A NEW POWER ARISES IN IRELAND
The Party manipulators had now got their stranglehold on the country.
The people, where they were not chloroformed into insensibility, were
doped into a state of corrupt acquiescence. All power was in the hands
of the Party. The orthodox daily Press was wholly on their side. The
British public and the English newspaper writers were impressed only,
as always, by the big battalions. The Irish Party had numbers, and
numbers count in Parliament as nothing else does. Whatever information
went through to the American Press passed through tainted sources. An
influential Irish-American priest, Father Eamon Duffy, writing some
time since in the great American Catholic magazine, _The
Monitor_, said:
"We really never understood the situation in America. Ireland was in
the grip of the Party machine and of one great daily paper, and these
were our sources of information. It was only the great upheaval that
awakened us from our dream and showed us that something had been
wrong, and that the Party no longer represented the country."
This is a remarkable admission from an independent and unprejudiced
authority. He candidly declares they never understood the situation in
America. Neither was it understood in England, and the House of
Commons is the last place which tries to understand anything except
party or personal interests. There is just about as much freedom of
opinion and individual independence in Parliament as there could be in
a slave state. In Ireland, as I have said, outside Munster the truth
was never allowed to reach the people. Even the great national
movement which Mr William O'Brien re-created in the United Irish
League had almost ceased to function. It was gradually superseded by a
secret sectarian organisation which was the absolute antithesis of all
free development of democratic opinion and the complete negation of
liberty and fair play.
Up in the north of Ireland there existed an organisation of a secret
and sworn character which was an evil inheritance of an evil
generation. From the fact that the Ribbonmen used to meet in a shebeen
owned by one Molly Maguire, with the Irish adaptability for attaching
nicknames to anything short of what is sacred, they became known as
"Molly Maguires," or, for short, "the Mollies." In some ill-omened day
branches of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which had seceded from
the American order of that name, began to interest themselves in
Ulster in political affairs. They called themselves the Board of Erin,
but they were, as I have said, more generally known as "the Mollies."
They were a narrowly sectarian institution and they had the almost
blasphemous rule that nobody but a Catholic frequenting the Sacraments
could remain a member. They had their own ritual and initiation
ceremony, founded on the Orange and Masonic precedents, and had their
secret signs and passwords. It is possible that they were at first
intended to be a Catholic protection society in Ulster at the end of
the eighteenth century to combat the aggressiveness and the fanatical
intolerance of the Orange Order, who sought nothing less than the
complete extermination of the Catholic tenantry. A Catholic Defence
organisation was a necessity in those circumstances, but when the
occasion that gave it justification and sanction had passed it would
have been better if it were likewise allowed to pass. Any organisation
which fans the flames of sectarianism and feeds the fires of religious
bigotry should have no place in a community which claims the sacred
right of freedom. It was the endeavour of Mr O'Brien and his friends
finally to close this bitter chapter of Irish history by reconciling
the ancient differences of the sects and inducing all Irishmen of good
intent to meet upon a common platform in which there should be no
rivalries except the noble emulations of men seeking the weal of the
whole by the combined effort of all.
Whatever unfortunate circumstance or combination of circumstances gave
impulse to "the Board of Erin," I know not-whether it arose out of a
vainglorious purpose to meet the Orangemen with a weapon of import
similar to their own, or whether it was merely the love of young
people to have association with the occult, I can merely
conjecture--but it was only when Mr Joseph Devlin assumed the
leadership of it that it began to acquire an influence in politics
which could have no other ending than a disastrous one.
Never before was the cause of Irish liberty associated with
sectarianism. Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet and Thomas Davis are regarded
as the most inspired apostles and confessors of Irish nationality. It
was a profanation of their memory and an insult to their creed that in
the first decade of the twentieth century any man or band of men
should have been audacious enough to superimpose upon the structure of
the national movement an organisation which in addition to being
secret and sectarian was grossly sordid and selfish in its aims.
Stealthily and insidiously "the Board of Erin" got its grip in the
United Irish League. It "bossed," by establishing a superiority of
numbers, the Standing Committee. Then by "getting hold" of the
officers of Divisional Executives and branches it acquired control
over the entire machinery of the movement, and thus, in an amazingly
short space of time, it secured an ascendancy of a most deadly and
menacing character. Its first overt act of authority was to strangle
freedom of speech and to kill land purchase. What Mr John Dillon had
been unable to do through his control of the Party and his collusion
with _The Freeman's Journal_ the Board of Erin most effectively
accomplished by an energetic use of boxwood batons and, at a later
time, weapons of a more lethal character.
A National Convention had been summoned to pronounce on the Birrell
Land Bill of 1909--a measure which, with incomparable meanness, was
designed "to save the Treasury" by ridding it of the honourable
obligations imposed by the Wyndham Act of 1903. This Bill, on the
ground that the finance of the Act of 1903 had broken down, proposed
to increase the rate of interest on land loans from 2-3/4 to 3-1/4 per
cent., and to transform the bonus from a free Imperial grant to a
Treasury debt against Ireland. Apparently it should require no
argument to prove that this was a treacherous repeal of an existing
treaty, guaranteed by considered legislative enactment, and that it
was a proposal which no Irishman with any sense of the duty he owed
his country could for one moment entertain. But it was the unthinkable
and the unbelievable thing which happened. Mr Dillon was determined,
at all costs--and how heavy these costs were, one hundred thousand
unpurchased tenants in Ireland to-day have weighty reason to know--to
wreak his spite against the Wyndham Act, which he had over and over
again declared was working too smoothly, and prayed that he might have
the power to stop it. Mr Redmond I regard in all this wretched
business as the unwilling victim of the forces which held him, as a
vice in their power. Yet from the sin of a weak compliancy in the
unwise decrees of others he cannot be justly acquitted. Although the
Party had rejected the proposal for a new Land Conference, and thereby
broken the articles of reunion under which Mr O'Brien and his friends
re-entered it, we continued to remain within its fold. We could not,
for one thing, believe that the country was so steeped in ignorance
and blindness that if the facts were once allowed to reach it, or the
arguments to be temperately addressed to any free assembly of
Irishmen, they would not see where national interests lay. Accordingly
Mr O'Brien and his friends determined to submit, in constitutional
fashion, the overwhelming objections to Mr Birrell's Bill to the
judgment of the National Convention which was to consider whether the
Bill would expedite or destroy land purchase. It was conveyed to Mr
O'Brien beforehand that it was madness on his part to attempt to get a
hearing at the Convention, that this was the last thing "the powers
that be" would allow, and that as he valued his own safety it would be
better for him to remain away.
Just as he had never submitted to intimidation when it was backed by
the whole force of the British Government, Mr O'Brien was equally
resolved that the arrogance of the new masters of the Irish democracy
was not going to compel him to a mood of easy yielding and he properly
decided to submit his arguments to a Convention which, though he was
well aware it would be "packed" against him, yet he had hopes might be
swayed by the invincibility of his arguments. In the ordinary course
the stewards for managing and regulating the Convention would be drawn
from Dublin Nationalists. On this occasion, however, they came by
special train from Belfast and were marched in military order to the
Mansion House, where some sackfuls of policemen's brand-new batons
were distributed amongst them. They were the "Special Constables" of
the Molly Maguires recruited for the first time by an Irish
organisation to kill the right of free speech for which Irishmen had
been contending with their lives through the generations. It would be
quite a comedy of Irish topsy-turvydom were it not, in fact, such a
disastrous tragedy.
The favourite cry of the enemies of Conciliation was that the Purchase
Act would bankrupt the Irish ratepayers. By means which it is not
necessary to develop or inquire into, the British Treasury was induced
on the very eve of the Convention to present to a number of the Irish
County Councils claims for thousands of pounds on foot of expenses for
the flotation of land loans. A base political trick of this kind is
too contemptible for words. It, however, gave Mr Redmond one of the
main arguments for impressing the Convention that the Birrell Bill
could alone save the ratepayers from the imminence of this burden. It
would have been easy to demolish the contention had the reply been
allowed to be made. But this was just the one thing "the bosses" were
determined not to allow--Mr O'Brien had given notice of an amendment,
the justification of which is attested by the facts of the succeeding
twelve years. It expressed the view that the Birrell Land Bill would
lead to the stoppage of land purchase, that it would impose an
intolerable penalty upon the tenant purchasers whose purchase money
the Treasury had failed to provide, and that it would postpone for
fifty years any complete solution of the problem of the West and of
the redistribution of the untenanted grass lands of the country. The
moment Mr O'Brien stood up to move this, at a concerted signal,
pandemonium was let loose. I was never the witness of a more
disgraceful incident--that an Irishman whose life had been given in
so full and generous a fashion to the people should, by secret and
subsidised arrangement, be howled down by an imported gang and
prevented from presenting his views in rational fashion to men the
majority of whom at least were present for honest consideration of
arguments. It is a thing not easily forgotten or forgiven for the
Irishmen who engineered it, that such a ferocious and foolish display
of truculent cowardice should have taken place. For an hour Mr O'Brien
manfully faced the obscene chorus of cat-cries and disorder. He
describes one of the incidents that occurred in the following words:--
"While I was endeavouring, by the aid of a fairly powerful voice, to
dominate the air-splitting clamour around me, Mr Crean, M.P., on the
suggestion of Father Clancy, attempted to reach me, in order to urge
me to give up the unequal struggle. He was no sooner on his legs than
he was pounced upon by a group of brawny Belfast Mollies and dragged
back by main force, while Mr Devlin, with a face blazing with passion,
rushed towards his colleague in the Irish Party, shouting to his
lodgemen: 'Put the fellow out.' At the same time Father Clancy, Mr
Sheehan, M.P., and Mr Gilhooly, M.P., having interposed to remonstrate
with Mr Crean's assailants, found themselves in the midst of a
disgraceful mêlée of curses, blows and uplifted sticks, Mr Sheehan
being violently struck in the face, and one of the Molly Maguire
batonmen swinging his baton over Mr Gilhooly's head to a favourite
Belfast battle-cry: 'I'll slaughter you if you say another word.'"
So does this Convention go down to history as the beginning of an
infamous period when the sanctity of free speech was a thing to be
ruthlessly smashed by the hireling or misguided mobs of an
organisation professing democratic principles. The miracle of the
Easter Rising was that it put an end to the rule of the thug and the
bludgeonman. But many things were to happen in between.
Certain police court proceedings followed, in which Mr Crean, M.P.,
was the plaintiff. The only comment on these that need now be made is
that Mr Crean's summons for assault was dismissed, and he was ordered
to pay £150 costs or to go to gaol for two months, whilst the police
magistrate who tried the case was shortly afterwards rewarded with the
Chief Magistracy of Dublin!
The Board of Erin now began to march south of the Boyne and to usurp
the functions of the United Irish League wherever it got a footing. It
was frankly out for jobs, preferments and patronage of all kinds, so
that even the dirty crew of place-hunting lawyers which Dublin Castle
had plentifully spoon-fed for over a century became its leaders and
gospellers, seeing that through it alone could they carve their way to
those goodly plums that maketh easy the path of the unctuous crawlers
in life--the creed of the Mollies, and it gained them followers
galore, being that nobody who was not a member of "the Ancient Order"
was eligible for even the meanest public office in the gift of the
Government or the elected of the people. Even a Crown Prosecutor, one
of the Castle "Cawtholic" tribe whose record of life-long antipathy to
the vital creed of Irish Nationality was notorious, now became a pious
follower of the new Order and was in due course "saved" by receiving
an exalted position in the judicial establishment of the country,
which owed nothing to his honour or his honesty. Under the auspices of
the Board of Erin "the shoneen"--the most contemptible of all our
Irish types--began to flourish amain. It was a great thing to be a
"Jay Pay" in the Irish country-side. It added inches to one's girth
and one's stature, and to the importance of one's "lady." It was
greatly coveted by the thousands who always pine to swagger in a
little brief authority, and thus the Board of Erin drew its adherents
from every low fellow who had an interest to serve, a dirty ambition
to satisfy, an office to gain or probably even a petty score to pay
off. No doubt there were many sincere and honest and enthusiastic
young men attracted to it by the charm of the secret sign and
password, and others who believed that its Catholic pomp and parade
made for the religious uplift of the people. But taken all in all, it
was unquestionably an evil influence in the lives of the people and it
degraded the fine inspiration of Nationality to a base sectarian
scramble for place and power.
Gone were the glorious ideals of a nobler day wherever it pushed out
its pernicious grip. Surrendered were the sterner principles which
instructed and enacted that the man who sought office or preferment
from a British Minister unfitted himself as a standard-bearer or even
a raw recruit in the ranks of Irish Nationality. The Irish birth-right
was bartered for a mess of pottage and, worst of all, the fine
instincts of Ireland's glorious youth were being corrupted and
perverted. The cry of "Up the Mollies!" became the watchword of the
new movement and the creed of selfishness and sectarianism supplanted
the evangel of self-denial and self-sacrifice. It was a time when
clear-sighted and earnest men almost lost hope, if they did not lose
faith. To be held in subjection by the tyranny of a stronger power was
a calamity of destiny to be resisted, but that the people should
themselves bind the chains of a more sordid tyranny of selfishness
around their spirits was wholly damnable and heart-breaking.
It was to fight this thing that Mr William O'Brien proposed yet
another crusade of light and liberty. As he founded the United Irish
League when the country was sunk in the uttermost depths of despair
and indifference, he now made a first gallant effort to establish a
new national organisation to preach a nobler creed of brotherhood and
reconciliation among all Irishmen, and to this he gave the appropriate
title of the All-for-Ireland League. The city and county of Cork
rallied to his side, with all the old-time fervour of Rebel Cork. The
inaugural meeting of the League was held in my native town, Kanturk,
and was splendidly attended by as gallant a body of Irishmen as could
be found in all Ireland--men who knew, as none others better, how to
fight, when fighting was the right policy, but who knew also, in its
proper season, when it was good to make peace. The Press, however,
shut its pages to the new movement and a complaisant Irish Party, now
utterly at the mercy of the Board of Erin, at a meeting specially
summoned for the purpose, passed a resolution of excommunication
against the new League and against every Member of Parliament who
should venture upon its platform, on the ground that it was usurping
the functions and authority of the United Irish League, which was now
nothing more than a cloak for the operations of the Board of Erin.
No human being could struggle under the mountain weight of
responsibility that now rested on the shoulders of Mr O'Brien. Wearied
by the monstrous labours and fights of many years, deserted by his own
colleague in the representation of Cork City, with the Nationalist
Press engaged in a policy of suppression and a system of secret
intimidation springing up all over the country, it would have been
madness for him to attempt to continue.
Accordingly he decided to quit the field again and to leave the clever
political manipulators in possession. After he had sent in his
application for the Chiltern Hundreds I came across specially from
Ireland to meet him at the Westminster Palace Hotel. It were meet not
to dwell upon our interview, for there are some things too sacred for
words. I know that he had then no intention of ever returning to
public life, and though he was obviously a man very, very ill, in the
physical sense, yet I could see it was the deeper wounds of the soul
that really mattered.
I have had sorrows in my life and deep afflictions, the scars of which
nothing on this earth can cure, yet I can say I never felt parting so
poignantly as with this friend, whom I loved most and venerated most
on earth. I returned to Ireland that night, not knowing whether I
should ever see the well-beloved face again. He went to Italy on the
morrow to seek peace and healing, away from the land to which he had
given more than a life's labour and devotion. He enjoined his friends
not to communicate with him, but he promised to watch from a distance,
and that if the occasion ever arose he would not see them cast to
destruction without effort of his duty made.
How well and generously he kept that promise these pages will show.