THE SPIRIT OF DOLLY'S BRAE

New Zealand Tablet, 16 October 1919, Page 13

THE SPIRIT OF DOLLY'S BRAE

In Christmas Week, 1795, Lord Gosford, Governor of Co. Armagh, called a meeting of the leading magistrates and gentry of the county to "devise a plan to check the calamities which have already brought down upon this county." . . . "It is no secret," he said in the course of an. address which is not sufficiently known, "that a persecution accompanied with all the circumstances of ferocious cruelty which in all ages have distinguished that dreadful calamity is now raging in this county. Neither age nor sex nor even acknowledged innocence as to the late disturbances is sufficient to excite mercy, much less to afford protection. The only crime which the wretched objects of this merciless persecution are charged with is a crime of easy proof: it is simply a profession of the Roman Catholic faith. . A lawless banditti have constituted themselves judges of this species of delinquency, and tho sentence they pronounce is equally concise and terrible; it is nothing less than a confiscation of all property and immediate banishment. It would bo extremely painful and surely unnecessary to detail all the horrors that attended the execution of so wide and tremendous a proscription which certainly exceeds, in the comparative number of those it consigns to ruin and misery, every example that ancient and modern history can afford. For where have wo heard, and in what history of human cruelties have wo read of more than half the inhabitants of a populous county being deprived at one blow of the means, as well as the fruits, of their industry and driven in the midst of an inclement winter to seek a shelter for themselves and their helpless families where chance may guide them? This is no exaggerated picture of the horrid scenes now acting in this county. Yet surely itJ is sufficient to awaken sentiments of indignation and compassion in the coldest bosoms. These horrors are now acting, and acting with impunity. The spirit of impartial justice without which law is no better than tyranny has for a time disappeared in this county, and tho supineness of the magistracy is a topic of conversation in every corner of this kingdom,." The Orange Society was then three months in existence, and a large percentage of the magistrates to whom the Governor spoke were enrolled brethren who with tongue in cheek agreed to this resolution: "That the Roman Catholic residents of this county were grievously oppressed by lawless persons unknown who attack and plunder their houses by night, unless they immediately abandon their lands and habitations."

Lord Gosford might have spared himself the trouble of speechmaking. The apostles of civil and religious liberty pursued their beneficent mission of extending the territory of "Ulster." Ten months later in the Irish Parliament he offered to produce sworn evidence that 1400 Catholic families had been expelled from their homes or murdered or burned in their houses or perished of famine in the fields or on the roadsides. The French Reign of Terror seemed to have been the model on which the brethren acted. It is matter of historical fact that from Co. Armagh alone 7000 Catholics were banished, murdered, or died. Grattan told the Parliament in the opening of 1796 that "the object of the Orangemen was the extermination of all the Catholics of the county ... a banditti of murderers committing massacre in the name of God, and exercising despotic power in the name of liberty."

This is the society which ever since has ruled- Ireland, which placed Galloper Smith on the Woolsack in England and set James Campbell at the head of the "Law" in Ireland. I was in the crowd of tens of thousands who filled the square in front of the City Hall, Belfast, on that Covenant Day in September the year before the war, when Carson and his henchmen marched in to sign. There was but one hymn raised by the crowd, Dolly's Brae. "And the tune we played was kick the Pope right over Dolly's Brae."... The sound of that fiendish chorus is" in my ears yet. What Was Dolly's Brae? It was an Orange

outburst which took place on the Twelfth of July, 1849, on the road between; Bally ward and Castlewellan. f There were two roads by which the Orangemen might have marched, but they had made up their minds to go by the hilly, uneven route, for no other reason than that it led through a Catholic district and the Catholic village of Dolly's Brae. Owing to the efforts of the local priests no. resistance was offered to the passage of the processionists, who had come armed with guns and bayonets. This so disappointed their leaders that the procession was halted beyond tho village, the 500 armed men were reformed and the whole body marched back again, the big drums beating, as the hymn commemorates, "Kick the Pope." In the result two villages were wrecked, and a number of Catholics murdered. Let tho official Report speak: "While this [the burning of Magheramoys] was going on above, I lament to say that the work of retaliation, both on life and property, by the Orange Party was proceeding lower down the hill and along the side of the road, in a most brutal and wanton manner, reflecting the deepest disgrace on all by whom it was perpetrated or encouraged. One little boy 10 years old was deliberately shot while running across a field. The stipendiary magistrate stopped a man in the act of firing at a girl rushing from her father's house. An old woman of 70 was murdered and the skull of an idiot beaten in with the. butts of their muskets. Another old woman was severely beaten in her house, while another, who was subsequently saved by the police, was much injured and left in her house, which had been set on fire. An inoffensive man was taken out of his house, dragged to his garden, and stabbed to death by three men with bayonets in the sight of some of his family. The Catholic chapel, the house of tho Catholic curate, and the National schoolhouse were fired into and the windows broken; and a number of the surrounding houses of tho R.C. inhabitants were set on fire and burnt, every article of furniture having been first wantonly destroyed therein." Or the police report: "No language can describe the scene of horror that has been enacted in the neighborhood." That was "Dolly's Brae," the work of tho fathers and grandfathers of the men who to-day are asking through their leaders for "guarantees." No wonder they are nervous. Conscience'doth make cowards. But they are not ashamed. Dolly's Brae is their battle song to this day. They are proud of it. They might have selected any other popish killing anniversary from the Diamond Eight! in 1795, but evidently something specially artistic about this performance has secured .its commemoration. —"Ultach," in the Dublin Leader.