Dublin Notes.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIX, Issue 18, 30 January 1891, Page 21

Dublin Notes.

■ (From the National Papers.) W fO signal victories have been won by Campaigners in Kilkenny county. In one case the tenants of various properties abont Lister lin, 81ievearragh, and Ballyreddy, who were evicted a couple of years ago, have been restored to their farms, having secured reductions of about forty per cent., and getting a heavy load of arrears wiped out besides. The settlements in these cases were brought about mainly through the instrumentality of the Rev Canon Holohan, P.P., of Rosbercon, and Mr. Hinsoo, solicitor, of New Ross. We are glad to see a stir in the county Down, such as that which was witnessed at Sheepbridge. The men of Newry deserve great credit for the large share they had in making the demonstration the big success it was ; but the surrounding districts, which sent in their stalwart contingents, with their bands, must Dot be overlooked. Two members of the Irish Party attended —Messrs. M'Cartan and Crilly. Mr. M'Cartan criticised very scathingly the recent decisions of the Land Commissioners in Belfast, raising the tenants' rents in many cases, and giving the most paltry abatements in a few others. Subsequently Mr. Crilly addressed the meeting, after making an effective protest against the presence of a police note-taker on tbe platform. The burlesque prosecution in Tipperary, after dragging its dreary length along for nearly three months, has ended as everyone anticipated from the monent the impartial Shannon and his brother Removable took their places on the bench, except only iv this, that Messrs. Dillon and O'Brien were not there to go to prison when the pre-arranged Bix-months' sentences were pronounced. Their shameless refusal to have their law tested by a case Btated to a superior court was hardly anticipated. We will not insult our readers' intelligence by any further comment on those grotesque proceedings. It were, indeed, to waste words on unresisting imbecility. The Coercionists themselves— the most moderate and the most virulent, Mr. Courtney, M.P., and the Daily Express— have denounced the ludicrous burlesque, and the Coercion journals have hid the reports away in shamefaced paragraphs in their obscurest columns. They were right in this for tbe evidence for the prosecution, which showed that during the whole time the combination has been in force in Tipperary, no man, woman, or child was hurt (.except of course, those hurt by tbe police), completely dissipated the calumnies of the Ooercionists who had been cramming the public ear with stories of diabolical outrages and savage intimidation. A piece of jobbery on the part of tbe Castle has come to our ears •o audaciously and transparently base and corrupt, that we should have hesitated to give it evidence except on tbe clearest evidence. For the reader to appreciate the nature of this job it is necessary he should know that ad a rule the north-east and north-west circuits are combined in one Winter Assizes for Ulster, with one set of Crown prosecutors. This winter they are to be divided. There is a special Winter Assize to be held for the northwest circuit, in which the Olphert estate is situate, and who is to be the Crown Prosecutor ? Who does our readers imagine ? Why, Mr. Olphert, son of the exterminator ! Comes the second question. Who and what is this Mr. Olphtrt? As a barrister he is utterly incompetent— absolutely bneflecs. He has never, we venture to assert, held one single brief in Dublin. For the last three circuits he has given up in despair. For the last three months he has not so much as put his nose into the Four Courts— hall, court, or library. He has been too hard at work at Falcarragb. He, arjd not his father, we learn, is really the evictor of Falcarragh. The old man is secretly anxious for peace ; the hopeful son insists that the extermination must continue. For this he is rewarded by tbe Coercion Government by this neat job. If any of hie father's evicted victims, or rather his own, are sent to tbe assizes for defending thfcir hovels against his emergencymen, he will have the double privilege of pros- eating them to conviction and being well paid for doing it. Admirably calculated is this to produce respect for the impartiality of the law. It is estimated that he will make about £350 out of the job. If the Givernment felt it incumbent on them to contribute this sum to the encouragement of the evictions, better to have paid the sub-exterminator out of the Secret Service Fund than go through the ehameles pretence of paying him legal fees for legal work. It is worse than an alma — it is a bribe. Besides believing that Mr. Parnell's retention of office will throw tbe course of Home Rule back for a generation, Mr. Davitt has a personal grievance against the member for Cork because of the falsehood tbe latter told him in regard to tbe OSheacase. Mr, Dsvitt says that as soon as the divorce suit was mentioned in toe newspapers he came over from Dub'in expressly to see Mr. Parnell. He succeeded in getting at Captain O'Shea's case and his evidence, and was the first to lDform the membt r for Cork what tbe case against him really wis. Mr. ParnelL then spoke to him as follows :— " Davitt, I waot you to go back to Ireland to tell our friends that I am goicg to get out of tbis without the slightest stain on my name or reputation" ; aud he repeated the words again. Mr. Davitt says he fully believed him, and went Btraight away and told Mr. John Morley, who was delighted. Ihen he returned tv Ireland and repeated Mr. Parneil's words to Archbishop Walsh, who was not only deligbted, but intensely relieved. He also told the same thing freely in Ireland, and wrote out to friends in Au'traha and America to tbe like effect. The Most Noble the Marquis of Clanncarde, as might be expected, has joined heartily in the Government scheme of concerted evict, oas. policemen are busily engagei in expelling his wretched tenants from home and holdings in the parish of Woo ifurd, where the miser Maiquis has already quenched one hundred and twenty humble hearths with the kind assistance of the beneficent Government. It seems a slur on Irish minhood that these atrocities, which would stir tbe blood of the most patient people in the world, are borne ao tamely. But the certainty of redress is the secret of their patience. They know that in a year or two the accursed system must fall. Even in

the present, eviction do longer means the helpless, hopeless misery of the bad old days. The evicted tenant can count securely on the watchful charity of the Irish race at home and abroad — ay, and of millions of sympathisers of alien blood to alleviate as far as may be tbe sufferings to which he is subjected. Let bnt the Tenants' Defence Association cease for one bonr its mission of mercy, and the e victors and their abettors would be taught a terrible lesson of the vengeance of an outraged and despairing people. We would be deeply grateful for a Coercionist explanation of the recent proclamation suppressing the National League over a vast tract of country, principally in Ulster. On their every-day working hypothesis, the brave Mr. Golf our has completely crushed the National agitation. How comes it, then, that the National League in those districts has now for the first time become dangerous ? Over fifty townlands are suppressed in the county of Fermanagh, and about seventy in the county of Monaghan. To these are added two in the county of Water ford. Now, we do not enter into the charge — apparently the well-founded charge — that has been plainly made, that the League was suppressed in the district because of its active intervention in the Parliamentary Revision Courts. We prefer taking the matter as far as possible from the Coercionist's own point of view. We assume, therefore, with the Coercionists that the National League was suppressed the moment the vigilant Government discovered it was dangerous. Just see in what a quandary their own explanation lands them. The Coercion Act was passed to put down the National League. Tbe result of four years of vigorous and successful Coercion is that the League has grown so powerful and dangerous in these districts that the last desperate devices have to be put in force against it. As for suppression, one might, of course, as well hope to suppress flame with oil as suppress the National League by Viceregal proclamation. " The more they dam it up the more it burns.' So muoh, at least, the Castle blockheads ought to have learned by this time. All Ireland is up and stirring in aid of the Tenants' Defence Association, each district inspired with a generous rivalry of gene* rosity. Everywhere we hear of conventions held and subscriptions pouring in. Every penny will be needed. The resumption of the Falcarragh evictions is plain proof that a very brief experience has convinced our amiable Chief Secretary that the policy of small bribes and big promises which he tried on in some poverty-stricken corners of the West and North won't pay. He has resorted to his old plan of starving out the tenants' combination. For every one of the fifteen hundred souls, men, women, and children, now in progress of eviction at Falcarragh, together with the five thousand families already evicted, food and shelter have to be provided from week to week by the funds of the Tenants' Defence Association. This thought is a spur in the side of the people's generosity. Eviction is tha battleground the Government has chosen. On this they have elected to right their last fight in concert with the exterminators of Ireland. Their plan is, by wholesale concerted evictions, to exhaust the resources of the Tenants' Defence Association, " make examples of tbe tenants" on certain estates, including, of course, the Ponsonby, the Olphert, and the Clanricarde, and so terrify tbe tenants of the rest of Ireland into abject submission to any terms it may please their masters to impose. Brennan, a drunken and ruffianly emergencyman, which adjectives might indeed fairly describe the entire class, was sentenced to a month's imprisonment at the Clonmel petty sessions for breaking into tbe house oi a labouring man named Kearney, smashing bis furniture, and threatening to shoot the old man with a revolver, all without even the shadow of suggested provocation. If it bad been Kearney who had winkled at one of Brennan's pigs he would hive got six months from the same bench on which tba Marquis of Waterford presided. Mr. Balfour gave his Liverpool audience one vivid glimpse, at least, of what he saw in Donegal :— " We were," he said, " no searchers after the picturesque, but on one occasion we walked through a vihage upon that stormy coist, which we were told, and truly told, was one of the finest places of scenery on the West coast of Ireland. We walked up between the pojr hovels and the wretched holdings, looked at the people digging out their black and rotten potatoes, and tbe wretched twice-shorn sheep attempting to get a living on the poor pastures that surrounded these people's homes, and we walked on and over tbe brow of a hill, not a hundred yards from these homes and we came to a point from which you could not see the dwelling or the habitation of man ; and we looked down, and we saw some of the finest cliff scenery in the United Kingdom. We saw the long rhythm of tbe Atlantic coming in beneath ns slowly from the West ; and I think every one of us who saw that felt that the bitter discord between the poverty, the narrowness and squalor of the scene that we bad just passed through, as compared with the spacious splendour of the natural scenery we were looking at, brought home to us how the work of man, or ra her the carelessness and indifference of man, hud marred Borne of the most magnificent of Nature's handiwork." To complete tbe picture he should have added that a visitor coming two days later would have found the forces of the British Empire, with a batteringram provided at the public expense, engaged in driving those same wretched peasants, with their wives and little ones, from their miserable hovels out into the wild rain-storm that beat upon the desolate mountain bide. Mr. Balfour declared that he found his experience as Chief Secretary very " entertaining." This is part of his entertainment. We are quite certain the words of the Most Rev. Dr. Nulty, Bishop of Meath, will be received with respect by the tenants of Ireland—" The same Government," he said, " that assisted evictions in the past were bringing in a land bill called the Land Purchase Act. He said that Bill was to buttress up and build up landlordism, and create a peasant proprietary that had an interest iv landlordism. By tbe BUI the tenants who were in arrears would be obliged to purchase the lard at more than its value. He was not against peasant proprietary or compensating the landlord*, but they should not get more than tbe land was wonb." The Bishop's view is emphasised by the multitude of petitions that have been presented of late by over-hasty purchasers under the Asbbonrne Act, vainly petitioning relief from their cast-iron contract.

The eminent Hebrew financier, Mr. Ooschen, took upon himself a few dayi ago to make a special defence of the Royal Irish batonmen. He asserted that they carried ont their part in the coercion play with the mildness and self-restraint of so many martyrs. As Mr. Goschen, so far as we know, has never bad an opportunity of feeing those gentlemen in their war paint, his assurances on the subject are especially valuable for the purposes of history, "as she is written." It iB not a little curious that only a day or two after he spoke an Irish newspaper editor was so driven to incredulity by the story which a reporter of hia own paper told of wLat he saw the Boyal Irish do, that he put his doubts on tha subject into the shape of an editorial comment. The reporter was describing the Falcarragh evictions, ana he stated that when resistance was offered at the house of Mrs. M'Ginley, stones were flung at the defenders by the police as well as the emergency men. This the editor of the freeman's Journal Baid he could hardly credit ; but the next post brought him a corroboration of the report signed by several other witnesses of the scene— Mr. Dalton, M.P.; Mrs. Amos, Miss Borthwick, Father M'Fadden and Father Boyle. But this is not, so far as our recollection serves us, the first time that the police were found converting themselves into a stone-throwing mob at evictions, and otherwise exceeding their duties in aid of the evictors of those who are practically their own kith and kin. There is many a good and humane man serving in the ranks of tha Royal Irish Constabulary ; but there are, on the other hand, many who are a thorough d'sgrace to the country which they claim as their own ; und it is those black sheep who have earned the encomiums of such friends of humanity as Ooschen and Co. The Archbishop of Cashel, hot-foot from the Eternal City, has given his benison to the Tenants' Defence Fund, together with a subscription which represents in its mnnificence, in some degree, the generosity of his great Irish heart. His grace, in forwarding his fifty pounds to the fund to Father Rafferty, of Tcurle*. expressed his warm hope that the patriotic efforts of tha people to aid their evicted brethren throughout the country might be crowned with success. So far as those who live under his own immediate eye in the town of Thurles are concerned, there is not much reason to fear a failure. The meeting held there last Monday gave earnest of what they intended to do. Over a hundred pounds was subscribed on the spot, and there is no doubt that this sum will be largely augmented ere the subscription has been closed in the town and vicinity. The doubling of last year's subscriptions was an object of emulation with many present. Father Rafferty, Mr. Joseph Ryan, and Mr. Finn led the way in this commendable race, and several more took up the running with a will. One thing to be noted about these Tipperary meetings is that there are at least no apologists for wrong-doers or compromising with public enemies. Forty-five years ago, Father Duan pointed out at the Thurles meeting, Tipperary had double the population it now boasts. Though emigration and destitution were contributory causas of this awful decline, it was rapacious and cruel landlordism, backed up by its crowbar brigade, which was mostly responsible for the havoc, he declared. If these words be true of Tipperary— and their truth no educated Irishman can question — how much more wonld they be faithfully descriptive of other counties io Ireland not so favourably placed f But Tipperary has now turned a nevr leaf in the chapter of its relations with thi extirpating hydra ; aud the impetus given to the movement by its patriotic Archbishop and clergy is certain to be of enormous value in guiding it to a successful termination.