Ireland and the Home Rule Movement

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Title: Ireland and the Home Rule Movement

Author: Michael F. J. McDonnell

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[i]

Matri dilectissimae

[ii]

Ireland and the Home Rule Movement

By Michael F. J. McDonnell

With a Preface by John Redmond, M.P.

1908

[iii]

[iv]

[v]

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 [vi]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.

[vii]

CONTENTS

[viii]

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.

[ix]

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 [x]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 [xi]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.

[1]

CHAPTER I

THE EXECUTIVE IN IRELAND

La 'Garnison' a occupée le pays sans le 'gouverner,' ou en ne le gouvernant que de son propre interet de classe: son hegemonie a été toute sa politique.

—L. PAUL-DUBOIS, L'Irlande Contemporaine, 1907.

A regarder de près 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 [2]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 [3]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 [4]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 [5]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 [6]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 peuplé 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 [7]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 minutiæ 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 [8]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