Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, 19 January 1922, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O’Brien.)

CHAPTER 11. THREE YEARS’ NIGHTMARE (1882—1885) The three years between the Phoenix Park murders in 1882 and Earl Spencer’s surrender of the Vice-royalty in 1885 witnessed an agony of body and mind in their resistance against desperate odds such as the half-a-dozen men who underwent it cannot even yet recall without a shudder in the watches of the night. They were young and “their sleep fell soft on the hardest bed,” or they should never have lived to emerge in golden clouds of victory from the Inferno. The living are beginning to lose sight of the forlorn outlook, and History has not yet arrived to reconstitute it, when Forster’s jails having been triumphantly thrown open to his prisoners and Gladstone won over to strew their way with the rosy petals of a policy of concession differing in nothing except in name from Home Rule, the entire edifice of our hard-won success was tumbled about our ears one sweet afternoon in May by a trio of half-witted "desperadoes who did not even know until they read it in the paper the next morning that it was the new Chief Secretary, the angel of good tidings, they had murdered. What a labor of Hercules to begin building up all over again from the bottom, and what a handful of raw Irish gorsoons to affront the task! Parnell himself avowed that as long as the new Coercion Act should remain in force, public life in Ireland had been made for him impossible. He bade God-speed to the young enthusiasts who refused to quit the breach quand meme, with the same pang half sorrow, and half pride—with which a commander sees his forlorn hope charging forth to their doom. Not uncommonly in the Irish battle, one particular county or district does a disproportionate amount of the fighting, then falls asleep and only reawakens ten or fifteen years afterwards. It so happened now again. Mayo, which bore the major part of the burden during the fierce though incredibly short life of the Land League, retained not a vestige of the Land League organisation for many years after its suppression in 1881. ,Those who figured most largely on its early platforms— Tom Brennan, Harold Rylett, Boyton, Dillon, Sheridan, Daly, and the V alshes of Balia and of Castlebar for all practical purposes disappeared from the fighting front altogether. Michael Davitt ever liable to an occansional lovable rebellion against the realism of earthy politics—allowed himself to be carried off in the train of Henry George’s apostleship of the Nationalisation of the Land, until Parnell was forced to take public issue with him, and in a single speech in Droghedk dismissed the Georgian evangel from the practical affairs of Ireland. Mr. Dillon had retired to the rancho of a relative in Colorado in despair, and only came back three years afterwards with the bonfires for our victory. There was no help to be expected from the House of Commons. Only twenty-eight “Home Rule” members gave a vote against the Coercion Bill that tore “the Kilmainham’ Tieaty to shreds and began a new war of extermination against Irish Nationality. Mr. Healy summed up the situation when, turning upon the Coercionists yelling around him, he cried: “I had as lief try to reason with a pack of Zulus. Come on with your assegais as soon as you like!” / - But the outlook at home was scarcely less depressing, “the Land League” has come to be popularly accepted as the incarnation of Ireland’s resistance for a quarter of a century. The reality of the case was far otherwise. The Land League had only a bare twelvemonths’ existence when it was suppressed by a proclamation following the No Rent Manifesto in the winter of 1881 and was never afterwards revived. The country was exhausted by the sacrifices of the first volcanic upheaval against coercion and famine. Even after the National League was timorously founded under the naked sword of the new Coercion Act, there were few who risked making speeches to its meetings, and, indeed, the meetings were few and frightened which could be got to listen to them. Lord Spencer’s Government availed themselves of the country’s abasement to deepen the terror by exacting a fearful vengeance for the murders of the

preceding years; scouring the country for suspects; manufacturing a hideous race of informers by offering rewards of thousands of pounds for evidence, regardless of its character trying the victims of the delatores by ruthlessly packed juries, of “loyal Protestants” in Dublin; “convicting them by hook or crook” (in the words of one of their delirious organs in the press); hanging dozens of them despite their clamorous protestations of innocence on the very scaffold; and sentencing the High Sheriff of Dublin (Mr. Edmund Dwyer Gray, M.P.) to six months’ imprisonment and a fine of £SOO for exposing the drunken orgy in which one of the packed “loyal Protestant juries” spent the night before they sent one of their young victims to the scaffold. Mr. T..P. O’Connor once described the struggle which began with the utter prostration of the National movement and ended with the overthrow of Earl Spencer, as “a long and lonely duel” between that intrepid Viceroy and myself. Substituting United Ireland for my own then unfamiliar personality, the description is not an untrue one. The paper was literally a weekly insurrection in print. To its columns as behind the barricades gathered all the stormy passion, all the insuppressible resolve of a country panting to escape from its galling chains. Why its machinery was not broken up and its conductors hustled into penal servitude as promptly as Lord Clarendon dealt with John Mitchel was to ourselves a source of wonder from week to week. The answer was most likely to be found in the cry of the Trojan in his burning city —Una spot victis nvllom sperare salutem our one hope of safety was that Dublin Castle was aware that safety was the last thing we hoped for. As between those who undertook to dragoon Ireland out of her ideals and ourselves, we gave no quarter and we expected none. Possibly the recollection of the Castle Law Advisers was still fresh of Forster’s frantic six months’ battle for the extermination of United Ireland when its offices were pillaged, its editor, sub-editors, compositors, clerks, and printer’s devils were scattered in half-a-dozen Irish gaols, and none the less the offending sheet reappeared in this town or that —for a good many weeks, in two or three different towns and different editions together—in Belfast or Cork, now in Liverpool or London, or in Paris, and the whole editing done all the time from the unfortunate Chief Secretary’s own grim gaol of Kilmainham —' when the haughty Government of England had its police forces engaged in chasing ragged newsboys through the streets of Dublin and breaking open commercial travellers’ cases and milliners’ bandboxes at every railway station for consignments of the übiquitous and invisible journal and mustering cohorts of detectives at Dover and Folkestone and Newhaven for the arrival of the French boats, and actually commissioning a gunboat to cruise off Kinsale on the chance that the French fishing boats might smuggle in parcels of the Paris edition. The grave Red Earl might well shrink 1 from recommencing a form of warfare in which his dignity was sure to be the worst sufferer. He chose more grandiose methods and instituted a State prosecution for Seditious Libel. I was obliged to sandwich my visits to Mallow in the famous election contest against Mr. Naish, the Law Adviser, with attendance at the bar in the'Courthouse at Green Street (where Robert Emmet uttered his last words), to. answer an indictment the upshot of which might well have seemed settled, the moment the jury was sworn. For “the seditious libel” being a charge of befouling the course of justice by shameless jury-packing, we were treated to a handsome illustration of the very process charged against the Crown, when Catholic and Nationalist jurors were ordered to “Stand by” by the practitioner subsequently known to fame as “Pether the Packer,” and a jury composed in overwhelming numbers, of “loyal Protestants” was wirepulled before my face “to convict me by hook or crook” for hinting that such infamies were possible. * A shady transaction enough, but still not altogether unforgivable. For the prosecution in Green Street doubled the majority Mallow which broke for ever the power of Dublin Castle to corrupt the Irish boroughs. Better still, the Crown selected for prosecution an article arraigning in specific particulars the entire system of white terrorism by which the Phoenix Park murders were avenged. It was

the Terrorists themselves who really stood in the dock for judgment, .and in their own Court by their own packed tribunal they were confounded. .'Furthermore, the trial shattered the last defence' of the jury-packers for the selection of Protestants and the exclusion of Catholics, for one of the two Catholics'' admitted among the twelve held out fanatically for a conviction while one of the ten “loyal Protestants” (the late Alderman Gregg) was so horrified by the proven justification of the worst charges in United Ireland that it was he who really baulked the Crown Prosecutors of their prey, and he left the jury box (as the Lord Lieutenant left Ireland two years afterwards) a steadfast Home Ruler for the remainder of his life. Tims far, there was still some tolerable show of “playing the game”—the game being one of life or death between an established Government and a newspaper in open insurlection. The facts now to be related disclose a case of murderous foul play as between a powerful State and a subject than which—l believed intensely then, and am still more deliberately persuaded now—nothing worse is to-be found in human annals since the times when the instruments of Government were the dagger and the bowl. On the 25th August, 1883, as the concluding words of an article in United Ireland replying to the Freeman on a different question— the deportment of Irish members in the House of Commons- occurred the following sentence: “If the House of Commons wants to make rules to stop such questions as Mr. Healy’s, it is open to it to devote its valuable time to the attempt, but it will not do so until the life and adventures, and what is called the ‘private character ’ of various Crown Employees in Ireland from Corry Connelan to Detective Director and County Inspector James Ellis French are fully laid bare to the universe.” That one sentence and nothing more. Our editorial work had usually to be rushed through at a red heat in the small hours before the day of publication, and this particular article, which was written by Mr. Healy, had escaped my supervision. Had it been otherwise, the sentence specified would have conveyed no definite meaning to me. It was, I think, the first time the name of James Ellis French had come to my ears; as it happened, I never beheld him either before or afterwards. Corry Connelan I remembered chiefly as the Under Secretary celebrated in Thackeray’s comic ballad of “The Shannon Shore,” and had never heard of otherwise, save-through some vague echo of the chroniqnes scandalevses of the Dublin society of the second last generation. The above was the one casual sentence on the strength of which Dublin Castle formed and carried on for several years a conspiracy which is not too strongly characterised as a loathsome one, for the destruction of United Ireland and myself, after open violence, and the i esources of a packed Bench and a packed Jury had failed them. A darker villainy still, that destruction was to be compassed by shielding the crimes of high officials in Dublin Castle’s own service on condition of their throwing upon a private' individual the apparently impossible task of bringing these crimes home'to them. Words that may well shock gentle minds: let us see whether the accusation bo overcharged. ■/ A eek or two after the publication, I received a writ for- £SOOO damages for libel at the suit of ' James Ellis French, Detective Director and County Inspector, and it was announced at the same time in the papers that the plaintiff had been suspended from duty by his superiors in Dublin Castle. It was then X first inquired of Mr. Healy the meaning of the allusion in the leading article, and learned both the certainty of French’s guilt and the still deeper guilt of the great officers of State who had deliberately called him in to insist that he should make the defence of his white soul the means for crushing the' insurgent newspaper under a mountain of -public odium as well as financial ruin. Mr. Healy’s informant was a District Inspector of Constabulary at Charleville, and there could be no rational doubt that his information was well founded. It was the common gossip of the Castle underworld and of the officers’ headquarters at the Constabulary Depot. Nay, the scandal was so notorious to the supreme authorities,of Dublin Castle themselves that, long before the allusion in United Ireland they had set an investigation going

with a view to bringing the criminal to justice. A'number of youthful District Inspectors and Cadets had been summoned to the Castle and with whatever reluctance made any further doubt impossible by their revelations; matters were in this posture when the solitary compromising sentence in United Ireland changed the half-convicted criminal into the protagonist of Dublin Castle against a hated foe. French was informed that he would be summarily dismissed unless he brought an action for libel against United Ireland, and to make the threat the more effective he was suspended from duty until ho had successfully prosecuted his suit. In the meantime the official investigation was dropped by those who alone could have induced the witnesses of his guilt to break silence, and the burden was thrown upon those who (it was calculated) must absolutely fail to do so. In any event, whether Cassio killed Roderigo, or Roderigo killed Cassio, or each did kill the other, the Dublin Castle lagos would have their consolations.

(To be continued.)