Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (2 of 2) / (2nd ed.) (1888)

by William Henry Hurlbert

Presently two cars appeared. We got upon one, Mr. Tener driving a spirited nag, and taking on the seat with him a loaded carbine-rifle. Two armed policeman followed us upon the other, keeping at such a distance as would enable them easily to cover any one approaching from either side of the roadway. It quite took me back to the delightful days of 1866 in Mexico, when we used to ride out to picnics at the Rincon at Orizaba armed to the teeth, and ready at a moment’s notice to throw the four-in-hand mule-wagons into a hollow square, and prepare to receive cavalry. As it seems to be perfectly well understood that the regular price paid for shooting a designated person (they call it “knocking” him in these parts) is the ridiculously small sum of four pounds, and that two persons who divide this sum are always detailed by the organisers of outrage to “knock” an objectionable individual, it is obvious that too much care can hardly be taken by prudent people in coming and going through such a country. Fortunately for the people most directly concerned to avoid these unpleasantnesses a systematic leakage seems to exist in the machinery of mischief. The places where the oaths of this local “Mafia” are admin istered, for instance, are well known. A roadside near a chapel is frequently selected—and this for two or three obvious reasons. The sanctity of the spot may be supposed to impress the neophyte; and if the police or any other undesirable people should suddenly come upon the officiating adepts and the expectant acolyte, a group on the roadside is not necessarily a criminal gathering—though I do not see why, in such times, our old American college definition of a “group” as a gathering of “three or more persons” should not be adopted by the authorities, and held to make such a gathering liable to dispersion by the police, as our “groups” used to be subject to proctorial punishment. Mills are another favourite resort of the law-breakers. Mr. Tener tells me that a large mill between this place and Loughrea is a great centre of trouble, not wholly to the disadvantage of the astute miller, who finds it not only brings grist to his mill, but takes away grist from another mill belonging to a couple of worthy ladies, and once quite prosperous. It is no uncommon thing, it appears, for the same person to be put through the ceremony of swearing fidelity more than once, and at more than one place, with the not unnatural result, however, of diminishing the pressure of the oath upon his conscience or his fears, and also of alienating his affections, as he is expected to pay down two shillings on each occasion. Once a member, he contributes a penny a week to the general fund. It seems also to be an open secret who the disbursing treasurers are of this fund, from whom the members, detailed to do the dark bidding of the “organisation,” receive their wage. “A stout gentleman with sandy hair and wearing glasses” was the description given to me of one such functionary. When so much is known of the methods and the men, why is it that so many crimes are committed with virtual impunity? For two sufficient reasons. Witnesses cannot be got to testify, or trusted, if they do testify, to speak the truth; and it is idle to expect juries of the vicinage in nine cases out of ten will do their duty. Political cowardice having made it impossible to transfer the venue in cases of Irish crime, as to which all the authorities were agreed about these points, from Ireland into Great Britain, it is found that even to transfer the trial of “Moonlighters” from Clare or Kerry into Wicklow, for example, has a most instructive effect, opening the eyes of the people of Wicklow to a state of things in their own island, of which happily for themselves they were previously as ignorant as the people of Surrey or of Middlesex. This explains the indignant wish expressed to me some time ago in a letter from a priest in another part of Ireland, that “martial law” might be proclaimed in Clare and Kerry to “stamp out the Moonlighters, those pests of society.” That in Clare and Kerry priests should be found not only disposed to wink at and condone the proceedings of these “pests of society,” but openly to co-operate with them under the pretext of a “national” movement, is surely a thing equally intolerable by the Church and dangerous to the cause of Irish autonomy. This I am glad to say is strongly felt, and has been on more than one occasion very vigorously stated by one of the most eminent and estimable of Irish ecclesiastics, the Bishop-Coadjutor of Clonfert, upon whom I called this morning. Dr. Healy, who is a senator of the Royal University of Ireland, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy, presides over that part of the diocese of Clonfort which includes Portumna and Woodford. He lives in a handsome and commodious, but simple and unpretentious house, set in ample grounds well-planted, and commanding a wide view of a most agreeable country. We were ushered into a well-furnished study, and the bishop came in at once to greet us with the most cordial courtesy. He is a frank, dignified, unaffected man, and in his becoming episcopal purple, with the gold chain and cross, looked every inch a bishop. I was particularly anxious to see Dr. Healy, as a type of the high-minded and courageous ecclesiastics who, in Ireland, have resolutely refused to subordinate their duties and their authority as ecclesiastics to the convenience and the policy of an organisation absolutely controlled by Mr. Parnell, who not only is not a Catholic, but who is an open ally and associate of the bitterest enemies of the Catholic Church in France and in England. Protestant historians affirm that Pope Innocent was one of the financial backers of William of Orange when he set sail from Holland to crush the Catholic faith in Great Britain and Ireland, and drive the Catholic house of Stuart into exile. But it was reserved for the nineteenth century to witness the strange spectacle of men, calling themselves Irishmen and Catholics, deliberately slandering and assailing in concord with a non-Catholic political leader the consecrated pastors and masters of the Church in Ireland. When in order to explain what they themselves concede to be “the absence from the popular ranks of the best of the priesthood,” Nationalist writers find it necessary to denounce Cardinal Cullen and Cardinal M‘Cabe as “anti-Irish ”; and to sneer at men like Dr. Healy as “Castle Bishops,” it is impossible not to be reminded of the three “patriotic” tailors of Tooley Street.

Bishop Healy looks upon the systematic development of a substantial peasant proprietary throughout Ireland as the economic hope of the country, and he regards therefore the actual “campaigning” of the self-styled “Nationalists” as essentially anti-national, inasmuch as its methods are demoralising the people of Ireland, and destroying that respect for law and for private rights which lies at the foundation of civil order and of property. In his opinion, “Home Rule,” to the people in general, means simply ownership of the land which they are to live on, and to live by. How that ownership shall be brought about peaceably, fairly, and without wrong or outrage to any man or class of men is a problem of politics to be worked out by politicians, and by public men. That men, calling themselves Catholics, should be led on to attempt to bring this or any other object about by immoral and criminal means is quite another matter, and a matter falling within the domain, not of the State primarily, but of the Church.

As to this, Bishop Healy, who was in Rome not very long ago, and who, while in Rome, had more than one audience of His Holiness by command, has no doubt whatever that the Vatican will insist upon the abandonment and repudiation by Catholics of boycotting, and “plans of campaign,” and all such devices of evil. Nor has the Bishop any doubt that whenever the Holy Father speaks the priests and the people of Ireland will obey.

To say this, of course, is only to say that the Bishop believes the priests of Ireland to be honest priests, and the people of Ireland to be good Catholics.

If he is mistaken in this it will be a doleful thing, not for the Church, but for the Irish priests, and for the Irish people. No Irishman who witnessed the magnificent display made at Rome this year, of the scope and power of the Catholic Church, can labour under any delusions on that point.

From the Bishop’s residence we went to call upon the Protestant rector of Portumna, Mr. Crawford. The handsome Anglican church stands within an angle of the park, and the parsonage is a very substantial mansion. Mr. Crawford, the present rector, who is a man of substance, holds a fine farm of the Clanricarde estate, at a peppercorn rent, and he is tenant also of another holding at £118 a year, as to which he has brought the agent into Court, with the object, as he avers, of setting an example to the other tenants, and inducing them, like himself, to fight under the law instead of against it. He is not, however, in arrears, and in that respect sets a better example, I am sorry to say, than the Catholic priest, Father Coen, who made himself so conspicuous here on the occasion of the much bewritten Woodford evictions. The case of Father Coen is most instructive, and most unpleasant. He occupies an excellent house on a holding of twenty-three acres of good laud, with a garden—in short, a handsome country residence, which was provided by the late Lord Clanricarde, expressly for the accommodation of whoever might be the Catholic priest in that part of his estate. For all this the rent is fixed at the absurd and nominal sum of two guineas a year! Yet Father Coen, who now enjoys the mansion, and has a substantial income from the parish, is actually two years and a half in arrears with this rent! This fact Mr. Tener mentioned to the Bishop, whose countenance naturally darkened. “What am I to do in such a case, my lord?” asked Mr. Tener. “Do?” said the Bishop, “do your plain duty, and proceed against him according to law.” But suppose he were proceeded against and evicted, as in America he certainly would be, who can doubt that he would instantly be paraded, before the world, on both sides of the Atlantic as a “martyr,” suffering for the holy cause of an oppressed and down-trodden people, at the hands of a “most vile” Marquis, and of a remorse-less and blood-thirsty agent?[¹¹] Mr. Crawford, a tall, fine-looking man, talked very fully and freely about the situation here. He came to Portumna about eight years ago; one of his reasons for accepting the position here offered him being that he wished to take over a piece of property near Woodford from his brother-in-law, who found he could not manage it. As a practical farmer, and a straightforward capable man of business, he has gradually acquired the general confidence of the tenants here. That they are, as a rule, quite able to pay the rents which they have been “coerced” into refusing to pay, he fully believes. He told me of cases in which Catholic tenants of Lord Clanricarde came to him when the agitation began about the Plan of Campaign, and begged him privately to take the money for their rents, and hold it for them till the time should come for a settlement.

The reason for this was that they did not wish to be obliged to give over the money into the “Trust” created by the Campaigners, and wanted it to be safely put beyond the reach of these obliging “friends.” One very shrewd tenant came to him and begged him to buy some beasts, in order that he might pay his rent out of the proceeds. The man owed £15 to the Clanricarde property. Mr. Crawford did not particularly want to buy his beasts, but eventually agreed to do so, and gave him £50 for them. The man went off with the money, but he never paid the rent! Mr. Crawford discovering this called him to account, and refused to grant him some further favour which he asked. The result is that the “distressed tenant” now cuts Mr. Crawford when he meets him, and is the prosperous owner of quite a small herd of cattle.

Mr. Crawford’s opinion of the mischief done by the methods and spirit of the National League in this place is quite in accord with the opinions of the Bishop-Coadjutor. Power without responsibility, which made the Cæesars madmen, easily turns the heads of village tyrants, and there is something positively grotesque in the excesses of this subterranean “Home Rule.” Mr. Crawford told me of a case here, in which a tenant farmer, whom he named, came to him in great wrath, not unmingled with terror, to say that the League had ordered him, on pain of being boycotted, to give up his holding to the heirs of a woman from whom, twenty years ago, he had bought, for £100 in cash, the tenant-right of her deceased husband! There was no question of refunding the £100. He was merely to consider himself a “land-grabber,” and evict himself for the benefit of those heirs who had never done a stroke of work on the property for twenty years, and who had no shadow of a legal or moral claim on it, except that the oldest of them was an active member of the local League!

Nor was this unique.

In another case, the children of a tenant, who died forty years ago, came forward and called upon the League to boycott an old man who had been in possession of the holding during nearly half a century. In a third case, a tenant-farmer, some ten years ago, had in his employ as herd a man who fell ill and died. He put into the vacant place an honest, capable young fellow, who still holds it, and has faithfully and efficiently served him. Only the other day this tenant-farmer was warned by the League to expect trouble, unless he dismissed this herd, and put into his place the son, now grown to man’s estate, of the herd who died ten years ago!