Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 14, 12 April 1923, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O'Brien.)

CHAPTER XXl.— (Continued.)

No political leader of the first rank resided in the province of Connacht while the Land .League was in being. For twenty years after the Land League arose and disappeared, the special historic features which discriminated the case of that forlorn province from the rest of the country were scarcely understood at all east of the Shannon, and, but for Dr. Duggan’s heaven-sent cry from the wilderness, might have remained altogether neglected. The case of Connacht was all but as grossly misunderstood in the North and in the South, as it was by English legislators and by Cockney tourists. The Bishop would inveigh with a humor akin to burning scorn against the flippant ignorance with which the Thackerays and minor book-makers accepted, like parrots, Cromwell’s description of Connacht as a barely more endurable alternative to hell. Hie tourist road ran through the wilds which border the Western Coast in the midst of picturesque blue mountains swarming with beggars, as picturesque but as bare and ragged as their poor patches of mountain soil. The Bishop, from his first outlook on life, knew what a caricature was the W ild 11 est of the Cockney ready-writers. He knew that if the coast section of the province was a waste of giant rocks and chainless seas, the greater part of inland Connacht was a rolling expanse of feeding lands as rich as any in the world, although they contained no painted mountains to gratify the astheticism of the Titmarshes, no inns to comfort their bellies, and no population in rags to decorate their sketch-books. To Dr. Duggan the beginning and end of the case of Connacht was that, in the designs of nature, it was not a land of famine, but a land of full and plenty; that it was not a congested pauper warren, but the product of an inhuman system of devastation by which, even in his own memory, the population were transported from the magnificent plains of Mayo, Roscommon, and Galway, and their rich inheritance transferred to droves of bullocks owned by great graziers and “bullock men” as void of human feeling as their cattle.

The remedy was as plain as the disease; to undo the work of the Famine Clearances and repeople the lonely plains of inland Connacht with “the transports” penned up amidst the bogs and crags. When the cry of “the Land for the People” rolled in upon the horizon with the first signs of famine in 18<8, that was in its obvious meaning for the Bishop and for the Western peasants who thundered it forth. Not so with the founder of the Land League. Much though the Bishop loved Davitt’s noble simplicity of soul, he dismissed with an indulgent smile, for any practical purpose in Connacht, the theories of the Nationalisation of the Land which the Father of the Land League had imbibed from Henry George. The problem was to restore the rich lands to the cultivators starving for lack of them, not to mortgage them away to some abstract State in the interests of some new-fangled counsel of social perfection. Nationalisation of the Land would mean in practice liberating the peasants from the landlords to enslave them to some unknown Dublin Bureaucrats. There was the land, and there were the people, and lo! the Land League agitation swept over the West, and died down without making any practical contribution to the problem how to bring them together. It was not until twenty years afterwards on the uprise of the United Irish League that the theoricians’ cry of “The Land for the People” was defined with more precision to mean “more land and better land for the people,” out of the abundant stores lyiim everywhere around them under the tooth of the bullocks and their exploiters. From that day forth the battle was won. Under the pressure of a new hurricane from the Wild West, statesmen began to understand; laws were enacted (although with incredible ineptitude and slowness) to re-colonise the luxuriant plains of Connacht with the landless, “transports”.; the doctrines preached with burning tongue by Dr. Duggan before the Congested Districts Board and before the Land League were heard of, became the commonplaces of legislators, who had denounced them as communism and passed their first apostles through the fires of. three. ruthless : Coercion Acts; sleek . Government officials took to personally conducting a new generation of Cockney tourists in their motor-cars the toy* villages and

tributed grass-ranches which but yesterday it was treason and blasphemy to dispute with “the big bullock-men.’ When the tremendous truth was at long last mad© manifest, the grass was growing over the noble old Bishop’s grave; but to Dr. Duggan, more than to any other teacher or even man of action—to his clear vision of the inmost truths of the matter the fanatical zeal of his apostolate to his fearlessness in insisting upon the surgery by which alone the evil could be cut out to this roots the credit for the liberation of Connacht from the grip of landlordism and big grasierdom is in largest measure due. His friends and his critics would agree in describing him as an extreme man. A biography, no matter from what pious hands, that would conceal the fact would be as little to his taste as temporising always was. He never believed that the deep wounds of Ireland were to be cured by sprinkling them with rose-water. Landlordism was the fount of all the poison of Irish life: landlordism and the rule of England which had fashioned landlordism to her own likeness and subsidised its crimes for purposes of her own. For these two fell powers there could be only one choice. They must go on exterminating or be exterminated. The Bishop would give the last penny in his purse not always with a perfect discretion —to the poor. With as ready a prodigality he would give the last drop of blood in his veins if that would better serve his ancient race.

But no considered judgment of his was a merely rash one. He was no respecter of persons nor of powers. He once fluttered the gentle dovecots of a meeting of the Bishops by denouncing the danger to the faith of Ireland caused by the growing contributions of the great grazing interest to the ranks of the priesthood in the West. "St. Bernard," he declared, in the voice of sweetest courtesy in which he delivered his thunders, "St. Bernard once remarked that when the chalices were of wood, the priests were of gold. Now that our chalices are of gold, God forbid that our priests should be of fat." "But, my dear lord," remarked one of his Most Reverend Brethren with a twinkle in his eye, "what would you do?" The reply came short and sharp as the report of a pistol in a church: "I would put the priests—and perhaps ourselves—for twelve months upon a diet of Indian meal stirabout." Those who may question whether the permanent interests of religion were served—may not even have been wounded—by plain dealing such as this, would never have understood Dr. Duggan, or his fondness for the true Irish priest as, take him for all in all, the finest product of the Irish soil, and would never have been of much use in bringing to pass the benign revolution which will stand to his immortal credit. (To be continued.)