A Strange City

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 22, 28 May 1903, Page 1

A Strange City

It is a strange non-Catholic racial amalgam— Scoto-Anglo-Hibernian— that partially peoples the north-east corner of Ulster (Ireland). Strong, thrifty, and dour they are, less witty and picturesque and expansive than their countrymen beyond the yellow belt, and less known to the world outside. The Pope does not bear a good name among those of them— and they are many who are members of the fraternity of the saffron sash, and the-r hostility to him is the dominant note of social and religious and political life in north-east Ulster. To the t,rethren, the Roman Pontiff and all his following are outside the covenanted mercies of the Most High. This fierce sectarian feeling however deplorable, is not, however, without its humorous side. Somewhere in his ' Irish Life and Character,' for instance, Mr. McDonagh tells the following story illustrative of the facility with which the brethren curse the Pope on the slenderest provocation. They put their hearts into it, and the

exercise seems to refresh them. It happened in the county of Down. An over-zealous policeman met a farmer whose name was painted on his cart in script or cursive characters, like ordinary writing. 'My man,' said the uniformed busybody, ' these letters are difficult to read. The Act requires your name to be painted In Roman letters.' The farmer sat doggedly and sullenly still under the official rebuke until the hated woid ' Iloman ' smote his ear-drum. Then his ryemblazed like a pair of little electric furnaces. ' Jioinan ' ' he furiously shouted. 'To hell with the I'ope ! ' And with a fierce whip-cut on his horse's ribs, he was off.

Some of the many and far-reaching results of this melancholy spirit of sectarian animosity in Belfast are feet forth in trenchant phrase in the coin so of ono of a series of cleverly - written articles by the editor of the ' Southern Cross ' of Buenos Aires, who has recently returned to his desk from an extended tour in Ireland. ' Belfast,' says he in his latest contribution to hand, 'hums with industry and calls itself progressive. And Act, Jhnderlying all this commeiciahsm, all this thrift and all this cult of the main chance, there is a cast-iron bigotry — a cruel, corroding, unfathomable, ferocious sectarian rancor. You feel this, too, before you are long in Belfast. It seems to pervade the very atmosphere. It souis existence. It works its way into most fields of human activity. You see it in the stern features of shopmen who actually make their business interests subser\ ient to Orangeism. You read it in the Press. At the custom house esplanade there is a fleece anti-Catholic open air gutter-orator propaganda troing on nearly every Sunday The high councils of fanatics and schemers who direct the no-Popery campaigns may be said to be in permanent session. Of the ten thousand operatives working in the ship-building yards not ten are Catholics A Catholic's life would not be safe there. The owners of the yards are not bigots by choice. They are the v ictims of circumstances. If they employed Catholics, they would be in hot water the whole year round To begin with, things would be constantly happening—to the Catholics. Bolts and crowbars nnd hammers and packages of rivets and sharp, heavy pieces of scrap-iron would be falling on their heads, coming to all intents and purposes out of the sky. No one could be pointed out as the thrower of such missiles It would be all put down to accident. There would be no hostile manifestation of a noisy character. Theie would be no howling But, all the same, Catholic mechanics would be dropping of! from day to day One would be lound lying under a gilder at the bottom of a ship's hold another would be found sprawling on a scaffolding with the point of a thtee-inch shackle-pm buried m his brains ; later on another would be found under a lilt with both legs broken. It would all be seeming accident The police could mai-e nothing of it The emploveis might or might not be obliged to pay damages but in any case they would have no end of kgal tioi.ble on their hands. No one can control scrap-non in Beltast when there is sectarian or political trouble m the wind Odds and ends of boilers and girders and other proiectiles disappear from the yards and rcapiear down town in showers, smashing heads and windows and the peace of the realm. The way to look for smoothness m the labor market, therefore, is to keep the opposing loices apart. The ship builders are not in business to comer bigotry or to experiment m political philosophy They are merely hard-headed employees who aie wisom thengeneration. They know too well how the cat jumps They know, for instant c. that, notwithstanding the honest, if lamentable, zeal of a few fanatical leadeisand some of their followers, there is anothei tact— the fait that Orange hostility to Catholicism is laigelv (]\n> to sordid political enmity, or in other woids to haul cash '