MR. MORLEY'S TASK IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 105

MR. MORLEY'S TASK IN IRELAND

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Englishmen whose opinions about Ireland are still in a state of fluidity, the wars of the Shamrock and Ivy between two bodies of Irish Nationalists must be a grievous stumbling-block. It is sometimes forgotten that Irish Nationalists have only fallen out at all because a majority of seven-eighths of them were willing to sacrifice even Mr. Parnell's leadership rather than follow him in tearing up the compact of peace between the two democracies. Englishmen would do well to bear in mind also that the only news their papers print from Ireland is sensational and, generally, mischief-making news. For ten years all they read of the Land League revolution was that a voice cried ' Shoot them!' in the course of a public meeting, or that a cow was mutilated by some Hibernian Jack-the Ripper. The readers of the Times are at present entertained with verbatim reports of every insensate word said by every insignificant Dissentient in the country; the more insensate the word, and the more insignificant the man, the more liberally the Times' space is lavished for their fame. How is the busy British reader to bethink him that all this is a ridiculous travesty of the public opinion of a country in twenty-five out of whose thirty-two counties Redmondism has no more effective following than Theosophy has in the British shires? The great counties of Wexford, Cork, and Tipperary—the first the focus of the Insurrection of '98, and the two others the nurseries and strongholds of the Fenian movement—are so completely with us that, in ten out of their thirteen constituencies, no Redmondite candidate appeared at all, and in the three they fought they were ridiculously worsted. The correspondents of the English papers live in Dublin, and, among vast masses of the Dublin workmen the feeling that Mr. Parnell was not so much wrongly displaced as displaced in the wrong … continue reading »

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