that the majority or the minority of a nation should be governed against its will, one need scarcely say which is the principle adopted in a normal system of Parliamentary government. The rapidity with which under Grattan's Parliament an emancipated Ireland ceased to be intolerant leads one to suspect that the bigotry of creeds which is attributed to us as a race is not a natural characteristic, but rather the outcome of external causes. This view

[95]is borne out by the opinion of Lecky, who declared that the deliberate policy of English statesmen was "to dig a deep chasm between Catholics and Protestants," and if proof of the allegation is needed it is to be found in the fact that in the middle of the eighteenth century the Protestant Primate, Archbishop Boulter, wrote to Government concerning a certain proposal that "it united Protestants and Papists, and if that conciliation takes place, farewell to English influence in Ireland."

Under Grattan's Parliament Trinity College, Dublin, opened its doors, though not its endowments, to Catholics. In 1795 a petition from Maynooth, the lay college in which was not till twenty years later suppressed by Government for political reasons, was presented to the Irish House of Commons by Henry Grattan, protesting against the exclusion of Protestants from its halls. In the ranks of the Volunteers, who secured free trade in 1779 and Parliamentary Independence in 1782, Catholics and Protestants stood shoulder to shoulder, and the independent legislature, which was the outcome of their efforts, granted the franchise to the Catholics.