THE IRISH PRIESTS AND THE FENIANS.

Evening Post, Issue 27, 10 March 1865, Page 2

THE IRISH PRIESTS AND THE FENIANS.

The burning in effigy of the parish priest of Skibbereen, in Ireland has already been recorded. The Dublin correspondent of the Times writes : — This astounding event, without precedent, I believe in the annals of the country, has created sensation in the .Roman Catholic communit} 7 . Their organs seem quite unable to account for the fact that a Roman Catholic priest could be burnt in effigy in an Irish town where the great majority of the inhabitants are Roman Catholics. Yet, according to " A Looker-on," in the Cork Constitution, by whom public attention was first directed to the outrage, a large number of the inhabitants of Skibbereeen and the surrounding districts assembled at the market square in that town, and had a thing dressed up as a Ronum Catholic clergyman wearing spectacles, to which they set nre at both extremities, amid the shouts and execrations of the multitude. When the effigy was nearly burnt, the police came and took it away from the crowd, who were kicking it about the street, crying out, " So perish all our enemies, O Lord ! " This account is corroborated by the local journal, the Skibbereen "Ka^le, and accepted as true by the Roman Catholic journals in Cork. The clergyman who. was the object of this outrage is the Rev. D. Coliins, parish priest of Rath. The Cork Examiner states that during the time of the famine he assisted to rescue hundreds from starvation. In the streets of Cork, he begged from door to door for the perishing people of Skibbereen ; in the lobby of the House of Commons, he implored money on their behalf; in the cabinet of ministers of state he supplicated for assistance in impassioned accents ; in the boardroom, in the press, he fought the battle for those poor creatures who were helpless as children. And what was the offence of th's good priest, that the children whom he thus preserved alive by begging bread for them should turn against him and wreak their vengeance on him by burning him in effigy ? He denounced the Fenians from the altar at Rath ; and it is said that through his instrumentality a person named Keane was committed by the magistrates for administering unlawful oaths ; and so the friends of Keane, who must include almost tha entire population in that quarter, else they would have punished the offenders, resolved to vent their wrath against their own spiritual adviser as a " felon-letter." The Morning News makes the following remarks upon this subject, from which it appears that the bishop also had been insulted by his own people : — "The population of Skibbereen is almost exclusively Catholic; and some time ago, at least, it yielded to none in Ireland in public spirit, Catholic zeal, and in patriotism. Within the past five years, a startling change would seem to have taken place in Skibbereen. Fenianism has taken a choice selection of the rising generation under its hallowed gniuance. Nowhere el*e, we are told, ia the 'movement' so well forward; nowhere else are the pupils so 'advanced; the^ have got to priest-burning in effigy, and bishopinsulting in person in the public streets. How often during the past four years have we cried out that ravening wolves were among the flock, slowly, cautiously, -\ silently, stealthily turning the members of the flock against their pastors ? How often

have we told young, ardent, and probably well-meaning Irish Catholics that they were in the hands of guides who would not let them see all at once 'the advanced stage to which they would be brought gradually, carefulty, and craftily.' . . . A sad a?id bitter experience is vindicating our warnings j and those who once imagined that we exaggerated the danger now think we underrated it. The Catholic 1 ishops anil priests of Ireland have been painfully awakened to that danger. They have seen recurrences winch they once believed impossible to happen in Ireland. They find a Mazzinian spawn on Irish soil." The Kerry Post states that tlie lloman Catholic clergy of Tralee had felt compelled to denounce on the previous Sunday the Fenian Society, the Tralee Beading-room, and a paper published in Dublin called The Irish People, owing to the hold the pernicious principles of the society had got on the people of that town. The Rev. Mr. Collins had done the same in his chapel, and hence the burning in effigy.