Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Economic conditions; Land tenure -- Ireland
In the next place, it is to be noted that the checks proposed affect
legislation only and not administration. If the Bill of 1893 or any
similar Bill should become law, the whole executive power in Ireland
will be in an Irish Ministry responsible to an Irish Assembly; and it is
obvious that many of the wrongs against which the restrictive clauses of
the Bill were directed may be inflicted by administrative act or
omission as effectively as by legislation. To quote a work of
authority[33]--
"An independent Irish Executive will possess immense power. It will
be able by mere administrative action or inaction, without passing
a single law which infringes any restriction to be imposed by the
Irish Government Act, 1893, to effect a revolution. Let us consider
for a moment a few of the things which the Irish Cabinet might do
if it chose. It might confine all political, administrative, or
judicial appointments to Nationalists, and thus exclude Loyalists
from all positions of public trust. It might place the bench, the
magistracy, the police, wholly in the hands of Catholics; it might,
by encouragement of athletic clubs where the Catholic population
were trained to the use of arms, combined with the rigorous
suppression of every Protestant association suspected, rightly or
not, of preparing resistance to the Parliament at Dublin, bring
about the arming of Catholic, and the disarming of Protestant,
Ireland, and, at the same time, raise a force as formidable to
England as an openly enrolled Irish army. But the mere inaction of
the executive might in many spheres produce greater results than
active unfairness. The refusal of the police for the enforcement of
evictions would abolish rent throughout the country. And the same
result might be attained by a more moderate course. Irish Ministers
might in practice draw a distinction between 'good' landlords and
'bad' landlords, and might grant the aid of the police for the
collection of 'reasonable,' though refusing it for the collection
of 'excessive,' rents."
Irish Ministers might even refuse actively to oppose the "moral claim"
of the Irish Catholics to the use of the cathedrals and of the
accumulated capital of the Irish Church.[34]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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