Ireland and the Home Rule Movement written by Michael F. J. McDonnell
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Michael F. J. McDonnell >> Ireland and the Home Rule Movement
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19 IRELAND AND THE HOME RULE MOVEMENT
by
MICHAEL F. J. McDONNELL
With a Preface by John Redmond, M.P.
1908
_Matri dilectissimae_
PREFACE
Without agreeing with every expression of opinion contained in the
following pages I heartily recommend this book, especially to Englishmen
and Scotchmen, as a thoughtful, well-informed, and scholarly study of
several of the more important features of the Irish question.
It has always been my conviction that one of the chief causes of the
difficulty of persuading the British people of the justice and
expediency of conceding a full measure of National autonomy to Ireland
was to be found in the deep and almost universal ignorance in Great
Britain regarding Irish affairs present and past--an ignorance which has
enabled every unscrupulous opponent of Irish demands to appeal with more
or less success to inherited and anti-Irish prejudice as his chief
bulwark against reform. It was this conviction that led Mr. Parnell and
his leading colleagues, after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill in
1886, to establish an agency in England for the express purpose of
removing the ignorance and combating its effects, and no advocate of
Irish claims in England or Scotland has failed to find traces down to
this day of the good effects of the propaganda thus set on foot, the
discontinuance of which was one of the lamentable results of the
dissensions in the Irish National Party between 1890 and 1900.
This book carries on the work of combating British ignorance of Irish
affairs and the effects of that ignorance in a manner which seems to me
singularly effective. The writer is no mere rhetorician or dealer in
generalities. On the contrary, he deals in particular facts and gives
his authorities. Nothing is more striking than the care he has
obviously taken to ascertain the details of the subjects with which he
has concerned himself and the inexorable logic of his method. It is
perfectly safe to say that he neglected few sources of information which
promised any valuable results, and that he has condensed into a few
pages the more vital points of many volumes. It is not necessary to say
anything of his style except that the cultured reader will most
appreciate and enjoy it.
I shall not anticipate what the author has to say except in respect of
one particular matter to which it seems to me expedient that particular
public attention should be directed, especially by English and Scotch
readers. The study of Irish history throws an inglorious light on the
character of many British statesmen, and one of the salient facts
brought into prominence in this little volume is that, even since the
conversion of Mr. Gladstone to Home Rule, more than one leader of each
of the two great political parties in Great Britain have displayed an
utter lack of political principle in their dealings with Ireland, and
especially with the Irish National question. I cannot but think that if
the facts, as told by the author of this volume, were universally, or
even widely, known amongst Englishmen and Scotchmen there would be much
less heard in the future regarding Home Rule eventuating in Rome Rule or
endangering the existence of the Empire.
This volume will, I hope, have a wide circulation not only in Great
Britain, where such works are specially needed but in Ireland itself,
where also it is well calculated to strengthen the faith of convinced
Home Rulers and to bring light to the few who are still opposed to the
Irish National demand for self-government, and to other important,
though minor, reforms.
J. E. REDMOND.
December, 1907.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
THE EXECUTIVE IN IRELAND
CHAPTER II
THE FINANCIAL RELATIONS BETWEEN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND
CHAPTER III
THE ECONOMIC CONDITIONS OF IRELAND
CHAPTER IV
THE LAND QUESTION
CHAPTER V
THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION
CHAPTER VI
THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
CHAPTER VII
UNIONISM IN IRELAND
CHAPTER VIII
IRELAND AND DEMOCRACY
CHAPTER IX
IRELAND AND GREAT BRITAIN
CHAPTER X
CONCLUSION
NOTES
ADDENDUM
"You desire my thoughts on the affairs of Ireland, a subject
little considered, and consequently not understood in
England."
--JOHN HELY HUTCHINSON, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin,
in a letter written in 1779 to the Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland.
INTRODUCTION
A decree of Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who has sat in the
chair of St. Peter, in virtue of the professed jurisdiction of the
Papacy over all islands, by a strange irony, sanctioned the invasion of
Ireland by Strongbow in the reign of Henry II. Three years ago I stood
in the crypt of St. Peter's in Rome, and the Englishman who was with me
expatiated on the appropriate nature of the massive sarcophagus of red
granite, adorned only with a carved bull's head at each of the four
corners, which seemed to him to stand as a type of British might and
British simplicity, and in which the sacristan had told us lay all that
was mortal of Nicholas Breakspeare. Seeing that I took no part in this
panegyric, he took me on one side and said that he had observed that all
the English Protestants to whom he showed that tomb, situated as it is
literally _ad limina Apostolorum_, waxed eloquent, but, on the other
hand, the Irish Catholics whom he told that it contained the bones of
the dead Pontiff invariably shook their fists at the ashes of the
unwitting, but none the less actual, source of their country's ills. To
this I replied by quoting to him a saying of Robert Louis Stevenson, who
as a Scot viewed the matter impartially, and who declared "that the
Irishman should not love the Englishman is not disgraceful, rather,
indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race and
not personal to him who cherishes the indignation."
* * * * *
The great tendency which has been so marked a feature of Irish life in
the course of the last decade to turn the attention of the people
towards efforts at self-improvement and the development of self-reliance
without regard to English aid, English neglect, or English opinion,
excellent though it has been in every other respect, has had this one
drawback--that there has grown up a generation of Englishmen,
well-intentioned towards our country, to whom the problems of Irish
Government are an unknown quantity. The ignorance of Irish affairs in
England is due partly to ourselves, but also to a natural heedlessness
arising from distance and preoccupation with problems with which
Englishmen are more intimately concerned.
In view of the awakening of the democratic forces of Great Britain it is
vital that Irish questions should be set before the eyes of the
electorate of Great Britain, in order that, when for the first time the
constitutional questions involved are placed before voters unprejudiced
by class interests or a fellow-feeling for the pretensions of property
wherever situate, there may be a body of electors who realise the
gravity of the problems in question, and who have a full appreciation of
the history of the case.
The Irish question has at no time been brought before the English public
less than at the present day. Fenianism in the seventies and the various
agrarian agitations in the eighties served to keep it constantly before
the English eyes, and after the acquittal of Mr. Parnell and his
colleagues of the charges brought against them by the _Times_ much
educative work was done for a short time by Irish Members of Parliament
on English platforms.
The demands of Ireland have always been met by an unjust dilemma. When
she has been disturbed the reply has been that till quiet is restored
nothing can be done, and when a peaceful Ireland has demanded
legislation the absence of agitation has been adduced as a reason for
the retort that the request is not widespread, and can, in consequence,
be ignored.
The remedy against such inaction proving successful in the future lies
in the existence of a strong body of public opinion in Great Britain,
educated to such a degree in the facts of the case as to brook no delay
in the application of remedies. As for us, we cannot expect to be
believed on our mere _ipse dixit_, and must state our case frankly and
fully. The present moment seems timely, before the smoke of conflict has
once again obscured the broad principles at issue. I propose to deal
with reform in a plea of urgency, endeavouring at the same time to trace
the evolution of things as they are to-day, quoting history as I go,
with one aim only in view, to point a moral and adorn a tale. It will
serve, I hope, to explain the past, to illustrate the present and to
provide a warning for the future.
The Irish question, as Lord Rosebery has said, has never passed into
history, because it has never passed out of politics.
M.F.J. McD.
Goldsmith Building, Temple.
CHAPTER I
THE EXECUTIVE IN IRELAND
"La 'Garnison' a occupee le pays sans le 'gouverner,' ou en ne
le gouvernant que de son propre interet de classe: son
hegemonie a ete toute sa politique."
--L. PAUL-DUBOIS, _L'Irlande Contemporaine_, 1907.
"A regarder de pres on percoit pourtant que cette imitation
Irlandaise de la justice brittanique n'en est sur bien des
points qu'une assez grossiere caricature, ce qui prouve une
fois de plus que les meilleures institutions ne vaient que ce
que valent les hommes qui les appliquent, et que les lois sent
pen de choses quand elles ne sont pas soutenus par les
moeurs."--Ibid.
"What does Ireland want now; what would she have more?" asked Pitt of
Grattan at the dinner table of the Duke of Portland in 1794, and
Englishmen have echoed and re-echoed the question throughout the century
which has elapsed. The mode in which it is asked reminds me, I must
confess, of that first sentence in Bacon's Essays--"What is truth? said
jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer."
When, at the end of the nineteenth century, the nations of Europe
devoted themselves to a retrospective study of the progress which the
passing of a hundred years had brought in its train, Ireland alone was
unable to join in the chorus of self-congratulation which arose on every
side.
To her it was the centenary of the great betrayal to which, as a
distinguished writer has said, the whole of her unbribed intellect was
opposed, and which formed the climax to a century of suffering. The
ancients who held that when ill-fortune befell their country the gods
must be asleep would have said so, I have no doubt, of Ireland at the
end of the eighteenth century. The people, in a phrase which has become
historic, had put their money on the wrong horse in their devotion to
the Stuart cause, but, more than this, while they thereby earned the
detestation of the Whigs, they were not compensated for it by the
sympathy of the Tories, who feared their Catholicism even more than they
liked their Jacobitism. In this way the country fell between two stools,
and was not governed, even as English Statesmen professed to govern it,
as a dependency, but rather it was exploited in the interest of the
ruling caste with an eye to the commercial interests of Great Britain in
so far as its competition was injurious. Religious persecution, aiming
frankly at proselytism, and restrictions imposed so as to choke every
industry which in any way hit English manufactures were the keynotes of
the whole policy, and in the pages of Edmund Burke one may find a more
searching indictment of English rule in Ireland in the eighteenth
century than any which has since been drawn up.
The concession of Parliamentary independence in 1782 was, as the whole
world knows, yielded as a counsel of prudence in the panic fright
resulting from the American war and the French revolution. Under
Grattan's Parliament the country began to enjoy a degree of prosperity
such as she had never known before, and the destruction of that
Parliament was effected, as Castlereagh, the Chief Secretary, himself
expressed it, by "buying up the fee-simple of Irish corruption"; in
other words, by the creation of twenty-six peerages and the expenditure
of one and a half million in bribing borough-mongers.
In very truth, the Act of Union was one which, by uniting the
legislatures, divided the peoples; and it has been pointed out as
significant that when the legislatures of England and Scotland were
amalgamated a common name was found for the whole island, but that no
such name has been adopted for the three kingdoms which were united in
1800.
The new epoch began in such a way as might have been expected from its
conception. The bigotry of George III., undismayed by what he used to
call Pitt's "damned long obstinate face," delayed for more than a
quarter of a century the grant of Emancipation to the Catholics, by
promises of which a certain amount of their hostility had been disarmed.
The tenantry asked in vain for nearly three-quarters of the century for
some alleviation of the land system under which they groaned, and for an
equal length of time three-quarters of the population were forced to
endure the tyranny of being bound to support a Church to which they did
not belong. The cause of struggling nationality on the Continent of
Europe, in Italy, in Hungary, in Poland, in the Slav provinces, has in
each case gained sympathy in Great Britain, but the cause of Irish
nationality has received far other treatment. That charity should begin
at home may be a counsel of perfection, but in point of fact one rarely
sees it applied. Sympathy for the poor relation at one's door is a rare
thing indeed. Increasing prosperity makes nations, as it makes men, more
intolerant of growing adversity, and the poor man is apt to get more
kicks than half-pence from the rich kinsmen under the shadow of whose
palace he spends his life, and to whom his poverty, his relationship,
and his dependence are a standing reproach. When I hear surprise
expressed by Englishmen at the fact that England is not loved in Ireland
I wonder at the deep-seated ignorance of the mutual feelings which have
so long subsisted, one side of which one may find expressed in the
literature of England, from Shakespeare's references to the "rough,
uncivil kernes of Ireland" down to the contemptuous sneers of Charles
Kingsley, that most English of all writers in the language, each of whom
provides, as I think, a sure index to the feelings of his contemporaries
and serves to illustrate the inveterate sentiment of hostility,
flavoured with contempt, which, as Mr. Gladstone once said, has from
time immemorial formed the basis of English tradition, and in regard to
which the _locus classicus_ was the statement of his great opponent,
Lord Salisbury, that as to Home Rule the Irish were not fit for it, for,
he went on to say, "nations like the Hottentots, and even the Hindoos,
are incapable of self-government."
A cynical Irish Secretary once asked whether the Irish people blamed the
Government for the weather; but it must be conceded that the mode of
government made the Irish people more dependent than otherwise they
would have been on climatic conditions, for this reason, that the margin
between their means and a starvation wage was extremely small, and thus
it was that in the middle of the century an act of God brought
sufferings in its train, the results of which have not yet been effaced.
Through it all the country was governed not in the interests of the
majority, but according to the fiat of a small minority kept in power by
armed force, not by the use of the common law, but of a specially
enacted coercive code applicable to the whole or any part of the country
at the mere caprice of the chief of the Executive. The record, it must
be admitted, is not edifying. Irish history, one may well say, is not of
such a nature as to put one "on the side of the angels." Lecky's
"History of the Eighteenth Century" has made many converts to Home Rule,
and I venture to think that when another Lecky comes to write of the
history of the nineteenth century the converts which he will make will
be even more numerous.
Among the anomalies of Irish government there is none greater than that
of the Executive, the head of which is the Viceroy. The position of
this official is very different from that of the governor of a
self-governing colony. If the Viceroy is in the Cabinet his Chief
Secretary is not; but the more common practice of recent years has been
for the Chief Secretary to have a seat in the Cabinet to the exclusion
of the Lord Lieutenant. Whether the latter be in the Cabinet or not he
has no ministers as has a colonial governor, to whose advice he must
listen because they possess the confidence of a representative body, and
moreover, although the Lord Lieutenant is a Minister of the Crown, his
salary is charged on the Consolidated Fund, with the result that his
acts do not come before the House of Commons on Committee of Supply as
do those of the Chief Secretary on the occasion of the annual vote for
his salary.
As early as 1823 Joseph Hume ventilated the question of the abolition of
the Lord Lieutenancy, and a motion introduced by him to that effect in
1830 received a considerable measure of support. Lord Clarendon, who in
1847 succeeded Lord Bessborough as Viceroy, accepted the office on the
express condition that the Government should take the first opportunity
of removing the anomaly. In pursuance of this agreement Lord John
Russell, in 1850, introduced a Bill, which was supported by Peel, with
the abolition of the office for its object. On its second reading it was
passed by the House of Commons by 295 votes to 70. In spite of this
enormous majority in its favour the Bill was dropped in an unprecedented
manner, and never reached the Committee stage owing, it is said, to the
opposition of Wellington, who objected to the fact that it would deprive
the Crown of its direct control over the forces in Ireland and to the
fact that it would leave the Lord Mayor of Dublin, a person who was
elected by a more or less popular vote, as the chief authority in that
city.
In 1857 the question was mooted once more, but no action ensued; and
again, on the resignation of Lord Londonderry in 1889, a number of Irish
Unionists, headed by the Marquis of Waterford, urged Lord Salisbury to
consider the advisability of abolishing the office, together with the
Viceregal Court, which a recent French observer has stigmatised as
"peuple de snobs, de parasites et de parvenus."[1] In the event Lord
Salisbury, so far from acceding to the request, nominated the Marquis of
Zetland to the vacant post, and the proposal to abolish it has not since
been raised in public. Men like Archbishop Whately, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, whose ambition it was to see what they called the
consolidation of Great Britain and Ireland effected, were strongly in
favour of the proposal, and its rejection on so many occasions has been
doubtless due to the fact that to mix and confound the administration of
Ireland with that of Great Britain would necessitate the abandonment of
the extreme centralisation of Irish Government, and those who were most
anxious, as the phrase went, to make Cork like York were the very people
who were most opposed to any abdication of Executive powers which an
assimilation of methods of government would have inevitably brought in
its train.
The government of Ireland is effected by more than forty boards--the
forty thieves the late Mr. Davitt used to call them--and it will be for
the reader, after he has studied the account which I propose to give of
them, to say whether or not they deserve the name.
It is nearly twenty years since Mr. Chamberlain, in a celebrated speech
at Islington, made the following remarkable declaration:--"I say the
time has come to reform altogether the absurd and irritating anachronism
which is known as Dublin Castle, to sweep away altogether the alien
boards of foreign officials and to substitute for them a genuine Irish
administration for purely Irish business." Change of opinions, no one
can refuse to admit, in a statesman any more than in other men, and as
regards the latter part of the extract which I have quoted Mr.
Chamberlain may have changed his views, but it is to the earlier part of
the sentence that I would refer. There is in it a definite statement of
facts which no change in opinion on the part of the speaker could alter,
and which express, as well as they can be expressed, the views of the
Nationalists as to the Castle, the alien boards of foreign officials in
which remained undisturbed during the course of the seven years after
the coalition of Unionists and Tories, in which Mr. Chamberlain was the
most powerful Minister of the Crown.
Of the purely domestic branches of the Civil Service in Great Britain,
the Treasury, the Home Office, the Boards of Education, of Trade, and of
Agriculture, the Post Office, the Local Government Board, and the Office
of Works, are all responsible to the public directly, through
representative Ministers with seats in the House of Commons, the
liability of whom to be examined by private members as to minutiae of
their departmental policy is one of the most valuable checks against
official incompetence or scandals, and is the only protection under the
constitution against arbitrary rule. The whole administrative machinery
of the forty-three boards in Ireland has been represented in Parliament
by one member, the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, but he is
supported since a few months ago by the Vice-president of the Department
of Agriculture. The result is that, while in Great Britain a watchful
eye can be kept on extravagance or mismanagement of the public services,
the maintenance of a diametrically opposite system of government in
Ireland, under which it is impossible to let in the same amount of
light, leads to the bureaucratic conditions of which Mr. Chamberlain
spoke in the speech from which I have quoted.
In answer to these complaints it is usual to point to the case of
Scotland as analogous, and to ask why Ireland should complain when the
Scottish form of government arouses no resentment in that country. The
parallel in no sense holds good, for Scotland has not a separate
Executive as has Ireland, although she has, like Ireland, a separate
Secretary in the House of Commons. Scottish legislation generally
follows that of England and Wales, and in any case Scotland has not
passed through a period of travail as has Ireland, nor have exceptional
remedies at recurring periods in her history been demanded by the social
conditions of the country; and last, but by no means least, one has only
to look at a list of Ministers of the Crown in the case of this
Government, or of that which preceded it, to see that the interests of
Scotland are well represented by the occupants of the Treasury Bench,
whichever party is in power, so that it is no matter for surprise that
she is precluded by her long acquiescence from demanding constitutional
change.
More than half a century ago Lord John Russell promised O'Connell to
substitute County Boards for the Grand Jury, in its capacity of Local
Authority, but the latter survived until ten years ago. The members of
the Grand Jury were nominated by the High Sheriffs of the Counties, and
as was natural, seeing that they were the nominees of a great landlord,
they were almost entirely composed of landlords, and the score of
gentlemen who served on these bodies in many instances imposed taxation,
as is now freely admitted, for the benefit of their own property on a
rack-rented tenantry. A reform of this system of local government was
promised by the Liberals in the Queen's Speech of 1881, but so far was
the powerful Government at that time in office from fulfilling its
pledges that not only was no Bill to that effect introduced, but,
further, in April, 1883, a Bill to establish elective County Councils,
which was introduced by the Irish Party, was thrown out in the House of
Commons by 231 votes to 58. In his famous speech at Newport in 1885,
when the Tories were, as all the world thought, coquetting with Home
Rule, Lord Salisbury declared that of the two, popular local government
would be even more dangerous than Home Rule. He based his view partly on
the difficulty of finding thirty or forty suitable persons in each of
the thirty-two counties to sit on local bodies, which would be greater
than that of finding three or four suitable M.P.s for the same divisions
of the country; but, even more than this, he insisted on the fact that a
local body has more opportunity for inflicting injustice on minorities
than has an authority deriving its sanction and extending its
jurisdiction over a wider area, where, as he declared, "the wisdom of
the several parts of the country will correct the folly or mistakes of
one." In spite of this explicit declaration, when, in the following
year, the Tories had definitely ranged themselves on the side of
Unionism, the alternative policy to the proposals of Mr. Gladstone was
nothing less than the establishment of a system of popular local
government. Speaking with all the premeditation which a full sense of
the importance of the occasion must have demanded, Lord Randolph
Churchill, on a motion for an Address in reply to the Queen's Speech
after the general election of 1886 had resulted in a Unionist victory,
made use of these words in his capacity of leader in the House of
Commons:--
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