Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (2 of 2): (2nd ed.) (1888)Hurlbert, William Henry
History
Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (2 of 2): (2nd ed.) (1888)
Hurlbert, William Henry
Ireland -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901
When one sees what a magistrate now represents in Ireland, it certainly
is not easy to reconcile an inconsiderate attack upon the character and
conduct of such an officer with the most elementary ideas of good
citizenship.
After Mr. Roche left us, a gentleman in the carriage, who is interested
in some Castle Island property, told us that nothing could be worse than
the state of that region. Open defiance of the moral authority of the
clergy is as rife there, he says, as open defiance of the civil
authorities. The church was not long ago broken into, and the sacred
vestments were defiled; and, but the other day, a young girl of the
place came to a magistrate and asked him to give her a summons against
the parish priest "for assaulting her." The magistrate, a Protestant,
but a personal friend of the priest, esteeming him for his fidelity to
his duties, asked the girl what on earth she meant. She proceeded with
perfect coolness to say that the priest had impertinently interfered
with her, "assaulted her," and told her to "go home," when he found her
sitting in a lonely part of the road with her young man, rather late at
night! For this, the girl, professing to be a Catholic, actually wanted
the Protestant magistrate to have her parish priest brought into his
court! He told the girl plainly what he thought of her conduct,
whereupon she went away, very angry, and vowing vengeance both against
the priest and against him.
This same gentleman said that at the Bodyke evictions, of which so much
has been heard, the girls and women swarmed about the police using
language so revoltingly obscene that the policemen blushed--such
language, he said, as was never heard from decent Irishwomen in the days
of his youth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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