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
I interviewed all sorts and conditions of men, but every individual
bound me down to closest secrecy. And although nobody said anything
approaching high treason, their alarm on finding they had ventured to
express to a stranger anything like their real opinion was very
significant. The conversations took place last evening, and this
morning before breakfast a young man called on me at the Station
Hotel, Limerick Junction, three miles from Tipperary, "on urgent
business." "Me father thinks he said too much, an' that ye moight put
what he said in print, wid his name to it. Ye promised ye wouldn't,
an' me father has confidence, but he wishes to remoind ye that there's
plinty in Tipperary would curse him for spakin' wid an Englishman, an'
that dozens of thim would murther him or you for the price of a pot of
porter." Another messenger shortly arrived, bearing a letter in which
the writer said that any mention of his name would simply ruin him,
and that he might leave the country at once. And yet these men had
only said what Englishmen would account as nothing.
New Tipperary adjoins the old, to which it is on the whole superior.
All the descriptions I have seen of the Land League buildings are
untrue and unfair. Most of them were written by men who never saw the
place, and who paraphrased and perpetuated the original error. It was
described as a "mile or two from Tipperary," and the buildings were
called "tumble-down shanties of wood, warped and decaying, already
falling to pieces." The place adjoins and interlocks with the old
town; it is not separated by more than the breadth of a street, is
largely built of stone, and comprises a stone arcade, which alone cost
many thousands. Some of the cottages are of wood, but they look well,
are slated, and seem in good condition. The butter mart, a post and
rail affair, with barbed wire decorations, is desolate enough, and
nearly all the shops are shuttered. Enamel plates with Dillon Street
and Emmett Street still attest the glory that has departed, but the
plate bearing Parnell Street escaped my research. The William O'Brien
Arcade is scattered to the winds, save and except the sturdy stone
walls, which (_a la_ Macaulay's New-Zealander) I surveyed with
satisfaction, sketching the ruins of the structure from a broken bench
in Dillon Street.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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