The Bible War in Ireland by Irene Whelan

Author:Irene Whelan [Irene Whelan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843513100
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2012-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

This is an imaginative portrait of serious religion at work in the domestic environment. But some of the more important features to be found on the larger canvas of Irish evangelicalism are absent, and they are not to be found when Butler attempts to answer the question he sets himself—‘How was it that these improved manners did not lead to friendlier feelings but instead the old bitterness intensified, the old divisions deepened?’48

The effects of misplaced philanthropy are more vividly documented in Old and New Light, and go a long way towards explaining the bitterness and ill-feeling generated by the now-fashionable philanthropy of evangelical aristocrats. Crowe Evans’ work is set in the early 1820s, when the country was suffering the full effects of the post-Napoleonic depression. Jemima Lowrie has recently opened a Bible school on her father’s estate at Laylands and has succeeded in enrolling the children of a tenant, Tim Byrne, a once-prosperous farmer now fallen on hard times. All goes well for a while, and the youngsters are regularly sent to Miss Jemima to receive instructions, ‘which, whenever they were accompanied by a wedge of bread or a trencher of stirabout, were exceedingly welcome to young scholars’.49 The trouble starts when Jemima rewards the eldest child with a gift of a new Bible, which is introduced to the Byrne household at a most unfortunate moment, when the local Catholic curate, Fr McDowd, happens to have stopped by for a social visit. The ensuing conflict over who should have control over the minds of the hopeless Byrne children is related to the sympathetic Charles St George by Tim Byrne:

‘But as I was goin to ’quaint your reverence, when Miss axed for the childer, sure Judy couldn’t but send em. And sure as she did, it war’nt to spell at all, at all, that Miss Jemima taught ’em, but tip-top larnin to—to puzzle the priest; and if you war but to see Father McDowd, how mad he was at the hathen knowledge that had been put into the craturs. For all that, I got round the priest, and talked to him oncet or twicet, for he is a good sort of a body, and likes a drop, and isn’t malevolent the laste taste in the world. Ontil las Saturday night it was come five weeks, who should be with us but Father McDowd, when the childer cam home. And what should little Judy have in her fist but a bran-new Bible, given her, she said, by Miss, all as one as if it was a story book. Och, by my sowl! Ye might as well ha’ been tying Dundalk Bay in a big storm down wid a rope of suggawns (i.e. straw ropes) as thought of quieting him. Puillialoo! your reverence knows what the clargy are like when they’re vexed; troth, they’re as bad as the women, every bit; and that’s saying enough for ‘em. And the long and the short of it was, that Father McDowd wouldn’t hear of me sending the childer any more, at all, at all.

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