But boycotting is growing unpopular in Ireland. It is condemned by the bishops and the clergy generally. They are taking more and more positive grounds, and many refuse the communion to persons who are guilty of either boycotting or cattle driving, because they are contrary to justice and charity and are therefore sinful. I heard one of the bishops preach an impressive sermon on the subject. He condemned all combinations of persons to cause suffering or distress in their neighbors as inhuman, immoral, and unjust. He declared that boycotting was worse than murder, because it caused a greater degree of suffering. When a man was shot he usually died without agony, but when he was boycotted he suffered the worse sort of mental torture, and to cause such sufferings was one of the worst of sins. Father Gilligan, parish priest at Carrick-on-Shannon, preached against boycotting the Sunday we were there. He said, in introducing the subject, that he deeply regretted that many of his parishioners had joined in a boycott for which they imagined they had a good excuse, but nothing would justify a boycott. It was a crime, and those who had engaged in it would not be admitted to communion until they had sincerely repented. Every effort had been made by advice, by intimidation, and even by threats of violence, to keep the people from dealing with some of the most respectable merchants in the town. There were three degrees of boycotting—mild, medium, and savage—and all three had been condemned by the Church. “Have nothing to do with it,” said Father Gilligan, “do not touch it with a pole that would reach New York.”
At present boycotting is applied to landlords and cattle men who are occupying their land that is wanted for farms. The cattle men have no permanent tenancy, they erect no buildings, they make no improvements, and the cattle business is so profitable that they are able to pay twice as much rent as the ordinary farming tenant. For those reasons, and because he has only one man to deal with, a landlord is always glad to rent his lands for grazing, and gradually Ireland is becoming one great pasture.
Cattle driving is another weapon used by the same people for the same purpose, and that is condemned by the bishops and the clergy with equal emphasis. Archbishop Fennely of Tipperary recently preached a sermon in which he expressed the hope that before he closed his eyes in death he would see every acre of land in Ireland owned by the men who tilled it, but he could not sympathize with and he must earnestly condemn every form of violence and every unlawful measure that was used to secure that end. He gave his diocese a solemn warning that cattle driving, boycotting, and similar unlawful practices would not be tolerated by the Church.
This form of argument, it must be admitted, is a great advance over the fierce methods that have been used in the past, when murder and bloodshed were quite common, and other damages that cannot be repaired by money or by the judgment of the court were suffered. It was a habitual jest to speak of the “closed season for landlords.”
The Irish never overlook the humor in a situation, and at a cattle drive which took place in 1908 at Tuam, which is a place of considerable ecclesiastical importance, being the residence of the Most Rev. John Healey, one of the ablest and most influential Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland, the following lines were pinned to the tail of one of the cows:
GOD SAVE IRELAND.
“Leave the way, for we are coming.
And, on my soul, we got a drumming;
They cleared us out so mighty quick,
And, faith, they used their hazel stick.