A GEM OF MISGOVERNMENT IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 45

A GEM OF MISGOVERNMENT IN IRELAND

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Sir Thomas Brady and the late Mr. J. A. Blake—men with their hearts in their work, and who were consequently set down for cranks in the Black Book of Dublin Castle, and doomed to retirement on the first pretext—have been proclaiming in vain that a rich mine of deep-sea fishing lay off the Western coasts if the people had only seaworthy boats to work it. Laissez-faire answered 'Nonsense! there is no fishing-bank off this cold coast that would repay more ambitious gear than the ancient spillet-hooks and hide-covered currachs of the natives.' Accordingly to their spillets and canoes the natives were left from famine-time to famine-time, while again and again sums sufficient to have equipped great fishing-fleets were poured out along the Mayo seaboard upon relief-works as purposeless as the oakum picking or crank-turning of a gaol-yard. It was left for some roaming Frenchmen to plough their way to wealth along the coast where an enlightened Dublin Castle could discern nought but barrenness and food for Coercion. Those trawling-steamers have made sad havoc of the poor islanders' rude night-lines, and by the rattle of their paddles and their voracious sweeping-brush style of fishing at the very mouth of the bay, they have alarmed the fish and possibly done permanent damage to the fishing; but they have at least proved that here, within stone-throw of the famishing islanders, there is food and wealth exceeding relief funds a thousand times over, and that the islanders can but lift their empty hands in wonder while it is garnered by strangers. There is a pathos too deep for words in one fact mentioned to me last week by Father Molloy, the true-hearted pastor of Clare Island. He was dependent for his fish-dinner on Good Friday upon the courtesy of a foreign trawler. His own luckless parishioners could but … continue reading »

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