AMONG THE CLOUDS IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 32

AMONG THE CLOUDS IN IRELAND

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as ever when we came out. Even with the National ranks rent asunder for nine months, and the National funds tied up, he has not been able to snatch a single victory over the squares of unarmed Irish tenants against whom he has been for five years back hurling all the power of Britain in vain. Still less, of course, has he ventured to make himself ridiculous by starting a Tory candidate at any of the bye-elections, even with the Nationalists ranged in opposing camps—although only a dozen years since Carlow and Sligo were supposed to be as safe Tory strongholds as Mr. W. H. Smith's seat for the Strand. A generation ago some simple-minded folk in England used to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on the brilliant project of bribing 'Popery' out of Connemara whenever the potato blight left the hungry little Papists open to the arguments of soup and blankets. The potatoes having failed last year, Mr. Balfour took up the derelict work of the Irish Church Missions, and invested hundreds of thousands of the British taxpayer's money in a scheme of political souperism among the distressed peasants of the West. I heartily congratulate the poor people upon whatever little profits will have trickled into their pockets out of Connemara railways, road-tinkering, and the like 'relief works.' I would even thankfully acknowledge Mr. Balfour's liberality with the British taxpayer's alms in these poor regions if he had not been guilty of the meanness of refusing to spend a pound in any district that did not present him with a dutiful address, or help the local sergeant of police to erect a triumphal arch in his honour. But, as a measure for the conversion of Connemara from the Nationalist heresy, his expenditures have as little to show for themselves as the forlorn settlements of the Irish Church Mission folk. Now that the harvest has come, … continue reading »

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