THE PIGOIT PLOT.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIX, Issue 17, 23 January 1891, Page 19

THE PIGOIT PLOT.

(Sydney Freeman's Journal.') BxrORB we open up • he chapter of Pigott 's writings and doings in the service of the enemies of the Irish cause and its leader (Bays Davitt in the Lalmtr World), we will summarise the facts we have established, and the charges we have explicitely made against the employers of •• Bed Jim," the Dublin Cas'le spy. 1 Mr. Davitt points out that M'Dermott, after going about in Dubin advocating dynamite and a policy of violence, was next found in Cork, where he attended a meeting of five or cix men, and proposed the blowing up of the Government stores in Cork Harbour HVgave money to a man named Fetherston, and to another named Deasy for the purchase of explosives ; that he gave Deasy a recipe for the manufacture of nitro glycerine ; that he sent Deasy with explosives to Liverpool, with a note to a man named Flanigan, which was signed in M'Dermott's writing, " Fetherston ; " that these three men were arrested, tried, and sentenced to pjnal servitude for life, for the dos■eiaion of dynamite furnished by M'Dermott. M'Dermott next proceeded to London, and, by 6imilar means to those resorted to by him in Cork, succeeded in securing the arrest of men with whom he had planned dynamite outrage for the blowing op of the House of Commons and other Government buildings M'Dermott, in a letter to O'Donovan Rossa on the 3rd' April 1888, was told, over his own name, the part which he played in the Cork, Liverpool, and London dynamite plots. M'Dermott tried to organise in Paris similar dynamite con•piracies, and in that city he cashed a draft of 50,000 francs, payable to him under the name of " Robert Nunan," for the work which he had done for Dublin Castle in Cork, Liverpool, and London Shorty after arriving in New York in June, 1883, he was sent to Canada by ordes of Mr. Hoare, the present British Consul in New York, to carry on a dynamite agitation in the Dominion, and that money from Mr. Hoare was given him for that purpose Mr. Hoare iequested Mr. Jenkinson,of Dublin Castle to write to the Canadian Government to obtain its permission for Mr. M'Dermott to perform the work which he was sent to perform, which permission the Canadian Government peremptorily refused. M'Dermott endeavoured, while in Montreal, Toronto, Quebec and other Canadian cities, to entice Irishmen into dynamite plots as he had succeeded in doing in Cork, Liverpool, and London. ' After his flight from New ¥ork, he was arrested by the orders of Mr, Jenkinson, and taken before ihe stipandary magistrate in Liverpool, with the in ention of deceiving the magistrate and the publi' and especially the Irishmen of Liverpool, as to the real character of the spy. Although he was airested on the charge of complicity in the socalled conspiracy at Cork, he was ultimately spirited away from the Waltham Gaol by an agent of Mr. Jenkirjson and taken to Switzerland. From that time until now he has been in receipt of the Secret Service mouey for the work he has done for Dublin Castle and the Intelligence Department of the Home Office. We have also introduced the case of John Daly and James Bgan who were tried at the Warwick Assixes on August 1, 1884 ; and we have proved, on the testimony of Alderman Manton, of Birmingham and tne admissions of the Cbief of Police of that city, that the bumbs found upon the prisoner Daly, and for the possession of which he was sentenced to penal servitude for life, were given to him by an agent of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Mr. Hoare, the British Consul in New York, has attempted to "bluf "us with an indignant denial of our statements. We have issued a challenge to Mr. Hoare to insiruct his legal representatives in London to proceed against the Labour World for libel, and to vindicate himself in a Court of Law from the allegations we have made against him. To this challenge we have received no reply. Mr.jHoare contents himself by eaying " he leaves tbe matter to Govern- ; ment." Very well, we invne the Home Government, whoever or whatever that expression means to act as his substitute, and to put to the test of a judicial proceeding the trutn or otherwise of the charges we have made auainsthim and other Government officials. Richard Pigott was of obscure origin. His father was a native of the County Meath. Pigott senior nude his way to Dublin, where he was for some time employed as a cler X in the office „f the Tablet apub.ication then edited by the late Frederick Lucas. Iheeidei Pigott was at one period in the service of a Gjvernm-nt contract .r, named Purcel), who, pievious to the year 1840, undertook the conveyance of the Irish mails from Dublin to tbe provinces. George Pigoit, the father of Richard, next obtained a position on tha staff of a newspaper called the Monitor, then published in Lower Abbey street, Dublin, upon premises subsequently occupied by the Nation. It wasafier the foundation of the Nation, in 1842, that Richard Pigo t maile his debut in the humble role ot an office boy. Pigott'a after position of editor and proprietor of the Irishman and the Flag of Ireland newspapers, the repited organs of the physical force party, gave 1 inn exceptional oppjrtunities of learning whatever " secrets " belonged to the revolutionary bodies Toougo never an entrolled Fenian, it was generally believed that he was either a member of the Supreme Council, or, at least, one of the leading lights of tbe secret organisation. He encouraged this belief when speaking or writing to memb-ra or subordinate officers, in order to be made tne repository of a confidence which he could turn to account as opportunity mi;;ht offer. Oq one occasion the sum of £600 reach, d him from Amenca for the families of imprisoned Fenians. He inserted an acknowledgment of the money ia the Irishman, and had a email number of copies struck eff which represented the number of subscribers to (he paper in ihe city from whence the mo ey came, and he then had Ue acknowledgment taken out, aud the whole weeks' edition of tne piper printed without; a word appearing about the large sum having come into his hands. Pigott was perfectly impartial in his scheming and thieving. He found revolutionists and constitutionalists trusting or using him and he made them pay for the attention he bestowed upon them!

When the late Mr. Isaac Butt founded the Horn« Bnle movement Pigott subjected him and many of his colleagues to a systematic blackmailing. He threatened them with the active opposition of the Frnian organisation, declaring that if he was not relieved from his pecuniary difficulties he would be compelled to make terms with others.

The father of the Home Rule movement, a great lawyer though he was. fell an ea9y victim to the practised schemer, and frequently, when Mr. Butt, who was himself always poor, had not many pounds to spare, he would share with tais unconscionable rogue, who knew so well how to play upon the innate goodness and generosity of the last of Ireland's great lawyers. From the very inception oE tha Land League Pigott became its underhand and open enemy. Meanwhile the Land League was growing in influence and power. Members of Parliament were charged with helping themselves liberally out of. the League treasury, and so on, the object of these calumnious statements being to sow distrust in the public mind as to the honesty of purpose of the leaders of the League. Pigott was not slow to avail himself of the means which this line of attack tffered to his blaakmaiiiog practices. He wrote to Mr. Bgan informing him that two strangerj, whom he suspected of being emissaries of Dublin Castle, had called upon him, and had oftjred him a sum of £500 if ha would publish a certain document in the Irishman, which was to be an emptte of the squandering of the moneys of the League. This letter of Pigjtt's was read during the Parnell Commission. It was from this correspondence between Pigott and Mr. Egan we may date the origin of the conspiracy which eventuated in the publication of " Parnellism and Crime." It was, likewise, as if in poetic retribution, from the letters written by Pigott on this occasion and shortly afterwards, when the Irishman was sold to Mess-s. Parnell and E?an, that the authorship of the forged latters was first discovered by Mr. Patrick Egan. The plot for tbe moral assassination of the Land League and its leaders, which " the two agents of Dublin Castle " attempted to set going in February, 1881, with the aid of Richard Pigoit, was not abandoned, as the history of the Parnell Commission records. No sooner had Pigott dispose! of his papers in the ill-advised purchase of them by Messrs. Parnell and Egan in August, 1881, than he began to put into execution the scheme of defamation which had been suggested to him by Dublin Castle in the February previous. Pigott was either the inspiration or the author of many of the attacks made upon the Land League for its falsely-alleged identity with outrage and malversation of fuads which appeared in leading landlord and Tory organs in Dublin and London from 1881 to the publication of " Parnellism and Crime." And it is only right to say that, yeats previous to tne appearance of these libels in the Times, articles similar in character were contributed by Richard Pigott to such papers as the Dublin Express, the (Dublin) Standard,\St. James's Gazette, Evening News. Morning Post, the Globe, society journals like Vanity Fair, and other organs of anti-Iri-'B opinion. From December. 1881, down to the time in 1885 when Houston employed him to write an enlarged edition of the pamphlet," Parnellism," and commissioned him to proceed to New York, Pigott kept up a ceaseless attack upon the League and the Irish leaders in the columns of the above paper 0 . In 1883-4, during the excitement caused by the dynamite outrages which, as vn have shown, were organised by James M'Dermott, who was in the pay of Mr. Jenkinson, of Dublin Castle, Pigott may bn said to have bea " the dynamite editor " of the St. James's Gazette and the Evening News (now the Evening News and Post). Articles and notes tracing the dynamite agitation to Land League policy, attacks upon Mr. Parnell and the more prominent of his lieutenants, denunciations of Mr. Gladstone's Government for the extension of tbe Franchise to liehnd were regularly contributed by Pigott to the above London papers. On the 10th uf December Pigott received from the Standard £11 16s 31 for contribution up to date. On ths 24ih of the same month, £20 ; on tbe 23rd March, 1882, a further sum of £11 lls ; while so lac as October 1, 1885, a letter was sent to Pigott from the Evening Standard explaining that some information inserted from Dublin Wd3 " indep"nden< of the report sent by you."