THE TIMES ON O'CONNELL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 36, 4 January 1884, Page 21

THE TIMES ON O'CONNELL.

It has always been, for obvious reasons, the custom of the enemies of the Irish cause to praise Irish nationalist leaders who have -been, for some time dead ; and lately, according to this rule, O'Connell has come in for rather unstinted laudation at the hands of contemporary .Britons and West-Britons. But the Irish people should never forget that when those Irish patriots were alive they were denounced by the partisans of the English oppression as if they were the vilest criminals, and O'Connell in particular was made the victim of the foulest abuse which malice could suggest. Of this latter fact the recently published volume of Mr. Barry O'Brien, entitled, " Fifty Yiars of Concessions to Ireland," supplies more than one ' curious proof. The Times nowadays does not publish much in the way of original verse, but fifty years ago it did print some occasionally, and Mr. O'Brien tells us, in the work just mentioned, that on the 26th November, 1835, it gave to the world the following lines in reference to the great Irish agitator :— Scum condensed of Irish bog ! Ruffian — coward — demagogue ! Boundless liar — base'detractor I Nurse of murders— treason's factor 1 Spout thy filth— diffuse thy slime, Slander is in thee no crime I Safe from challenge — safe from law, What can curb thy callous jaw ? Who would sue a convict liar ? On a poltroon who would fire 1 Even the foul-mouthed King Harman, the Rev. Roaring Cane, or that Paddy Kelh/s Budget of the Tory party— the Evening Mail— has not said anything worse of Mr. Parnell than the foregoing. Indeed, it would be somewhat difficult to imagine how the force of Billingsgate could further go than it does in this specimen of nines " poetry." Nor, of course, was this the only attack of the kind made on O'Connell. The Times, at the period in question, almost daily described the Liberator as one of the vilest members of the human race ; in fact, that he was not stoned to death on some occasion or another by an English mob, or shot or stabbed by an English assassin, in consequence of the diatribes in the Times, is a wonder. That in the long run the Times injured itself rather than the victim of its scurrilous mendacity is now plain to all ; and if the circumstances do not teach O'Connell's present successor in the leadership of the Irish people and his colleagues ia the national movement that the West-British denunciations of which they are the object will be equally powerless for their intended purpo.e. it certainly ou»ut to have that effect.— Nation.