OUR IRISH LETTER

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5, 1 February 1906, Page 9

OUR IRISH LETTER

(Ifrom our own correspondent.) Dublin, December, 1905. The Catholic Truth Society. A month ago, the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland ield its third Congress under the presidency of his Eminence Cardinal Logue, supported by his Grace the ;3fost Rev. Dr. Healy, Archbishop of Tuam, and a large number of bishops and priests. 'The principal paper read was a long and interesting one by his Lordship the Bishop of Ross, who dwelt eloquently upon the dignity .of labor and the true nobility of rising above those false and pagan ideas that lead so many to despise honest work. His Lordship also went deeply into many of the historic reasons for Irish poverty, showing what so many people are apt to ignore, that in Ireland industries did not "fail from lack of character, of industry, of honesty, of enterprise, but from deliberate systematic suppression by laws 'passed to destroy every .trade by which Irish Catholics could obtain wealth and might, by winning wealth, retain any power. It was .not alone of our lands we were dispossessed, but of .©very source of commerce for which Ireland was famed: her woollen trade, her fishing trade, her tanning trade, her glass manufactory— even Royalty now eagerly seeks .after specimens of old Waterford glass— and many other sources of wealth which Ireland formerly exported all over Europe. These Conferences are of very great value, even though it seemed to me some of the speakers forgot that the encouragement of Catholic literature is the , object of the Society, and were apt to wander off the main line and seize upon this opportunity to air their ■own fads somewhat. Even so, it is good to see such throngs of earnest Catholics, lay and cleric, gathered to show their interest in what should be one of our most important Catholic works, and what would be of immense benefit were it not for one drawback. We all loiow the saying : How much do you sympathise ? Strange to say, although the annual subscriptian is .only the modest sum of five shillings, there are but ,600 subscribers, so that the committee, as they frequently regret, are not in a 'position to pay writers or to publish many important works without which the issues of the Catholic Truth Society are incomplete. A Literary Treat. Talking of literature, we are promised at no very .distant day a rare treat in the publication of what are known to a comparatively few students as ' The Sfurvey .Letters 'or ' O'Donovan's Letters.' Hitherto these letters, of which there is a large collection, have been under lock and key in the Royal Irish Aca.demy, Dawson street, Dublin, and are only lent to readers on the premises. These letters were' all written at the time when a 'Government Survey of all Ireland was being prepared. I have not the date at hand, but I think it was about seventy years ago. At the head ■of a staff was the celebrated Dr. Petrie, assisted by John O'Donovan, the great Irish scholar and translator of the Annals of the Four Masters. Under O'Donovan's directions, a number of clerks went from county to county, from parish to parish, from barony to barony, from house to house in such of the counties as wen? surveyed. But, unfortunately, sufficient money was not, supplied by Government, for such a -work was necessarily costly, and even though much was done for payment that barely covered the daily expenses, a stop was put to the Survey and the work was never completed. But what was done is of the highest interest and serves to show the value of what has been lost to us for .-ever through State niggardliness. John o'Oonovan himself travelled over much of the ground and wrote his report daily to Dr., Petrie in /Dublin in precisely the same way that he instructed his assistants to write to ■him, namely, at once and while the information was fresh in their memory, and as nearly as possible in the ■words of those giving the information ; also, no tradition, no local legend, no touch of character or coloring, no idiom of speech was to be lost : everything was jotted down and transmitted at once. We have, therefore, in those Survey Letters, a fund of Irish lore that keeps the reader who knows anything of Ireland poring, charmed, 'over their pages for hours together. It is long since I heard of any work about to be published that 'Will give such pleasure to Irish readers as this will.

Even the peasantry would, should it be published at a price within their reach, be the most eager readers of all so much is there of the lore told them by their fathers long ago.