Home rule -- Ireland; Ulster (Northern Ireland and Ireland) -- Politics and government; Unionism (Irish politics)
Ireland at the end of a generation of Unionism was suffering, as the
commissioners proceed to point out, not from over-population, but from
under-development. They tabled two sets of recommendations. The relief
programme advised compulsory provision for the sick, aged, infirm,
lunatics, and others incapable of work; in all essential matters it
anticipated in 1836 that Minority Report which to the England of 1912
still seems extravagantly humane. The prevention programme outlined a
scheme for the development of Irish resources. Including, as it did,
demands for County Fiscal Boards, agricultural education, better
cottages for the labourers, drainage, reclamation, and changes in the
land system, it has been a sort of lucky bag into which British
ministers have been dipping without acknowledgment ever since. But the
report itself was, like the Railway Report, too sane and too Irish to
stand a chance. There was sent over from England a Mr Nicholls, who,
after a six weeks flutter through the country, devised the Poor Law
System under which we still labour. Mr Nicholls afterwards became Sir
George, and when he died it is probable that a statue was erected to
him. If that is so the inscription must always remain inadequate until
this is added: "Having understood all about Ireland in six weeks he gave
her, as the one thing needful to redeem her, the workhouse."
But, of course, the capital exploit of the Economics of Unionism was its
dealing with the problem of land tenure. I shrink from inviting the
reader into the desert of selfishness and stupidity which constitutes
English policy, in this regard, from the Union to the triumph of the
Land League. Let him study it at large in Davitt's "Fall of Feudalism."
We are not concerned here to revive that calamitous pageant. Our
interest is of another kind, namely to signalise the malign influence
introduced into the agrarian struggle by government from Westminster as
against government from Dublin. Even had Grattan's Parliament remained,
the battle for the land would have had to go forward; for that
Parliament was an assembly controlled by landlords who, for the most
part, believed as strongly in the sacredness of rent as they did in the
sacredness of nationality. But by the Union the conflict was embittered
and befouled. The landlords invented their famous doctrine of
conditional loyalty. They bargained with Great Britain to the effect
that, if they were permitted to pillage their tenantry, they would in
return uphold and maintain British rule in Ireland.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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