Ireland as it is, and as it would be under Home RuleBuckley, Robert John
History
Ireland as it is, and as it would be under Home Rule
Buckley, Robert John
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901; Irish question
"As an Irishman, I should like to have a Parliament of my own. I
suppose that is a respectable ambition. At the same time, I cannot see
where it would do us any substantial good. No, I do not think the
present Nationalist members loyal to the English Crown. Nor are they
traitors. A priest explained that very well. There's a distinction. 'A
man may not be loyal and yet not be a traitor, for how can a man be a
traitor to a foreign government?' said he. That sounded like the
truth. I thought that a reasonable statement. For, after all, we _are_
under foreign rule, and we have a perfect right to revolt against it
and throw off the English yoke if we could do it, and if it suited us
to do it. How to do it has been the talk since my childhood, and many
a year before. It is the leading idea of all secret societies, and
hardly any young man in Kerry and Clare but belongs to one or other of
them. The idea is to get rid of the landlords who hold the country for
England. There it is, now. We'll never be a contented conquered
province like Scotland. We'd be all right if we could only make
ourselves content. But the Divil is in us. That's what ye'll say. The
Divil himself is in Irishmen."
The Mayo folks are great temporary migrants. From the County Mayo and
its neighbour Roscommon come the bands of Irish harvesters which
annually invade England. Latterly they are going more than ever, and
the women also are joining in large numbers. The unsettled state of
the country and the threat of a College Green Parliament have made
work scarcer and scarcer, and the prevailing belief among the better
classes that the bill is too absurd to become law, is not sufficient
to counteract the chronic want of confidence inspired by the presence
of Mr. Gladstone at the helm of state. Five hundred workers went from
Westport Quay to Glasgow the other evening. More than two-thirds were
women from Achil Island, sturdy and sun-burnt, quaintly dressed in
short red kirtle, brilliant striped shawl, and enormous lace-up boots,
of fearful crushing power. Though not forbidding, the women were very
plain, ethnologically of low type, with small turn-up noses, small
eyes, large jaws, and large flat cheekbones. The men were ugly as sin
and coarse as young bulls, of which their movements were remindful. A
piper struck up a jig and couples of men danced wildly about, the
women looking on. Five shillings only for forty hours' sea-sickness,
with permission to stand about the deck all the time. Berths were, of
course, out of the question, and the boat moved slowly into the
Atlantic with hundreds of bareheaded women leaning over the sides.
Another boat-load will land at Liverpool, to return in September and
October. The best-informed people of these parts think that under the
proposed change the young female population of Mayo would be compelled
to stay in England altogether, and that their competition in the
English labour market would materially lower the rate of factory wage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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