Irish News

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 38, 19 September 1901, Page 9

Irish News

OUR IRISH LETTER.

(From oar own correspondent.) Dublin, July, 1901. THE REVIVAL OP THE IRISH LANGUAGE. Foe 25 of the years that a number of Irish soholars, hie Grace of Dublin amongst them, hav,e been earnestly working towards the now established revival of the native language, the men of letters were looked upon by the public generally as visionaries whose efforts oould only result in awakening a certain amount of dilettanteism amongst a few. None outside the circle of these faithful workero dreamed of the tangible good that lay in the movement, and, now that the sorely up-hill work of these pioneers is at last a real, established work, bidding fair to be a success in more ways than one, all are wondering that the thing took so many years to quicken into life. Two very great benefits are already accruing, one a purely moral benefit. In all the centres where the Irish language is taught, the study of Irish history, the study of what Ireland was in her golden age of true Christian life, is opening the hearts and minds of our youth and giving them a taste of pure reading, in place of the enervating, and worse than enervating, literature that was fast oorroding that class that reads only for a passing amusement and reads nothing but what can be had at the cheapest rate. Many a time of late years has the wish been expressed that the humbler classes had not been taught to read at all. The lectures in Irish history and those on good national literature now constantly given have aroused a spirit of inquiry, of pride, of a desire to know more and more of these things and a taste for good reading onoe awakened is rarely, if ever, again demoralised. The material gain is as important in its way, though not quite ■o easily made successful, for there ia a strong force in arms against it. This material outcome of the Irish revival, as it is called, is a combination of traders assistants in various parts of the oountry, the object of the combination being to give genuine support to home manufacture. One would think this depended far more upon the traders and the public than upon traders' assistants, who are supposed obediently to sell what their employers place in their hands, if the public call for it. Not at all. Naturally it has been the business of English and foreign manufacturers to oppose the sale of Irish-made goods, and they have hitherto been so successful in doing this that almost every home product has barely kept upon its feet, whilst many once-flourishing industries have died out altogether. English laws had a good deal to do with this, but English and foreigh capitalists had still more, and ore of the great factors used by these capitalists had been the rank and file of Irishmen employed behind the counters of our large business establishments. This fact has long been known to Irish producers and to such of the public as desired to revive Irish manufactures by personal efforts to obtain home-made goods. It paid English, Scotch, and foreign producers not only to undersell Irish goods at certain times, but to go behind the counterH and subsidise every shopassistant who would undertake to press foreign goods at the expense of Irish. Now 99 per cent, of the retail purchases of a country are made by women, and 99 per cent, of these women have a horror of being bullied or of receiving impertinence in public. For the past 15 years, a certain class of Irish ladies who can afford to do so have systematically endeavored to purchase household articles and clothing of home manufacture, and I can personally vouch for the fact that during all those years the subsidised t-hop assistants not only endeavored to injure the Irish trade by misrepresentation as to the relative value of articles, but subjected these ladies to an incredible amount of suffering ; I have known a wealthy, but timid, woman leave one of our largest establishments almost in tears from the impertinence she received when she tried to inßist upon being shown Irish fabrics, although the sale of the home articles would, in reality, put more money in the pockets of the owners of the hjuse. The new education has extended to these shop assistants ; thuy appear genuine convert*, and have formed an Association extending all over Ireland, binding its members to do all in their power to forward those industries that will enable the people to remain at home, by furnishing employment for the artizan, and thus eventually improve the condition of all classes. A DONEGAL INDUSTHY. As I am speaking of these matters, here is an appeal to IriHh priests and to wealthy Iri~>h settlers in New Zealand, whose love of the Old Country will, let us hope, induce them to respond. Your clergy are building new churches: your wealthy citizens are ever on the look out for something- new with which to beautify their homes. In a former letter, I mentioned an industry recently started and already highly successful in the poorest part of Donegal. I speak of the hand- made carpeta fabricated by Donegal peat-ant girls in that picturesque little town, Killybegs. So beautiful in texture and design and so durable are these carpets that they have already found a wide market, especially for church purposes, and so successful has the fmt factory proved that the proprietor, Mr. Morton, of the Axminster Carpet Works, has just built and started a second Irish factory near Killybega, in the village of Kilear. The Bishop of the diocese, the Most Rev. Dr. O'Donnell, opened the works this week by placing the first tuft in the first hand-made carpet to be manufactured in Kilear. Not only does this carpetmaking give employment to numbers of women and girls, but it is also a help to the neighboring farmers, as the wool u&ed is grown

in the dißtnot. The texture of theee carpets is the richest I have ever seen : it is closer, deeper and thicker than the finest Axminster, and any color or pattern desired can be produced by the young peasant girls employed as deftly as by the most skilled Oriental carpet- weavers. ■ ORANGE ROWDYISM. • The 12th of July was not so hot a time as usual in Belfast, the Orange thermometer having fallen for the moment, in consequence of the trial of, and sentence upon Trew, the street preacher, and a couple of his associates, of whom I spoke in my last. At the opening of the trial, the judge, Chief Baron Pallas, clearly explained that the law peiniiU Catholics, equally with those of other denominations, to walk i« procession through the streets and to carry religious emblems. The police were the principal witnesses against rrew and his associates, and proved that these men had been guilty of a conspiracy to incite the Orange populace of Belfaifc to commit a felony. The police stated that some of the language ueed in the public streets by these men in reference to priests and nuns (even the Sisters of Mercy who nurse the Protestant sick of Belfast) and Catholics in general was so unseemly as to be unfit to repeat in Court or to publish in newspapers. Trew was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to a year's imprisonment, with hard labor ; two of his accomplices to six months' imprisonment without hard labor. Of course, all Orange attacks upon Catholics have not been put down, as the ship-builders are 9,000 strong and are permitted to use iron bolts, etc., as ammunition in their periodical outbreak. Therefore, as soon as the extra police vigilance was withdrawn, the storm arose and at the present moment Catholic workmen and workwomen are in hourly dread of their lives. Wherever a Catholic workman is found, a Bignal is given and the Orange mob nasailg him, a hundred to one. A few days ago an Englishman was discovered taking notes in the streets of Belfast. He was mistaken by the Orange rioters for a Nationalist journalist and only escaped with his life on proving that he was neither Catholic nor Nationalist. The comment of a Belfast evening paper on this is characteristic : it gravely points out that, once the Englishman convinced his ahsailanta that he was not a Popish Irishman, there was no excuse whatever for attacking him ! Evidently, Catholics are fair game in the eyes of the editor of that paper. la Portadown, so threatening was the aspect of affairs that the Government was forced to send 450 police into the town to protect a party of Catholics who were going on a peaceful holiday excursion. The Catholics carried no religious badges or emblems, though they had a legal right to do so, yet they had to be guarded to and from the train and to and from Benediction in the church after the excursion, and then guarded in bodies to their homes. Could such things occur outside Ulster in the twentieth century I To assist them in their unchristian work of stirring up sectarian passions, the Orangemen of Portadown imported for the occasion one of those wretched beings who pretend to be ex-monks and whose degraded and immoral language in ' lecturing ' would be proof enough to sane people that they never had been members of any ( hriati.in body, not to say members of communities usually remarkable for their learning and refinement. AN ALL KG ED CONSPIRACY. In the rest of Ireland things continue to go on so peacefully that *c are really in danger of getting ' blue mouldy for want of a batinV The police of Tallow. County Waterford, spent the last year and a half in getting up a conspiracy case, re the United Irish League, but the thing turned out merely an absurdity, bringing good-humored ridicule on the policemen who charged themselves with cooking the crime in fact, tho worst items of inflammatory language they produced in Court against the terrible Leaguers were references to a sparrow on the houpe-top and to a viper upon its knees. A member of the Itoyal Irish Constabulary solemnly swore that these references were used at a meeting and that they were, in his opinion, proof of a conspiracy and so inflammatory as to be calculated to bring about a breach of the peace As the case turned upon the boycotting of a man who had graobed land, it is likely enough that King David'b simile was used, but the viper must have been a dream of the policeman'?, seeing th it there are no vipers in Ireland, and, moreover, that vipers have no knees. lie that as it may, this, the most exciting case we had this season in the three provinces outside loyal Ulster, ended in smoke, in the smoke of bonfires lighted in honor of tlm acquitted traversers. Acquitted, even though tho Judge on the occasion was that celebrated man long known as ' Peter the Packer ' ; though the case was tried in Cork, where 34 Catholics were ordered to ' stand aside ' before a jury could be properly packed, and though his Lordship 1 Peter the Packer ' strongly urged the jury to find even a few of the traversers guilty. Even a packed jury could not get over the fact that the man about whom the whole rout was made openly cried 'Save me from my friends ' at the trial, by proving that he had finally done justice to the man whose land he had grabbed ; that on his so doing, the clergy had interfered and had the boycott taken off him ; that hrn trade (which he had nearly lost) was returning to him, and ttiat things would have goqe on well and happily for all parties but for the interference of the Crown. Ungrateful man ! ___ M.B.