TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 119

TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

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English statesmen began dimly to realise the gigantic blunder of English policy in Ireland for ages in bribing the few to oppress, degrade, and revolt the many. There began the inevitable process of unloading the few of the unjustifiable privileges which England for her own purposes had heaped upon them. Their religious establishment had to be reduced to equality. Its ascendency meant slavery of soul to fo.ur-fifths of the population. Their despotic power of rack-renting had to be shorn away. Its continuance meant not merely degradation of spirit, which blighted industry, but physical hunger, which consigned hundreds of thousands of people to famine-graves in every generation. These were painful surgical operations for a class bred up to pride and sway. They were all the more painful that the surgery was slow, and bungling and indecisive. As the passions of the hour evaporate we will more and more come to feel sympathy, rather than resentment, against a class who have been stripped of privilege so painful to part with, and whose fault was almost one of historic necessity. I have often thought that a great English statesman at the commencement of this century, if he proposed to reverse the policy of centuries and reduce the English garrison in Ireland into citizens in place of tyrants, ought to have treated the Irish question as England treated the negro slave question —that is to say, by recognising that the dominion of the Irish landlord caste was the legacy of a fatal English policy, and by giving liberal pecuniary compensation to the class whose domination the national interest compelled him to dethrone and disendow.

But, whatever clumsy ill-doing may be charged against England, either in arming her Irish garrison for mischief or in disarming them with kicks and cuffs as soon as the … continue reading »

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