Ireland and the Home Rule MovementMcDonnell, Michael, Sir
History
Ireland and the Home Rule Movement
McDonnell, Michael, Sir
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland
The latter have in truth secured their own way to a remarkable extent.
The promise has not been fulfilled which Mr. Chamberlain made after the
Unionist victory of 1886, to the effect that Lord Salisbury and the
Conservative leaders were prepared to consider and review the
"irritating centralising system of administration which is known as
Dublin Castle." At the time of the ill-fated Round Table Conference,
which Sir William Harcourt convened, Mr. Chamberlain committed himself
to the expediency of establishing some form of legislative authority in
Dublin, and admitted that such a body should be allowed to organise the
form of Executive Government on whatever lines it thought fit, and Sir
West Ridgeway, as Under Secretary, subsequently carried out the behests
of the same Government by outlining a scheme of self-government by means
of Provincial Councils with a partly elected board to control finance.
All these facts serve to show the injustice--in view of acknowledged
facts--of the description by the late Attorney-General for Ireland of
the Wyndham proposals as "mean and cruel desertion."
There is no part of the Irish question in respect of which more has been
said which is misleading than what is known as the problem of Ulster. I
have already explained what a misnomer this is. In the Counties of
Donegal, Tyrone, Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Cavan there are more
Catholics than Protestants, while in the Counties of Armagh and Down the
numbers of the two creeds are almost equally divided. What is known as
the question of Ulster should in truth be known as that of Belfast, for
it is only in that city and in the adjacent Counties of Antrim and Down
that the religious question is most acute.
The social conditions of the country, which have always been to some
extent, though not to that existing in recent years, agricultural, lead
one to seek a cause in the conditions of Land Tenure for the different
degrees of prosperity pervading the North-East corner of Ulster and the
rest of Ireland. It is impossible to doubt that the Ulster Custom of
Tenant Right had an immense effect on the economic status of the
province. Under it the system of tenure which held the field in the
other three provinces was replaced by one in which the tenants had
security against arbitrary eviction so long as they paid their rents,
and, in addition, were entitled to sell their interest in the property
to the incoming tenant, and this Tenant Right sold often for as much as
half, and sometimes for as much as the full, fee-simple of the holding.
The sum could be obtained on the tenant voluntarily vacating the holding
or on his being unable to pay the rent, the landlord being entitled to
be consulted with a view to approval by him of the incoming tenant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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