MR. MORLEY'S TASK IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 109

MR. MORLEY'S TASK IN IRELAND

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and at some risk, for reconciliation, and who will never be a party to closing the door against reconciliation, I cannot avoid seeing that men are growing into power among our opponents in whose hands Mr. John Redmond and his friends are only parliamentary chessmen—men whose watchword is ' No reconciliation!'—and who propose to constitute themselves a permanent element of opposition in Irish political life. That I regret deeply, for the poison it spreads in social life, and the young minds it leads astray; but adversaries of Home Rule need not too hastily assume that a fixed division of opinion among Irish Nationalists constitutes an argument in their favour. It, on the contrary, disposes of the old rooted suspicion that the Irish party were a band of conspirators who would be able to wield an Irish Parliament without let or hindrance as a weapon for separation. It would simply add another minority to the Opposition benches on College Green, and would in that way constitute an additional guarantee for the protection of minorities. The Orange minority and the Ivy minority would club together in the Irish Parliament, as they clubbed together in Cork last year, when they swapped a Redmondite mayoralty against an Orange shrievalty. For all practical fighting purposes, the Extreme Right and the Extreme Left are linked together through the country as effectively as the Tories and Liberal-Unionists pull together in Great Britain. The bogey of bogeys in Ulster is the fear of priestly dictation. The fiercest Ulster bigot will not complain that he has not sufficiently ardent Southern Catholic allies now—paladins who are not content with combating undue clerical influence, but contest the right of an Irish priest even to give ordinary-constitutional expression to opinions which happen to be the opinions also of five-sixths of the community. It is to … continue reading »

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