Irish Nationality

Any discussion of the Union in its effect on Ireland lies apart from a discussion of the motives of men who administered the system in the last century. The system itself, wrongly conceived and wrongly enforced, contained the principles of ruin, and no good motives could make it work for the benefit of Ireland, or, in the long run, of England.

Oppressive financial burdens were laid on the Irish. Each country was for the next twenty years to provide for its own expenditure and debt, and to contribute a sum to the general expenses of the United Kingdom, fixed in the proportion of seven and a half parts for Great Britain and one part for Ireland. The debt of Ireland had formerly been small; in 1793 it was 2-¼ millions; it had risen to nearly 28 millions by 1801, in great measure through the charges of Clare's policy of martial law and bribery. In the next years heavy loans were required for the Napoleonic war. When Ireland, exhausted by calamity, was unable to pay, loans were raised in England at heavy war-rates and charged to the public debt of Ireland. In 1817 the Irish debt had increased more than fourfold, to nearly 113 millions. No record was made in the books of the Exchequer as to what portion of the vast sums raised should in fairness be allotted to Ireland; there is no proof that there was any accuracy in the apportionment. The promised lighter taxation ended in a near bankruptcy, and the approach of an appalling famine in 1817. Bankruptcy was avoided by uniting the two treasuries to form one national debt – but the burden of Ireland remained as oppressive as before. Meanwhile the effect of the Union had been to depress all Irish industries and resources, and in these sixteen years the comparative wealth of Ireland had fallen, and the taxes had risen far beyond the rise in England. The people sank yet deeper under their heavy load. The result of their incapacity to pay the amount fixed at the Union was, that of all the taxes collected from them for the next fifty-three years, one-third was spent in Ireland, and two-thirds were absorbed by England; from 1817 to 1870 the cost of government in Ireland was under 100 millions, while the contributions to the imperial exchequer were 210 millions, so that Ireland sent to England more than twice as much as was spent on her. The tribute from Ireland to England in the last ninety-three years, over and above the cost of Irish administration, has been over 325 millions – a sum which would probably be much increased by a more exact method both of recording the revenue collected from Ireland and the "local" and "imperial" charges, so as to give the full Irish revenue, and to prevent the debiting to Ireland of charges for which she was not really liable. While this heavy ransom was exacted Ireland was represented as a beggar, never satisfied, at the gates of England.

Later, in 1852, Gladstone began to carry out the second part of the Union scheme, the indiscriminate taxation of the two countries. In a few years he added two and a half millions to Irish taxation, at a moment when the country, devastated by famine, was sinking under the loss of its corn trade through the English law, and wasting away by emigration to half its former population. In 1896 a Financial Commission reported that the Act of Union had laid on Ireland a burden she was unable to bear; and that, in spite of the Union pledge that the ability of Ireland to pay should always be taken into account, she was paying one-eleventh of the tax revenue of the United Kingdom while her taxable capacity was one-twentieth or less. While Great Britain paid less than two shillings in every pound of her taxable surplus, Ireland paid about ten shillings in every pound of hers. No relief was given.

Under this drain of her wealth the poverty or Ireland was intensified, material progress was impossible, and one bad season was enough to produce wide distress, and two a state of famine. Meanwhile, the cost of administration was wasteful and lavish, fixed on the high prices of the English scale, and vastly more expensive than the cost of a government founded on domestic support and acceptable to the people. The doom of an exhausting poverty was laid on Ireland by a rich and extravagant partner, who fixed the expenses for English purposes, called for the money, and kept the books.

The Union intensified the alien temper of Irish government. We may remember the scandal caused lately by the phrase of a great Irish administrator that Ireland should be governed according to Irish ideas. Dublin Castle, no longer controlled by an Irish parliament, entrenched itself more firmly against the people. Some well-meaning governors went over to Ireland, but the omnipotent Castle machine broke their efforts for impartial rule or regard for the opinion of the country. The Protestant Ascendancy openly reminded the Castle that its very existence hung on the Orange associations. Arms were supplied free from Dublin to the Orangemen while all Catholics were disarmed. The jobbing of the grand juries to enrich themselves out of the poor – the traffic of magistrates who violated their duties and their oaths – these were unchanged. Justice was so far forgotten that the presiding judge at the trial of O'Connell spoke of the counsel for the accused as "the gentleman on the other side." Juries were packed by the sheriffs with Protestants, by whom all Orangemen were acquitted, all Catholics condemned, and the credit of the law lowered for both by a system which made the juryman a tool and the prisoner a victim. It is strange that no honest man should have protested against such a use of his person and his creed. In the case of O'Connell the Chief Justice of England stated that the practice if not remedied must render trial by jury "a mockery, a delusion, and a snare"; but jury-packing with safe men remained the invariable custom till 1906.

Nothing but evil to Ireland followed from carrying her affairs to an English parliament. The government refused the promised emancipation, refused tithe reform. Englishmen could not understand Irish conditions. The political economy they advocated for their own country had no relation to Ireland. The Irish members found themselves, as English officials had foretold in advocating the Union, a minority wholly without influence. Session after session, one complained, measures supported by Irish members, which would have been hailed with enthusiasm by an Irish parliament, were rejected by the English. Session after session measures vehemently resisted by the Irish members were forced on a reluctant nation by English majorities. When Ireland asked to be governed by the same laws as England, she was told the two countries were different and required different treatment. When she asked for any deviation from the English system, she was told that she must bow to the established laws and customs of Great Britain. The reports of royal commissions fell dead – such as that which in 1845 reported that the sufferings of the Irish, borne with exemplary patience, were greater than the people of any other country in Europe had to sustain. Nothing was done. Instead of the impartial calm promised at the Union, Ireland was made the battle-cry of English parties; and questions that concerned her life or death were important at Westminster as they served the exigencies of the government or the opposition.

All the dangers of the Union were increased by its effect in drawing Irish landlords to London. Their rents followed them, and the wealth spent by absentees founded no industries at home. A land system brought about by confiscation, and developed by absentees, meant unreclaimed wastes, lands half cultivated, and neglected people. Landlords, said an indignant judge of wide experience in a charge to a jury in 1814, should build their tenants houses, and give them at least what they had not as yet, "the comforts of an English sow." To pay rent and taxes in England the toilers raised stores of corn and cattle for export there, from the value of eight million pounds in 1826 to seventeen million pounds of food stuffs in 1848, and so on. They grew potatoes to feed themselves. If the price of corn fell prodigiously – as at the end of the Napoleonic war, or at the passing of the corn laws in England – the cheaper bread was no help to the peasants, most of whom could never afford to eat it; it only doubled their labour to send out greater shiploads of provisions for the charges due in England. On the other hand, if potatoes rotted, famine swept over the country among its fields of corn and cattle. And when rent failed, summary powers of eviction were given at Westminster under English theories for use in Ireland alone; "and if anyone would defend his farm it is here denominated rebellion." Families were flung on the bogs and mountain sides to live on wild turnips and nettles, to gather chickweed, sorrel, and seaweed, and to sink under the fevers that followed vagrancy, starvation, cold, and above all the broken hearts of men hunted from their homes. In famine time the people to save themselves from death were occasionally compelled to use blood taken from live bullocks, boiled up with a little oatmeal; and the appalling sight was seen of feeble women gliding across the country with their pitchers, actually trampling upon fertility and fatness, to collect in the corner of a grazier's farm for their little portion of blood. Five times between 1822 and 1837 there were famines of lesser degree: but two others, 1817 and 1847, were noted as among the half-dozen most terrible recorded in Europe and Asia during the century. From 1846 to 1848 over a million lay dead of hunger, while in a year food-stuffs for seventeen million pounds were sent to England. English soldiers guarded from the starving the fields of corn and the waggons that carried it to the ports; herds of cattle were shipped, and skins of asses which had served the famishing for food. New evictions on an enormous scale followed the famine, the clearance of what was then called in the phrase of current English economics "the surplus population," "the overstock tenantry." They died, or fled in hosts to America – Ireland pouring out on the one side her great stores or "surplus food," on the other her "surplus people," for whom there was nothing to eat. In the twenty years that followed the men and women who had fled to America sent back some thirteen millions to keep a roof over the heads of the old and the children they had left behind. It was a tribute for the landlords' pockets – a rent which could never have been paid from the land they leased. The loans raised for expenditure on the Irish famine were charged by England on the Irish taxes for repayment.

No Irish parliament, no matter what its constitution, could have allowed the country to drift into such irretrievable ruin. O'Connell constantly protested that rather than the Union he would have the old Protestant parliament. "Any body would serve if only it is in Ireland," cried a leading Catholic nationalist in Parnell's time; "the Protestant synod would do." In the despair of Ireland, the way was flung open to public agitation, and to private law which could only wield the weapons of the outlaw. All methods were tried to reach the distant inattention of England. There were savage outbursts of men often starving and homeless, always on the edge of famine – Levellers, Threshers, and the like; or Whiteboys who were in fact a vast trades union for the protection of the Irish peasantry, to bring some order and equity into relations of landlord and tenant. Peaceful organisation was tried; the Catholic Association for Emancipation founded by O'Connell in 1823, an open society into which Protestants and Catholics alike were welcomed, kept the peace in Ireland for five years; outrage ceased with its establishment and revived with its destruction. His Association for Repeal (1832-1844) again lifted the people from lawless insurrection to the disciplined enthusiasm of citizens for justice. A Young Ireland movement (1842-1848) under honoured names such as Thomas Davis and John Mitchel and Gavan Duffy and Smith O'Brien and others with them, sought to destroy sectarian divisions, to spread a new literature, to recover Irish history, and to win self-government, land reform, and education for a united people of Irish and English, Protestant and Catholic. The suppression of O'Connell's peaceful movement by the government forced on violent counsels; and ended in the rising of Smith O'Brien as the only means left him of calling attention to the state of the country. The disturbances that followed have left their mark in the loop-holed police barracks that covered Ireland. There was a Tenant League (1852) and a North and South League. All else failing, a national physical force party was formed; for its name this organization went back to the dawn of Irish historic life – to the Fiana, those Fenian national militia vowed to guard the shores of Ireland. The Fenians (1865) resisted outrage, checked agrarian crime, and sought to win self-government by preparing for open war. A great constitutionalist and sincere Protestant, Isaac Butt, led a peaceful parliamentary movement for Home Rule (1870-1877); after him Charles Stewart Parnell fought in the same cause for fourteen years (1877-1891) and died with victory almost in sight. Michael Davitt, following the advice of Lalor thirty years before, founded a Land League (1879) to be inevitably merged in the wider national issue. Wave after wave of agitation passed over the island. The manner of the national struggle changed, peaceful or violent, led by Protestant or Catholic, by men of English blood or of Gaelic, but behind all change lay the fixed purpose of Irish self-government. For thirty-five years after the Union Ireland was ruled for three years out of every four by laws giving extraordinary powers to the government; and in the next fifty years (1835-1885) there were only three without coercion acts and crime acts. By such contrasts of law in the two countries the Union made a deep severance between the islands.

In these conflicts there was not now, as there had never been in their history, a religious war on the part of Irishmen. The oppressed people were of one creed, and the administration of the other. Protestant and Catholic had come to mean ejector and ejected, the armed Orangeman and the disarmed peasant, the agent-or clergy-magistrate and the broken tenant before his too partial judgment-seat. In all cases where conflicting classes are divided into two creeds, religious incidents will crop up, or will be forced up, to embitter the situation; but the Irish struggle was never a religious war.

Another distinction must be noted. Though Ireland was driven to the "worst form of civil convulsion, a war for the means of subsistence," there was more Irish than the battle for food. Those who have seen the piled up graves round the earth where the first Irish saints were laid, will know that the Irishman, steeped in his national history, had in his heart not his potato plot alone, but the thought of the home of his fathers, and in the phrase of Irish saints, "the place of his resurrection."

If we consider the state of the poor, and the position of the millions of Irishmen who had been long shut out from any share in public affairs, and forbidden to form popular conventions, we must watch with amazement the upspringing under O'Connell of the old idea of national self-government. Deep in their hearts lay the memory carried down by bards and historians of a nation whose law had been maintained in assemblies of a willing people. In O'Connell the Irish found a leader who had like themselves inherited the sense of the old Irish tradition. To escape English laws against gatherings and conventions of the Irish, O'Connell's associations had to be almost formless, and perpetually shifting in manner and in name. His methods would have been wholly impossible without a rare intelligence in the peasantry. Local gatherings conducted by voluntary groups over the country; conciliation courts where justice was carried out apart from the ordinary courts as a protest against their corruption; monster meetings organised without the slightest disorder; voluntary suppression of crime and outrage – in these we may see not merely an astonishing popular intelligence, but the presence of an ancient tradition. At the first election in which the people resisted the right of landlords to dictate their vote (1826), a procession miles in length streamed into Waterford in military array and unbroken tranquillity. They allowed no rioting, and kept their vow of total abstinence from whisky during the election. A like public virtue was shown in the Clare election two years later (1828) when 30,000 men camped in Ennis for a week, with milk and potatoes distributed to them by their priests, all spirits renounced, and the peace not broken once throughout the week. As O'Connell drew towards Limerick and reached the Stone where the broken Treaty had been signed, 50,000 men sent up their shout of victory at this peaceful redeeming of the violated pledges of 1690. In the Repeal meetings two to four hundred thousand men assembled, at Tara and other places whose fame was in the heart of every Irishman there, and the spirit of the nation was shown by a gravity and order which allowed not a single outrage. National hope and duty stirred the two millions who in the crusade of Father Mathew took the vow of temperance.

In the whole of Irish history no time brought such calamity to Ireland as the Victorian age. "I leave Ireland," said one, "like a corpse on the dissecting table." "The Celts are gone," said Englishmen, seeing the endless and disastrous emigration. "The Irish are gone, and gone with a vengeance." That such people should carry their interminable discontent to some far place seemed to end the trouble. "Now for the first time these six hundred years," said The Times, "England has Ireland at her mercy, and can deal with her as she pleases." But from this death Ireland rose again. Thirty years after O'Connell Parnell took up his work. He used the whole force of the Land League founded by Davitt to relieve distress and fight for the tenants' rights; but he used the land agitation to strengthen the National movement. He made his meaning clear. What did it matter, he said, who had possession of a few acres, if there was no National spirit to save the country; he would never have taken off his coat for anything less than to make a nation. In his fight he held the people as no other man had done, not even O'Connell. The conflict was steeped in passion. In 1881 the government asked for an act giving them power to arrest without trial all Irishmen suspected of illegal projects – a power beyond all coercion hitherto. O'Connell had opposed a coercion act in 1833 for nineteen nights; Parnell in 1881 fought for thirty-two nights. Parliament had become the keeper of Irish tyrannies, not of her liberties, and its conventional forms were less dear to Irishmen than the freedom of which it should be the guardian. He was suspended, with thirty-four Irish members, and 303 votes against 46 carried a bill by which over a thousand Irishmen were imprisoned at the mere will of the Castle, among them Parnell himself. The passion of rage reached its extreme height with the publication in The Times (1888) of a facsimile letter from Parnell, to prove his consent to a paid system of murder and outrage. A special commission found it to be a forgery.

With the rejection of Gladstone's Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893, and with the death of Parnell (1891), Irish nationalists were thrown into different camps as to the means to pursue, but they never faltered in the main purpose. That remains as firm as in the times of O'Connell, Thomas Davis, John O'Leary, and Parnell, and rises once more to-day as the fixed unchanging demand, while the whole Irish people, laying aside agitations and controversies, stand waiting to hear the end.

The national movement had another side, the bringing back of the people to the land. The English parliament took up the question under pressure of violent agitation in Ireland. By a series of Acts the people were assured of fair rents and security from eviction. Verdicts of judicial bodies tended to prove that peasants were paying 60 per cent. above the actual value of the land. But the great Act of 1903 – a work inspired by an Irishman's intellect and heart – brought the final solution, enabling the great mass of the tenants to buy their land by instalments. Thus the land war of seven hundred years, the war of kings and parliaments and planters, was brought to a dramatic close, and the soil of Ireland begins again to belong to her people.

There was yet another stirring of the national idea. In its darkest days the country had remained true to the old Irish spirit of learning, that fountain of the nation's life. In O'Connell's time the "poor scholar" who took his journey to "the Munster schools" was sent out with offerings laid on the parish altars by Protestants and Catholics alike; as he trudged with his bag of books and the fees for the master sewn in the cuff of his coat, he was welcomed in every farm, and given of the best in the famishing hovels: "The Lord prosper him, and every one that has the heart set upon the learning." Bards and harpers and dancers wandered among the cottages. A famous bard Raftery, playing at a dance heard one ask, "Who is the musician?" and the blind fiddler answered him:

"I am Raftery the poet,Full of hope and love,With eyes that have no light,With gentleness that has no misery.Going west upon my pilgrimage,Guided by the light of my heart,Feeble and tired,To the end of my road.Behold me now,With my face to a wall,A-playing musicTo empty pockets."

Unknown scribes still copied piously the national records. A Louth schoolmaster could tell all the stars and constellations of heaven under the old Irish forms and names. A vision is given to us through a government Ordnance Survey of the fire of zeal, the hunger of knowledge, among the tillers and the tenants. In 1817 a dying farmer in Kilkenny repeated several times to his sons his descent back to the wars of 1641 and behind that to a king of Munster in 210 A.D. – directing the eldest never to forget it. This son took his brother, John O'Donovan, (1809-1861) to study in Dublin; in Kilkenny farmhouses he learned the old language and history of his race. At the same time another Irish boy, Eugene O'Curry (1796-1862), of the same old Munster stock, working on his father's farm in great poverty, learned from him much knowledge of Irish literature and music. The Ordnance Survey, the first peripatetic university Ireland had seen since the wanderings of her ancient scholars, gave to O'Donovan and O'Curry their opportunity, where they could meet learned men, and use their hereditary knowledge. A mass of material was laid up by their help. Passionate interest was shown by the people in the memorials of their ancient life – giants' rings, cairns, and mighty graves, the twenty-nine thousand mounds or moats that have been counted, the raths of their saints and scholars – each with its story living on the lips of the people till the great famine and the death or emigration of the people broke that long tradition of the race. The cry arose that the survey was pandering to the national spirit. It was suddenly closed (1837), the men dismissed, no materials published, the documents locked up in government offices. But for O'Donovan and O'Curry what prodigies of work remained. Once more the death of hope seemed to call out the pieties of the Irish scholar for his race, the fury of his intellectual zeal, the passion of his inheritance of learning. In the blackest days perhaps of all Irish history O'Donovan took up Michael O'Clery's work of two hundred years before, the Annals of the Four Masters, added to his manuscript the mass of his own learning, and gave to his people this priceless record of their country (1856). Among a number of works that cannot be counted here, he made a Dictionary which recalls the old pride of Irishmen in their language. O'Curry brought from his humble training an incredible industry, great stores of ancient lore, and an amazing and delicate skill as a scribe. All modern historians have dug in the mine of these men's work. They open to Anglo-Irish scholars such as Dr. Reeves and Dr. Todd, a new world of Irish history. Sir Samuel Ferguson began in 1833 to give to readers of English the stories of Ireland. George Petrie collected Irish music through all the west, over a thousand airs, and worked at Irish inscriptions and crosses and round towers. Lord Dunraven studied architecture, and is said to have visited every barony in Ireland and nearly every island on the coast.