ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 92

ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

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Needless to say, the Times' charge that the Plan of Campaign was a mere heartless politician's stratagem is a falsehood as stupid and malicious as certain famous Facsimile Letters. There is nothing I more heartily hope for than that the history of the Plan of Campaign may be categorically investigated in a manner as decisive as the Facsimile Letters. The charges of dishonesty and blood-guiltiness against it are already given over by all except the most ignorant Tory claqueurs. The charge that it was not organised under the pressure of a terrific agrarian necessity will be still more signally confuted by the plainest facts. Nothing will be easier than to prove:—

1. That, if Mr. Redmond knows what he means at all by joining the Times in stating that the Plan of Campaign was founded for political purposes, Mr. Redmond had no more to do with the founding of the Plan of Campaign and no more knowledge of the circumstances under which it was founded than the editor of the Times had. Mr. Redmond was not even a member of the Organising Committee of the National League, at one of whose meetings the Plan was first resolved upon. The first time he assumed a leading position was as the leader of the movement for founding New Tipperary, which was a wholly different matter, three years after.

2. That the Plan was devised during the appalling agricultural crisis of the winter of 1886, in consequence of evidence pouring in upon us that the tenantry on various western estates, rendered desperate by their difficulties, and not knowing whither to turn after the rejection of Mr. Parnell's Bill, were on the point of commencing something like a small Sicilian Vespers; and that its effect was, beyond all doubt, to stop the recrudescence of agrarian crime, as well as to secure to the Irish tenantry … continue reading »

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