A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume I by Brendan O'Leary

Author:Brendan O'Leary [O’Leary, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192558169
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2019-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

1.5

Crying Aloud for Vengeance and the Power of a Colonial Caste

Toward Union’s End, 1858–1914

The national demand…is…that the government of every purely Irish affair shall be controlled by the public opinion of Ireland and by that alone. We demand this self-government as a right. For us the Act of Union has no binding moral or legal force. We regard it as our fathers regarded it before us, as a great criminal act of usurpation…[No] ameliorative reforms, no number of Land Acts, or Labourers’ Acts, or Education Acts, no redress of financial grievances, no material improvement or industrial development, can ever satisfy Ireland until Irish laws are made and administered upon Irish soil by Irishmen…[Our] claim to self-government does not rest solely upon historic right and title. It rests also, fellow-citizens, upon the failure of the British Government in the last one hundred years. Take the test of population. While in every civilized country in Europe the population has increased, in Ireland, in the last sixty years it has diminished by one half. Take the test of civil liberty. There has been a Coercion Act for every year since the Union was passed…Take the test of the contentment of the people. There have been since the Union three insurrections, all of them suppressed in blood…Take the test of the prosperity of Ireland…it is the history of constantly recurring famines every few years over a large portion of the west and north-west seaboard…Take the question of industrial development. A history of industries suppressed…and not one finger lifted in the last one hundred years to advance industrial prosperity…Now such a record as that cries aloud for vengeance.

John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Speech in Dublin, September 4, 1907

What does the history of Irish Home Rule show? [In the] negotiations…Mr Redmond, the representative of Southern Ireland, in order to bring Ulster into a Home Rule constitution common to the whole of Ireland, said to the representatives of Ulster: “Ask any political safeguards you like and you shall have them”…Their reply was, “Damn your safeguards, we don’t want to be ruled by you on any terms.” People who blame the minorities in India ought to consider what would have happened to the political aspirations of the majority, if the minorities had taken the attitude which Ulster took…But this is only incidental. The main question is, why did Ulster take this attitude? The only answer I can give is that there was a social problem between Ulster and Southern Ireland: the problem between Catholics and Protestants, which is essentially a problem of caste. That Home Rule in Ireland would be Rome Rule was the way in which the Ulstermen had framed their answer. But that is only another way of stating that it was the social problem of caste between the Catholics and Protestants, which prevented the solution of the political problem. This evidence again is sure to be challenged. It will be urged that here too the hand of the Imperialist was at work.

B. R.

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