The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LI, Issue 28, 2 July 1924, Page 7

The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

(By William O’Brien.)

-T CHAPTER Vl. TWO POLICIES IN ACTION. d-djt must not be supposed that the mistake concerning the , Protestant Minority which “The Home Rule Cabinet” now mournfully acknowledges was made lor lack of incessant forewarnings and entreaties, or that those of us who .'■now - point the moral of its unwisdom are, like the'Ministers themselves, only wise after the event. At each successive ?■: stage of the controversy—under a Tory Government, under ■‘ a Liberal Government, and under a Coalition Government [_£jftlike--:we of the AH-for-Ireland school can claim without 5| presumption to have iterated and reiterated, with moderate tion and solemnity, but without wavering," that any true :ydrish:f settlement must be sought by a combination of all ;t Irish .and English parties for an object loftier than party ; strategy, and above all thatdelicate’ deference:’ must bo paid to the traditional particularities and even prejudices of Ulster. Two further propositions may be respectfully d postdated as matters of common ■ agreement by "fins time: Cvvizi (a) that there is not one of our detailed suggestions—

for years held in derision and -for: a parable of reproach to us as factionist and traitorous—which would not now be recognised as concessions of such obvious good sense as to seem commonplace, and (b) that up to a certain date they would have been closed with by Ulster as a. satisfaction of all the reasonable requirements and apprehensions of. the Protestant minority. To make good this claim, it may be convenient once tor all to set out the terms of the Settlement by Consent which we proposed in the very words in which I challenged the verdict of the city of Cork, and which I was returned without an opposing voice to press upon the Government. It will be seen that they "cover the, three points on which “the apprehensions of our Protestant countrymen and not in Ulster alone” were most sensitive.

“1. (The Ulster tenor of parting with the active authority of the Imperial Parliament.) —We propose, for- an experimental term of five years, to give the Ulster Party which would remain in the" Imperial Parliament (say ten, with the possible addition of two members, one for Trinity College, and one for Rath mines, to represent the" Southern minority) a direct suspensory veto upon any Bill of the Irish Parliament unless and until it shall either be approved or rejected by a resolution of the Imperial Parliament, to be passed within one month after the exercise of the Veto. Further, to give the Ulster Party the right upon a signed requisition to the Speaker of discussing on a. motion for the adjournment of the House of Commons, any administrative Act of the Irish Executive dealing with Education, Justice, or Police. For. the experimental period, these powers would give the Protestant minority the direct and active protection of the Imperial Parliament in a much more effectual way than they possess it at present. Such a suspensory veto may seem an unheard-of concession to a minority, and so it is. It would in my judgment he gladly submitted to by the best thinking men of our race, in the belief that it would serve as a wholesome restraint upon an infant Parliament in its first inexperienced years, and in the firm conviction that nothing will be attempted which would either tempt the Ulster Party to exercise the Veto or the Imperial Parliament to enforce it. The concession would, of course, he unendurable unless (failing a fresh Act of the Imperial Parliament for its renewal) it were to expire at the end of the experimental period, by which time a General Election will have been undergone and the new Imperial Parliament placed in a position to judge of the Irish Legislature by its actual record.

“2. The in significance of the minority in a Dublin Parliament.)— the Bill stands, the .Ulster group will undoubtedly be a somewhat attenuated; one, as it is bound to be by a pedantic adherence to existing geographical boundaries. Nor would any fancy property franchise be, to my mind, tolerable in the popular chamber under modern democratic conditions. We should propose to deal, uusymmetrically but effectively, with the question of giving the Protestant minority a representation proportioned to their numbers and their natural claim for adequate protection by increasing the proposed representation in the Schedule to 20 for Belfast, 16 for Antrim, 8 for Armagh, 16 for Down, and 8 for Londonderry, which with a proportional vote (or, better still, a cumulative vote) extended . to the rest of the country would yield a Protestant minority vote of at least 60 in the Irish House of Commons. Here you would have established a body which could not possibly be put. down by oppressive means, and which would only have to win the adhesion of some 30 Catholic Nationalists at. the utmost to form a governing majority Upon a. National Peace programme which would efface all the old distinctions. What* a career of unhoped-for power' and , noble patriotism for the present- Unionist Minority, whom the Imperial Parliament has stripped of every vestige of’ political power aver four-fifths of the country and can never by any possibility of its authority restore it! Sensible • Irishmen would make, little difficulty about assenting iii addition"to such local powers as, apparently, Sir E. Grey would delegate to Ulster—appointments, for instance, of y County Court Judges, Inspectors of .Education and County ’ Inspectors of Police from competent panels— by the h Ulster County Councils or some other local authorities, but these 7would;: bo quite 7 insufficient inducements in" them-

M selves,-and would be happily overshadowed by the larger concessions which would attract Ulster . centripetally to, instead of repelling her from, the National Parliament, '; V “3. {The- fears of a Spoils system worked by a twoq. penny-ha-penny Tammany.) — Unionist minority are not I* the only Irish minority who regard with repugnance the ascendancy of a Secret Association confined to men of one * particular religious persuasion, and using as its most powers' ful instrument the • disposal of all offices and patronage w from the highest to the lowest, not according to the merits of the candidates, but according to their proficiency in the signs and passwords of the Order. The : growth of this sectarian organisation (whose object nobody has yet ventured publicly to put into words) is indeed re- ■ .-sponsible for the creation of three-fourths of the Ulster ' Difficulty whi ch now darkens the horizon. I am confident that most of the far-seeing supporters of Mr. Redmond must ; be-in their hearts as anxious as either the Ulster Minority i or the Munster Minority to put an end to any danger from .this undemocratic secret agency by having provision made that all offices of emolument (save only Ministers, • Heads of Departments, and Judges) should be disposed of by a carefully chosen body of Irish Civil. Service Commissioners who should throw them open to all candidates upon equal terms, and put an end to the scandal of dispensing Government patronage in partisan newspaper-offices by sectarian preferences and secret intrigues.” '-. These proposals were never made public by the Hibernian Press, nor by any newspaper' in England. The only version of them circulated in three-fourths of Ireland was that I proposed to ‘‘hand over Ireland to the veto of twelve Orangemen” —the only justification for that atrocious libel being the proposal for an experimental period of five years, to give a minority of a million the security of a possible appeal to the Imperial Parliament, to he decided within one month, under circumstances which made it all but certain that, by' reason of the very completeness of the security, the power would never be exercised. And this moderate price to purchase the confidence of one-fourth of S over Ireland to the veto of twelve Orangemen” that, too, in a Home Rule Bill which, in the words of Mr. T. P. O’Connor, “contained as many English vetoes as there s. were padlocks in a gaol.” Who can wonder if a country debarred from all chance of reading our proposals for themselves and so infamously led astray as to their real purport, should have taken half a generation of suffering to learn that the “factionists and traitors” were “funda- , mentally right” all along? For ourselves, so little did we J claim any special foresight in discerning the possibilities yof an incomparable National settlement in “an agreement J amongst all sections, creeds, and classes of Irishmen,” that . the only clue we could find to the enigma how any sane body of Irishmen could detect in it any trace of treason to Ireland was that those who only saw in the Land Confer- . ence settlement “a landlord swindle” infallibly bound to end in “national insolvency” felt themselves now constrained to persist in the error at any cost against all evidence and commonsensc. - Stand fast by our proposal, at all events, we did from start to finish against all the buffets of unpopularity and of carefully nurtured ignorance in Ireland and in England.. Persons familiar with the state of feeling in the Ulster Party, and especially among the mass of the Northern : population, prior to the Larne gun-running, will scarcely - deny that “a Bill thus conceived, far from being a grievance in the sight of embittered Irish Protestants, would have been hailed by them as an Act of Political Emancipa- -- tion such as the Imperial Parliament could never otherwise secure to them.” But what of its reception by the Republicans? They were not-then in existence, and with wiser counsels they might never have been, in any ponderable numbers. The opposition came from the self-aggran-dising place hunters of the Board of Erin; the clean-souled * . adolescents, who were to be the rebels of Easter Week had - not yet been made sick with the cajoleries of the Parliamentary politicians, and would sec no more trace of treason,.— V-to Ireland in our doctrines than in Davis’s genial version of the Orange war-song, “The - Battle "of the Boyne,” which ' they had been taught to lisp from their cradles)

: y. “Boyne’s old water, : , - : . ' Red with slaughter, > Now is as pure as the children at playj - , «So, in our souls, ' Its history rolls, Orange and Green will carry the day'”* From the poorest standpoint of expediency, there stood „ one-fourth of the Irish population who must either be lived with or exterminated. The latter course was, happily, as impossible as it would have been heathenish, it would have expelled from the service of Ireland a leisured class of soldiers, sportsmen, and genial comrades as ineradicably Irish as a free admixture of Gaelic blood for centuries could make them, and an industrial population whose energy, probity, and solidity of character would endow an Irish State with some of its most precious elements of stability. To acknowledge that there were two unmixable Irelands would be to fly in the face of some of the most shining truths of our history. Gaelic Ireland’s ethnic genius* had never found any difficulty, even as late as the Williamite wars, in fascinating and absorbing all the successive invaders who, in conquering,, were themselves conquered —the Norman Geraldines in Munster and the Norman Burkes in Connacht, the Danes in Dublin, the Scotsmen in Dalriada, the Belgians in Wexford, the Welshmen in Tyrawley, the grim Cromwellians themselves amidst the bewitching homes of Tipperary. The beadroll of statutes from century to century forbidding the adventurers from England— and ■ forbidding them in vain—to ‘‘five Irishly” and take Irish wives, is one long English protestation of the homogeneity of the nation. Even the era of the diabolical Penal Laws, if it raised up fiends to debase the Catholic Gaels almost out of human shape into a separate race, “in the English and Protestant interest,” produced also a dynasty of Protestant patriots as truly Irish as the eternal mountains that towered over Henry Grattan’s woods at Tinnahinch. Flood was the only man of genius in the Irish Parliament who represented anti-Catholic bigotry at its darkest; yet even he made atonement for that one sunspot in his character by the will in which he left a considerable property v for the encouragement of the study of Gaelic in Trinity College and the publication of the ancient manuscript literature of the Gael. With the graces and accomplishments of a cultured Irish nobleman-, Charlemont strangely mingled in his character a gloomy Protestant bigotry; yet he, too, was so passionate a fanatic for Irish liberty that, as Commander-in-Chief of Grattan’s Volunteers, his preparations for a war against the Parliament of England were more formidable than Sir E. Carson’s more than a century I'ater, and were authorised by sounder constitutional warrant. The man whom the English intellectual world now acclaim as the most sublime of their philosophers and statesmen was the Irish Protestant, Edmund Burke, who, for the inspired eloquence with which he scathed England’s doings in Ireland, went within an ace of being slain by the Gordon rioters as an Irish papist adventurer. To tear out from the journals of the Irish Parliament the splendid pages which record the Protestant struggle for Irish freedom from Molyneux’ first daring claims to the dying hours in which it succumbed to.the Act of Union — to disown the .romantic chapters added to our story by the Protestant Wolfe Tone when, after Parliamentary methods had failed, he appealed to the God of battles, and to disown them because the martyrs who died at his ' call on the scaffolds of Belfast and Carrickfergus and at Antrim. Fight were Protestant Dissenters who had not taken the Catholic Sacrament —would be to cancel the entire history* of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and has only to be set out in cold terms'of logic to excite the abhorrence of every Catholic Nationalist with an uncorrupted heart. . < _ -■ - ■ . ' . Irish Protestant patriotism did not die even under the scalpel of Castlereagh’s Act of Union,.'- Lecky, whom certain family sufferings during the 1 Land War unhappily alienated from the Irish. Cause in his declining years, has , left us in his books an immortal monument of , the inborn

*“I would go as far as ever' you; went to win :-over' Ulster,” Mr. De Valera told me in 1922. ; . -'7,

. Nationalism of the Irish Protestant genius. It would be scarcely possible for prejudice itself to study the unexpurgated edition of his Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland without filing convinced , that religious rancor was steadily disappearing in the generous sunheat of Grattan’s Parliament and was only resuscitated after the Union when the contagion of the Evangelical Revival in England spread in a virulent form to the North of Ireland. Dr. Boulter, the English Archbishop of Armagh, owns with frank brutality how truly religious feuds- in Ireland are the product of English policy and not of native perversity, when, inveighing against every measure “that tends to unite Protestant with Papist,” he adds, “whenever that happens, good-bye to the English interest in Ireland for ever.” And the Union gave England the means of , fomenting the war of creeds in Ireland during the bitter generation for which the Catholic Emancipation, more than half accomplished by the Irish Parliament during the- Viceroyalty of Lord Fitzw’illiam, was obliged to prolong its hate-engendering debates in the Parliament of England, Even so, the un- ' quenchable embers of Protestant patriotism flared up again and again in Ulster itself. Too little is known of . Cavan Duffy’s “League of the North and South,” in whose ranks the mass of ; the Protestant Dissenters and their clerical leaders in the ’Fifties were, beyond question eager to join hands with their Catholic countrymen, and which was only crushed by the apostacy of the ruffians, Keogh and Sadleir, unluckily condoned by the simplicity of two or three , Catholic prelates. So much an affair of yesterday is the Ulster Protestant bloc which Sir E. Carson managed to persuade England was ancient and- unbreakable, that within living recollection the Dissenters, who formed the weightier half of Sir E. Carson’s Covenanters, wore wholly at one with the Catholics on the two questions —religious disabilities and the land— were the staple interest of their lives, and were the active allies of the Catholics in every electioneering and democratic campaign,, against the other —the Episcopalian Tories. So late as 1885, it was Presbyterian votes that returned Justin MacCarthy for the City of Derry and Mr. Tim Mealy for South Derry, and myself for South Tyrone. (To be continued.)