OUR DUBLIN LETTER.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 363, 2 April 1880, Page 17

OUR DUBLIN LETTER.

(From our own Correspondent.)

Dublin, January 30, 1880. The coolness between our Lord Lieutenant and Lord Mayor, the rival rulers of the Mansion House and the Castle to which I alluded in my last letter, has recently developed into an open rupture, which is at this moment the one engrossing topic of conversation in Dublin. To begin at the beginning, I must go back to the old story of distress which has formed the melancholy burden of so many of my letters. 'All the horrors of a famine have fallen upon Ireland and our Government, the richest in the world, a Government possessed of absolutely illimitable resources — will not stir one finger to relieve her. From every side indeed, charitable subscriptions are pouring in a pace. The gross amount must at this moment have exceeded fifty thousand pounds. But Mrs. Partington, when she attempted to expel the ocean with a broom, was as wise as those who believe that this great tide of famine can be succcessfully encountered by private charity. What is wanting is a comprehensive Bcheme of public works throughout the country, which, while providing the famishing people with daily wages, which means food and clothing, will, by developing the reEources of the country, prevent the recurrence of such an awful crisis in the future. This is what everybody has been

asking the Government to do, and this is what the Government has persistently refused to do. Meantime a famine-stricken cry is heard from every corner of the land, and the heading of a man or a woman starved to death in the north and the south, and the east and the west, has grown horribly common in the newspapers. To aggravate the horror of the situation, the landlords have thought the present moment opportune for the enforcement of the payment of their rents. Of course people cannot pay what they have not got, and then follows the awful penalty of eviction. Even the worm we are told will turn at last, and it is hard to blame the long-suffering Irish peasant, to whom the Government is known as a power potent only for evil, if he resist the legal processes which would level his humble cottage with the ground, and send him forth a homeless wanderer on the face of the earth. The service of notices to quit was found to be a difficult a.nd dangerous task. The Government threw in their whole weight with the landlords. The constabulary, which have a perfect military organisation, were put into requisition ; they were marched and counter-marched about the country as a campaign. On the estates in the western districts of Ireland, the processes were served literally at the point of the bayonet. Nor was the military demonstration a mere empty pageant ; hunger breaks stone walls, they say, and the hungry and outraged people, whose appeal for mercy was answered by cold steel in many places, flung themselves, all enfeebled and unarmed as they were, upon the deadly weapons of the police. The women were everywhere foremost in this rash resistance ; stones and sticks were opposed with desperate courage to rifle, bullet, and bayonet point. In many instances the service of the notices was rendered impossible, and in one instance, at Carraroe, in the county of Galway, the unarmed peasantry actually broke the close ranks of the police, and captured their leader, whom they disarmed, and set at liberty without further molestation. The strange domestic war that is raging in the country has been very happily depictedjin a cartoon in one of our comic journals. There is a grand military parade ; a huge cannon is being fixed, and an enormous conical ball, with an evictment process attached, is winging its way to the door of a wretched cottage in the far distance. In the foreground, a General in full uniform, issues his commands to the process server with the match he orders to direct his gun straight upon the door, to the men to stand firm until the shot is fired, then the infantry to close in hollow square, and the cavalry to cover the retreat. The process server responds, " Gineral Jewel, sure ye won't run until I'm safe." Your readers must think I have completely forgotten the rupture between the Lord Mayor and the Lord Lieutenant to which I alluded in the first line of this letter, but I have not. I have been coming round to it all the time. The other day there was a great meeting of the members of the Irish Parliamentary party — at which the Lord Mayor, as member for Tipperary, presided — to consider, in view of the fast approach of the opening of Parliament, the Governmental action, or rather inaction, for the relief of the famine in this country. Resolutions were adopted that the question should be forced vigorously to the front when the Queen's speech was delivered. Then The O'Donoghue, the most recent accession to the Home Rule ranks, proposed a resolution offering the sympathy and support of the meeting to the peasantry in the West of Ireland struggling for their rights. This resolution the Lord Mayor, as chairman of the meeting, declined to put, as conveying approval of armed resistance to the law, which if they were not prepared to share it was cowardly to encourage. The resolution was modified into an expression of sympathy with the distressed tenantry of Treland ; and in this form was carried at a subsequent meeting, at which also the Lord Mayor presided. It is easy then to imagine the^Lord Mayor's surprise when, in reply to the invitation to the Lord Lieutenant to the customary ■t banquet at the Mansion House, at which the Lord Lieutenant's pre- * sence has gradually grown to be a matter of course, he received the reply that his conduct in presiding at a meeting at which resolutions were adopted encouraging armed resistance to the law and reflecting on the action of Her Majesty's Government precluded His Excellency from becoming his guest. An informal meeting of the Dublin Corporation was immediately held. The Lord Mayor, in a speech of wonderful power and sarcasm, immolated the Lord Lieutenant. The resolution encouraging illegality had been refused, he said, and refused by him ; and in censuring, not the action — for there had been no action — but the inaction of Her Majesty's Government in regard to the distress, he contended he was wholly within his rights. Finally it was resolved that the banquet should be abandoned, and that the £500 which was its estimated cost should go to the relief of the distress. There is but one instance on record of similar action on the part of a Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, and Conservatives and Liberals here join with wonderful unanimity in censuring the mingled folly and bad taste of the proceeding. Subsequently His

Excellency was foolish enough to ask the Lord Mayor to dinner, and received, of course, the most curt refusal. If I want to keep this letter within any reasonable bounds I must put the remaining items of news with telegraphic brevity. Mr. Parncll is prosecuting his crusade in America against the Irish landlords and the Irish land system with wonderful vigour and success. There was a curious incident in connection with the execution of the murderer McHugo, whose sentence and crime I spoke of in my last letter. The man was hanged in Gfalway a few days since. He died confessing his guilt ; he died penitently, and he died courageously. But he solemnly declared that he was incited to and assisted in the murder by an unknown man who appeared suddenly beside him on the road, and whom he has never seen before or since. This declaration is the more unaccountable as it would appear impossible, on the evidence at the trial, that any one but McHugo could have been at the scene of the murder at the time of its occurrence. The peasantry have solved the difficulty their own way by believing that the murderer was assisted by the evil one in person ; and the time (Christmas Eve), and the attendant circumstances of the deed, would almost! seem to lend a colour to the superstition. There are strange rumours afloat that there have appeared miraculously visions of Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin to several persons outside a small plain church at Claremorris, in the county of Mayo, and that many cures have been performed on the spot. I shall ascertain the particulars and the truth of the story, and write more fully on the subject in my next.