Ireland and the Home Rule Movement

by Sir Michael McDonnell

[163]Fermanagh, and Cavan there are more Catholics than Protestants, while in the Counties of Armagh and Down the numbers of the two creeds are almost equally divided. What is known as the question of Ulster should in truth be known as that of Belfast, for it is only in that city and in the adjacent Counties of Antrim and Down that the religious question is most acute.

The social conditions of the country, which have always been to some extent, though not to that existing in recent years, agricultural, lead one to seek a cause in the conditions of Land Tenure for the different degrees of prosperity pervading the North-East corner of Ulster and the rest of Ireland. It is impossible to doubt that the Ulster Custom of Tenant Right had an immense effect on the economic status of the province. Under it the system of tenure which held the field in the other three provinces was replaced by one in which the tenants had security against arbitrary eviction so long as they paid their rents, and, in addition, were entitled to sell their interest in the property to the incoming tenant, and this Tenant Right sold often for as much as half, and sometimes for as much as the full, fee-simple of the holding. The sum could be obtained on the tenant voluntarily vacating the holding or on his being unable to pay the rent, the landlord being entitled to be consulted with a view to approval by him of the incoming tenant.

The importance of the custom can be recognised in the light of the fact that in England, where improvements are effected in nearly every case not by the tenant but by the landlord, it has been found necessary, nevertheless, to give legislative sanction to Tenant Right.

This has been effected by the Agricultural Holdings Acts, 1875, 1883, and 1900, under which tenants are entitled to statutory compensation for improvements, whether permanent, as, for example, buildings; for

[164]drainage purposes; or, as in the case of manure, for the improvement of the soil.

The result of the Ulster Custom on the industry of the Northern tenant-farmer, who enjoyed a freedom of sale and a fixity of tenure, and, further, a compensation for improvements long before the tenants of the South and West secured these advantages, are impossible to over-estimate. Again, in considering the relative economic positions of the members of the two religions, it is impossible to blink the fact that little more than a century has passed since the Irish Catholics were treated as helots under a penal code, and that, if they have been behind hand in the industrial race, account must be taken of the lead in the saddle to which in that way they were subjected. The resulting preponderance of Protestants among the landed gentry led to a further factor in the ostracism which in the past they exercised as employers of labour, whether agricultural or industrial, which, besides its direct effect of breeding and perpetuating sectarian hate, served in an economic sense to unfit Catholics for employment, and to persuade those who in fact were least unfitted and retained their perceptive faculties, that the scope for their energies was to be found only abroad, and so tended to leave behind a residue of labourers rendered unfit for employment as against the time when the prejudice of the richer classes was removed. The non-application in the more purely Protestant parts of Ulster of the principles which held the field in other parts of Ireland made for prosperity in that province by tending towards an economic condition of the labour market, unimpeded by artificial restrictions, arising from religious differences and imposed at the hands of employers of labour. Another factor in the contentment of the Ulster Presbyterians under the varying vicissitudes of Irish government is to be found in the history of the Regium Donum. The Scottish settlers in 1610 having brought with them their ministers, the

[165]latter were put in possession of the tithes of the parishes in which they were planted. These they enjoyed till the death of Charles I., but payments were stopped on their refusal to recognise the Commonwealth. Henry Cromwell, however, allowed the body £100, which Charles II. increased to £600, per annum, but towards the end of his reign, and during that of James II., it was discontinued. William III. renewed the grant, increasing it to £1,200, and it was still further augmented in 1785 and 1792. After the Union Castlereagh largely increased the amount of the Regium Donum, and completely altered its mode of distribution, making it in fact contingent on the loyalty of the parson to the Union. The spirit in which it was granted is well shown in a letter in Castlereagh's memoirs, in which the writer, addressing the Chief Secretary just after the votes had been passed by Parliament, declared—"Never before was Ulster under the dominion of the British Crown. It had a distinct moral existence before, and now the Presbyterian ministry will be a subordinate ecclesiastical aristocracy, whose feeling will be that of zealous loyalty, and whose influence on those people will be as purely sedative when it should be, and exciting when it should be, as it was the reverse before." Those who blame Pitt for not having carried through his schemes of concurrent endowment, and who see in his failure to do so, one reason for the ill success of his policy of Union, must admit the importance of the fact that the Presbyterian clergy were pensioners of the State. A notion of the extent to which they were subsidised may be inferred from the fact that by the Commutation Clauses of the Church Disestablishment Act of 1869, the Dissenters secured as compensation for the loss of the Regium Donum and other payments a sum of £770,000, while the equivalent amount paid in lieu of the Maynooth grant to the Catholics—numbering at least eight times as many—amounted to only £372,000.

It was Froude who declared that if the woollen and linen industries had not been hampered there would now be four Ulsters instead of one. Even in the days before restrictions were placed on the production of Irish linen for the better encouragement of the English trade, the North of Ireland was far ahead of the rest of the country in the matter of flax-spinning, and this pre-eminence was mainly due to the fact that the climate there is more suited to that plant than in other parts of Ireland.

Starting with this advantage, linen was able in that province to survive the impositions placed on its production, while in places less favoured by a suitable climate the industry went to the wall. To assume off-hand, without going into the innumerable causes which effect such movements of commerce, that innate thrift was responsible, apart from all other causes, for the progress of Belfast is an attitude similar to that of one who should hold that nothing but the stupidity of the East Anglian yokel has prevented that country from becoming as much a centre of industry as is Lancashire, for such a sweeping generalisation would take no account of other forces at work in the development of the great commercial centres of the North as, for example, the fact that the peculiar conditions of the Lancashire climate are such that the processes of cotton-spinning can be best effected in an atmosphere containing the amount of moisture which there prevails.

In Belfast the interdependence of the linen and the ship-building trades—in one of which the men, while in the other the women, of many families are employed—is one of the most powerful instruments of social progress. The narrow sea which separates it from Scotland and the geographical conformation of Belfast Lough have, moreover, a great bearing on its prosperity. Independence of Irish railways with their excessive freights, crippling by their incidence all export trade, in a town like Belfast, nine-tenths