OUR DUBLIN LETTER.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 337, 3 October 1879, Page 11

OUR DUBLIN LETTER.

(PROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.)

August 10th, 1879. It does certainly seem a strange thing to sit down and write a letter to be first read by men on the other side of the globe ; men whose very existence is to me a matter of taith. Tn the old days a man took much longer to get round the world than the world took to get round the sun. We have changed all that, and a month after I have written this letter in Ireland the printer may be setting the first type in New Zealand. Still a month is a. very long time in the high pressure world we live in— long enough for a country to be conquered or freed — a dynasty to be overturned or restored — an empire to be created or destroyed. My little budget of news, though quite fresh leaving, may be flat, stale, and unprofitable on its arrival at its destination. Besides, it is an arduous task to attempt to compress the incidents with which our hundreds and hundreds of newspapers are daily overflowing into one short monthly letter for the New Zealand reader. Perhaps it is as well to begin as people always do begin conversations in this country with the weather. There will be more sympathy between New Zealand and Ireland on this subject, since for once in a way they have been having the same season at the same time. From the beginning of April to the end of July it has been winter with you and it has been winter here — cold nor'-easters and nor'-westers, and rain that poured out of the grey sky day after day with malignant persistency. With August there has been some slight improvement, and as 1 write the skies promise (what their promise is worth is another question) an interval of long deferred summer. The harvest here has suffered considerably, though, perhaps, not so much or so irretrievably as might have been expected by the long continued rains. The farmers have suffered far more from American competition. They began by sending us across the Atlantic dead and boiled beef in tins, and then followed raw and live beef in the leathern covering nature has provided. Now the Yankees send us everything — beef and mutton, live and dead ; oysters, salmon, lobsters, peas, peaches, eggs, and butter ; in fact, those articles are only quoted as samples, for everything that can by possibility appear on an Irish breakfast, dinner, or supper table is handed across the ocean by our American cousins. The farmers are driven mad by the universal and irresistible competition. Among the poorer classes, indeed, it is a very prevalent belief, based on the trans-Atlantic meteorological reports that appear in the newspapers, that the frost and rain come from America as well, and their freely expressed opinion is that " the weather was never right since the Yankees got charge of it." The combined result of American weather and American competition is terrible distress amongst the farmer classes in Ireland, and as agriculture is now almost the sole industry of the country, the distress may be properly described as universal. Numbers of landlords throughout the three kingdoms, headed by H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, in consideration of the distress, have made large reductions, in some instances as much as 30 per cent., in their rents. The Liberal and National newspapers call upon the landlords for still larger and more general reductions, but it would almost seem that no reduction short of total abolition of rents will satisfy the tenantry. In the West of Ireland especially monster meetings arc almost daily held, in which '-vagabond politicians" who have something to gain and nothing to lose by distuibance harangue the people maddened by privation, and resolutions calling for a total abolition of landlordism in this country are carried by acclamation. Process servers, guarded by police, are met on the public highways by crowds, numbering as many as five or six hundred, are deprived of processes for rent, and are driven away with violence ; while no jury can be found to convict the offenders. Bands of men, with their faces blackened, go round in the night from house to house amongst the farmers and, under threat of death, compel them to swear that they will pay no rent unless considerable reductions arc made. By many it is thought that a genera l combination is in progress against the payment of rent such as that by which about half a century ago the payment of tithes was successfully resisted. But agricultural distuibances are not the only disturbances to which the West of Ireland is at present sub jected. In the romantic district of Connemara the wild and picturesque highlands of Ireland the fiercest religious dissentions are rife. To explain their nature and origin it is necessary to allude to an association with which, perhaps, some of your readeis are unacquainted. This association is called the "Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics." The society was established, as far as I have been able to ascertain, in the year of the famine for the avowed purpose of purchasing by food, clothes, or money, raw Christian material in the shape of Catholic souls to be manufactured into orthodox members of the Protestant community. This society has existed and to a certain extent, that is to say pecuniarily, has flourished from that day to this, and it is no exaggeration to say that it has existed and flourished upon lies Every year a bulky report is published, in which a glowing account is given, always with a scrupulous exclusion of names, dates, and localities, of the marvellous conversions effected by the agents of the association. These conversions, it is hardly necessary to pay, are the merest fictions; if they were true there would not be by this time a Catholic in Ireland. But by this shallow device £21,000 and upwards are annually extracted from the pockets of bigots, chiefly English bigot.«, and so the society flourisheth. Its real work is first the purchase of children from starving parents, as one would purchase pigs in the market, to sell them at a profit to proselytising establishments in Dublin ; secondly, the circulation of placards, in prose and doggrel, containing the most ribald and scurrilous abuse of the Catholic religion ; such abuse as would not be tolerated for a moment by the Government if offered by British inhabitants in India to the Indian idols, is in Counemara poured out with impunity by those illiterate and mercenary missionaries against the most ancient and purest form of Christian woisbip. The Catholic Church is describi dasa '• liar and a man-slayer," " a system of fiaud founded by Satan,'' a " mother of harlots." In a wretched ballad entitled '• Paddy's Farewell to the Priest," the enlightened preacher of the Gospel expresses himself with unspeakable infimy in reference to that most august Sacrament

which God Himself has told us "is His body and blood." It is scarcely to be wondered at that, in spite of the exhortations of the priest, the Catholic peasant of Connemara occasionally breaks out into violence under such persistent and outrageous provocation. Some months ago a " mission " schoolmaster with the police who formed his escort amid the people he came to convert was somewhat roughly handled by the crowd. The attacking party to the number of sixteen, were indicted at the last Gal way Assizes which have just concluded, and the case excited the utmost interest, not merely in the district, but throughout the country. Six of the sixteen were tried. A Catholic judge, the Rt. Hon. Justice Deasy, presided and rigorously excluded all evidence as to the character of the missions, or the provocation the people received. But the jury, acting on their own knowledge of the subject, for the assault was pretty clearly proved, refused to convict. Two of the prisoners were acquitted. In regard to the remaining four, the jury disagreed, eight being for an acquittal and four for a conviction. Those latter persons were let out on bail, and it is believed that the country has beard the last of the prosecutions, and it is hoped that before long it will have heard the last of the Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics of Ireland. Of late, however, Ireland has been troubled not merely with agrarian and religious, but also with political dissentions. The disintegration of the Irish Horae-Kule party which had begun before the death of its gifted leader, Mr. Butt, has since continued with startling rapidity. A few weeks ago the borough of Bnnis became vacant, and the candidates were Mr. Wm. O'Brien, Q. C, who had become a convert from Liberalism to Home-Rule by a singular coincidence at the very moment the vacancy occurred, and a Mr. Finnigan, who was a Home- Ruler oE some standing. The priests and the Freeman's Journal (the principal Catholic and Home-Rule organ in Ireland) favoured the candidature of Mr. Wm. O'Brien. Mr. Parnell, M.P., the founder and the leader of the extreme " Obstruction Party " in the House of Commons, earnestly supported Mr. Finnigan. The contest, which was a close one, resulted in a victory for Mr. Finnigan, though by only a few votes, and in the excitement of the victory Mr. Parnell was reported to have given to the public some darkly coloured " word photographs," as they have been called, of his colleagues of the Home- Rule party. Mr. Shaw, their nominal leader, he was said to have described as " an old woman unfit to lead any party, and not giving the advanced section the slightest help." Mr. O'Shaughnessy '• had handed himself body and soul to the Whigs." Col. Colthurst, a recent addition to the party, was " a wooden headed martinet." Mr. Gabbet, the latest arrival, was " a very good dancer, but politically an ass." Of Mr. Gray, the son of Sir John Gray, the proprietor of the Freeman's Journal, and one of the most prominent of young Irish politicians, Mr. Parnell said, or was reported to have said, " he deserved to be kicked out of Tipperary, and would be at the next election.'" It is not easy to conceive the ferment created by the publication of these comments. The five daily papers of which Dublin boasts could speak about nothing else. Mr. Parnell denied the accuracy of the report. Evidence was not wanting on the other hand to support its authenticity. The quarrel seemed a very pretty quarrel as it stood. Bat it was suddenly complicated by another announcement that, at a meeting of the Home- Rule party, in Londom, Mr. Parnell described a large section of his coadjutors, in globo this time, as '• a set of cowardly Papist rats, who did not deserve to get anything." Again Mr. Parnell denied the accuracy of the report, and got five Irish members who had been present at the meeting to sup* port him in his declaration that " no such words had been used by him at the meeting." Mr. Gray, who was also corroborated by other members, declared he had himself heard Mr. Parnell speak the words reported. Mr. Gray suggests that the only way to account for the counter declaration was that the chairman had just left the chair when the words were spoken, and therefore it might be said that they were not spoken at the meeting. He said he knew of a similar point made on a previous occasion. Mr. Gray did not say what the other occasion was to which he alluded, but your readers may, perhaps, wish to be informed. At a previous meeting of the Home-Rule party, when it was suddenly announced that the great leader, Mr. Butt, was sick unto death, Mr. Biggar, the henchman of Mr. Parnell, then the rival of Mr. Butt, exclaimed, " the news is too good to be true," and refused when called upon to withdraw his words, on tho grounds that the chairman had left the chair, and the meeting was at an end before he bad uttered them. This is, however, by the way. On the " rat " controversy a vehement and voluminous correspondence raged last week between Mr. Parnell, who is, of course, a Protestant, and Mr. Gray, who is a recent convert to Catholicity. The correspondence, though occupying many columns of the newspapers, may be summed up in six or seven words, " You are a liar 1 " " You are another ! " Its outcome bas not been as might be expected, " Pistols for two and coffee for one," but the following paragraph in the London Correspondence of the Freeman's Journal, of August 9th, " Mr. Gray and Mr. Parnell met last evening in the house, at the suggestion of Mr. Shaw and Mr. O'Connor Power, and had a friendly explanation, which completely terminates the unpleasant controversy between them, and restores their former amicable relations." So all's well that ends well — a remark that I would wish to make applicable to my letter if possible. I have sent you nothing but dissentions and disturbances this time, and I will end with a promise to have, if the fates permit, more agreeable intelligence in my next month's budget.