Ireland and the Home Rule MovementMcDonnell, Michael, Sir
History
Ireland and the Home Rule Movement
McDonnell, Michael, Sir
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland
If urban industrial conditions militate against an increase of lunacy,
on the other hand it must be remembered that in most Irish towns there
is an appalling amount of overcrowding. The death-rate of Dublin--the
highest of any city in Europe--is, in consequence, no less than 25 per
1,000, as against 16 per 1,000 in Paris and New York, and 17 per 1,000
in London. The percentage of families, consisting on an average of four
persons, living in one room is in London 14.6, in Edinburgh 16.9, in
Glasgow 26.1, in Cork 10.6, in Limerick, 15.8, while in Dublin it
reaches the appalling percentage of 36. In Belfast, which, unlike any
other of the cities which I have mentioned, is for the most part modern,
the percentage is not higher than 1, and this fact has a very great
bearing on the industrial conditions in that city. Side by side with
these figures may be placed those of the death-rate from tuberculosis,
which from 1864 to 1906 in England decreased from 3.3 per 1,000 to 1.6,
in Scotland decreased from 3.6 per 1,000 to 2.1, and in Ireland
_increased_ from 2.4 to 2.7 per 1,000.
The rate war of the steamship companies, which reduced the cost of
passage across the Atlantic in 1904, caused the emigration returns to
rise from 45,000 to 58,000 in a single year, and at the same time there
were employed in Ireland two hundred emigration agents of one company
alone--the Cunard--each of whom received six shillings a head for each
banished Irishman and Irishwoman whom he got safely out of the country.
It is easy for the Irishman to wax eloquent about the exiles who, from
the time when O'Neil and O'Donnell weighed anchor in Lough Swilly at the
very beginning of the seventeenth century, sailed from their country to
seek their fortunes abroad in Church or State or camp, since
proscription deprived them of the _carrière ouverte aux talents_ at
home. The history of the "wild geese" in the service of France, Spain,
Italy, Austria, Prussia, and of Russia; of the Irishmen who were
respectively the first Quartermaster-General of the United States Army
and the first Commodore of the United States Navy, or of the seven Irish
Field Marshals of Austria, or of those who served as Viceroys to Chili,
Peru, and Mexico, is the story of the citizens of no mean city. Catholic
Europe is flecked with the white graves of the Irish exiles of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; from Rome to Valladolid, from
Douai to Prague, from Salamanca to Louvain, and from Tournai to Paris
you will find their bones. But the pathos of this is, to my mind, as
nothing compared with the pathos of what is occurring now. For one
thing, it was only men in those days that went in any large numbers,
while to-day it is both men and women. From the point of view of England
the result has been in no small degree serious. Of the four million
people who have emigrated since the great tidal wave began with the
famine, nearly ninety per cent. have gone, not to British Colonies, but
to the United States.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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