Being an ambitious tinker, M’Andrew started a gombeen business with the old man’s savings, which he found by chance in the secret drawer of an old desk, and in a very short time became the best hated and most feared man in the district.
At first M’Andrew supported Sinn Fein enthusiastically, but when he saw law and order beginning to disappear, being now a man of property, he became alarmed, and tried to run with the hare and the hounds.
M’Andrew’s great opponent was the young parish priest, Father John, who, after serving as a chaplain with the British Army in France with great distinction—he had been decorated for bravery in the field by both the British and the French—returned to Ireland, having seen enough bloodshed for his lifetime.
Father John was a grand man both physically and morally and in the right sense of the words, and if only the majority of young Irish priests were up to the standard of Father John there would be little trouble in Ireland to-day.
When he became the parish priest of Annagh, Father John saw at once that M’Andrew was fast reducing the great majority of his parishioners, who were poor men with poorer mountain land, to a state of slavery, and realised that it only wanted two bad years in succession to put the whole parish under the gombeen man’s thumb.
At first he tried to keep the farmers away from M’Andrew’s shop; but this they resented, as it entailed a journey of many miles to the nearest town, and then they had to pay nearly as much as to M’Andrew. Next he denounced M’Andrew and his evil practices from the altar, warning the people of the consequences; but in spite of all the priest could do or say the gombeen man flourished.
From the very first Father John opposed the Sinn Fein movement both by word and deed, and when the first Sinn Fein organisers appeared in his parish he quickly hunted them away; but before he knew what was happening practically every young man in the parish had been enrolled, whether he liked it or not, as a soldier in the I.R.A. M’Andrew was quick to seize his chance of revenge, telling the people that the priest was a secret agent of the British Government—hadn’t he served in the British Army and taken the pay of the British Government, an enemy of the people?—and that he was doing his best to stand between them and liberty. In a week Father John was practically an outlaw in his own parish, and M’Andrew became the popular hero.
Though he still officiated in the chapel, Sinn Fein saw to it that he was paid no dues. For nearly two years this state of affairs continued, and it would have been impossible for the priest to live if the older and more sober members of his flock had not come to his house secretly in the dead of night and paid him their dues.
One day, when feeling ran very high, Father John opened his daily paper to see his own death reported, and a long obituary notice, probably the handiwork of M’Andrew.
It was a situation common in Ireland—the peasants blind to the virtues of their truest friend, and making a popular idol of their worst enemy: it is a sad thing that many Irishmen will always insist in believing what they wish to believe.