CARDINAL MORAN ON IRISH AFFAIRS

New Zealand Tablet, 27 April 1911, Page 781

CARDINAL MORAN ON IRISH AFFAIRS

His Eminence Cardinal Moran, speaking at the final meeting of the St. Patrick's Day committee in Sydney, referred to the utterances of some of the speakers at an Orange demonstration a few days before. lie said he was impressed with the fact that some of the gentlemen why assisted at the meeting had the affix ex-member attached to their name. He hoped that, after the next election, many more of them would have the same affix. .Mr. Henley, when referring to his visit to Ireland, seemed to lament that he saw, on every side, a great number of beautiful Catholic churches had sprung up in Ireland, and when he visited Waterford, the guide could only" point out the, Protestant Cathedral, the brewery, and the gaol. The Protestant Cathedral had remained alone, although the Orange party had the whole of the resources of England, and indeed the wealth of the country they oppresssed, yet, as far as he could see, they had not erected another church. On the contrary, when peace was restored, the Catholic body showed enthusiasm in substituting for the poor chapels of penal times beautiful churches. Of course, the brewery was one of the industries the Orange faction encouraged amongst the people during the past hundred years, while they destroyed every other industry. As for the gaols, fifty years ago he (the Cardinal) had heard the remark made by a visitor to Ireland, that if the British Government stopped away from Ireland, one of the series of edifices erected, which showed that the British Government had existed in Ireland, would be the gaols. As it was, more than half the gaols were empty. When the Coercion laws ceased in Ireland there was no crime to fill the gaols. Some of tho gaols had been sold to the religious communities who used them for industrial schools, and as centres of education and religious instruction. He (the Cardinal) thought that such, a visitor as Mr. Henley might have looked abroad over the country, and noticed the great changes which had taken place during the past years. Mr. Henley would have found that the poor mud huts, in which the poor tenantry were compelled, by the Orange landlords, to live because they refused fixity of tenure, were replaced by 70,000 laborers' cottages, which were ornamented, comfortable homes with land attached for the convenience of the laborers.. The Orange landlords not only taxed the poor people to live in these mud huts,, but compelled them to pay an annual rent of £6 per

acre, the marketable value - of which '' i would riot i be £l. As the poor tenants had no money to pay such a rent they' were obliged to pay it by day labor, each,day of which was accounted as sd. This showed the tyranny and oppression which prevailed in the land. In the history of the world for the past 1000 years, they could not find anything to equal or surpass the terrible oppresssion and wholesale robbery of the poor tenants in Ireland, bv those who represented the Orange sentiment in the land, s