Carey, the Informer

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 104, 1 March 1892, Page 2

Carey, the Informer

Sir Thomas Gratton Esmonde, M.P., has compiled into a neat volume the letters he wrote "home" describing, his trip to Austvalia in the cause of Home Eule. He thus describes the grave of Carey, the informer : — James Carey lies ; ne:ir Port Elizabeth. We yisited thespot. A more awful lesson was never read, nor in more awful eloquence, than* the moral of that far-off grave. It would even seem as if the very earth' refused to harbour his wretched clay ;, and as if Nature herself were imbued' with the sentiment of his countrymen towards this poor, weak, desperate, and dishonoured tool and victim of Dublin 1 Castle officialism. It would tax the power of a Dante's pen to record the 1 horrors of that grave. Mine is miserably inadequate to the task. Upon the bare, leafless, lifeless breast of a sandhill, Where the whirlwinds eddy rouud like evil genu, and where the scorching seermg noisome desert blast sweeps across to the sea with the wail and shriek of a banshee, lies a heap of blood red stones. Upon one of these stones some passer-by has scratched with a rusty nail, " Carey, , the informer !" Nothing more. Such is the tomb, and such the epitaph. Around lie the bones of negro convicts who have suffered the extreme penalty of the law, while the only shade that ever stays over that grave comes as the setting sun sinks to his fiery couch behind the grim and ghastly structure of the adjoining gaol. In that company, amid such surround* ingS; the body of the Irishman who lured his countrymen to crime and sold them to a barbarous death for English gold awaits the last trumpet's sound. Was ever awful lesson read in more awful way — an epitome of English rule in Ireland ? The informer's deadliest foe could wish him no worse fate. Let us hope that his poor soul has found more mercy and less justice at Mercy's tountain-head.