A GREAT IRISH LEADER

New Zealand Tablet, 15 May 1913, Page 11

A GREAT IRISH LEADER

THE CENTENARY OF HIS BIRTH When Isaac Butt, the son of a Protestant clergyman, was born near Ballybofey, in the County of .Donegal, 100 years ago (says a writer in the Irish Weekly), Henry Grattan was preparing for his final . effort to secure a modest measure of Catholic Emancipation in the British Parliament. ' The Bill which he proposed (during the Session of 1813) was a very imperfect and restricted one,' writes a historian; 'but it provided that Catholics should sit in Parliament and hold public offices. . . . The debate which ensued is not worth recording, inasmuch as, after several amendments providing for veto, and at last an amendment striking out the clause enabling Catholics to sit , and vote in Parliament, the Bill was withdrawn and finally lost.' It is well to be reminded at this .period of how the Irish cause stood 100 years ago. Mr. John Redmond's review at the great banquet in London on St. Patrick's Day of the Irish nation's achievements during the year since St. Patrick's Day, 1912, was eloquent oratory, and it was couched in terms of very pardonable pride. He told of jnomises, kept to the letter, prophecies fulfilled, and high hopes justified. He did not claim the people's gratitude for himself and his colleagues ; it is theirs in full and overflowing measure. He dwelt on what has been accomplished ; and speeches like Mr. Redmond's, Mr. Devlin's, and Sir Joseph Ward's were testimonies to what can and will be done in the self-governed Ireland of the future. .But the Irish Leader's tribute to Isaac Butt was, perhaps, the most interesting portion of his addressand the most timely. Butt Was a Great Irishman. Only now we are beginning to realise the value of his work. Writing many years ago —before the memory of the controversies that clouded the last months of the Donegal patriot's career had begun to fade away —' Mr. T. P. O'Connor, M.P., said: 'He had great qualities of leadership. He was unquestionably a head and shoulders above all his followers, able though many of them were: and was, next, to Mr. Gladstone, the greatest Parliamentarian of his day. Then, he had the large toleration and the easy temper which makes leadership a light burden to followers; and the burden of leadership must be light when in an Irish Party, the leader has no office or salaries to bestow. And, above all, he had the modesty and the simplicity of real greatness.' Such were the personal characteristics of ' the leader of a small party in an assembly to which it was hateful in opinion, and feeling, and temperament' a party also which included within its ranks half-hearted men, selfseekers, and utterly dishonest individuals: perhaps the three classes would have formed a decisive-; majority of Butt's party at any period between 1870 and 1879. Despite all disadvantages, he fought earnestly, stead-

fastly, and with heroic perseverance. His comparative failure was: the fault or circumstances not within his control; his ; courage, his genius, and his patriotism were transcendent qualities; his devotion to the cause of his native country and his love for her people were displayed in every action of his public life. Brought up and educated in a Tory 'atmosphere,' he argued against Repeal and faced the mighty O'Connell him-, self. 'Councillor Butt will yet be with us,' said the Liberator; and within a decade the prophecy had became a fact. . - Butt pleaded for the 'Forty-Eight men in the courts; he defended the 'Sixty-Seven men with all the skill and devotion displayed by Curran at Green Street in 1798; he fought for the Irish tenants:; and he founded the Home Rule Movement, which dates, as we know it, from a memorable meeting held, at his desire and on his instigation, in the Bilton Hotel, Dublin, on the 19th of May, 1870. It was to Isaac Butt's connection with the Home Rule Movement special reference was made in the Hotel Cecil by the distinguished successor of Butt and Parnell. The centenary of the fine Protestant patriot's, birth may be fittingly celebrated in his native Donegal—the county whose wild hills he loved, and in which his body rests forever. But the Irish Nation owes a tribute to the memory of Isaac Butt which may well be paid in the National Capital where "he labored so strenuously for the country's welfare, and where he established * the ' Home Government Association of Ireland,' anu proposed the following resolution which was carried at the Bilton Hotel on May 19th, 1870: —' That it is the opinion of this meeting that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland is the establishment of an Irish Parliament with full control over our domestic affairs.' Why not hold in Dublin on May 19 a mighty Home Rule demonstration at which the first steps towards the erection of a permanent memorial to Isaac Butt could be taken, and at the same time, and under inspiring circumstances, yet another unqualified and unanimous declaration made of Ireland's unalterable determination to hold firmly by the terms of the resolution passed, on Butt's motion, on the 19th of May, 1870 ? Mr. Redmond said truly at the Hotel Cecil that the name of the great son of Donegal ' will occupy a niche of imperishable honor for all time in the hearts of an emancipated Irish people.' A monument to Parnell has been raised. Let the visible monument to Parnell's predecessor be decided upon by the Irish people before the actual date of their Emancipation arrives. "