Ireland Under Coercion Volume I Part 7

The maid having told us Ma.s.s would be performed at noon, I walked with Lord Ernest a mile or so up the road to Derrybeg, to see the people thronging down from the hills; the women in their picturesque fas.h.i.+on wearing their bright shawls drawn over their heads. But the maid had deceived us. The Ma.s.s was fixed for eleven, and I suspect her of being a Protestant in disguise.

On the way back we met Mr. Burke, the resident magistrate. He has a neat house here, with a garden, and had come over from Dunfanaghy to see his wife. He meant to return before dark. The country was quiet enough, he said; but there were some troublesome fellows about, keeping up the excitement over the arrest at Father M'Fadden's trial of Father Stephens--a young priest recently from Liverpool, who has become the curate of quite another Father M'Fadden--the parish priest of Falcarragh, and is giving his local superior a great deal of trouble by his activity in connection with the "Plan of Campaign." Mr. Wybrants Olphert of Ballyconnell, the chief landlord of Falcarragh, has been "boycotted," on suspicion of promoting the arrest of the two priests.

Five policemen have been put into his house. At Falcarragh, where six policemen are usually stationed, there are now forty. Mr. Burke evidently thinks, though he did not say so, that Father Stephens has been spoiled of his sleep by the laurels of Father M'Fadden of Gweedore.

He is to be tried at Dunfanaghy on Tuesday, and there are now 150 troops quartered there--Rifles and Hussars.

"Are they not boycotted?" I asked.

"No. The people rather enjoy the bustle and the show, not to speak of the money the soldiers spend."

Lord Ernest, who knows Mr. Olphert, sent him over a message by Mr. Burke that we would drive over to-morrow, and pay our respects to him at Ballyconnell. From this Mr. Burke tried to dissuade us, but what he told us naturally increased our wish to go.

After luncheon I ordered a car, and drove to Derrybeg, to call there on Father M'Fadden, Lord Ernest, who has already seen him, agreeing to call there for me on his return from a walk. We pa.s.sed much reclaimed bogland, mostly now in gra.s.s, and looking fairly well; many piles of turf and cl.u.s.ters of cottages, well-built, but not very neatly kept.

From each, as we pa.s.sed, the inevitable cur rushed out and barked himself hoa.r.s.e. Then came a waste of bog and boulders, and then a long, neat stone wall, well coped with unhewn stone, which announced the vicinity of Father M'Fadden's house, quite the best structure in the place after the chapel and the hotel. It is of stone, with a neat side porch, in which, as I drove up, I descried Father M'Fadden, in his trim well-fitting clerical costume, standing and talking with an elderly lady. I pa.s.sed through a handsome iron wicket, and introduced myself to him. He received me with much courtesy, and asked me to walk into his well-furnished comfortable study, where a lady, his sister, to whom he presented me, sat reading by the fire.

I told Father M'Fadden I had come to get his view of methods and things at Gweedore, and he gave it to me with great freedom and fluency. He is a typical Celt in appearance, a M'Fadden Roe, sanguine by temperament, with an expression at once shrewd and enthusiastic, a most flexible persuasive voice. All the trouble at Gweedore, he thought, came of the agents. "Agents had been the curse both of Ireland and of the landlord.

The custom being to pay them by commissions on the sums collected, and not a regular salary, the more they can screw either out of the soil, or out of any other resources of the tenants, the better it is for them. At Gweedore the people earn what they can, not out of the soil, but out of their labour exported to Scotland, or England, or America. Only yesterday," he continued, turning to his neat mahogany desk and taking up a letter, "I received this with a remittance from America to pay the rent of one of my people."

"This was in connection," I asked, "with the 'Plan of Campaign' and your contest here?"

"Yes," he replied; "and a girl of my parish went over to Scotland herself and got the money due there for another family, and brought it back to me here. You see they make me a kind of savings-bank, and have done so for a long time, long before the 'Plan of Campaign' was talked about as it is now."

This was interesting, as I had heard it said by a Nationalist in Dublin that the "Plan of Campaign" was originally suggested by Father M'Fadden.

He made no such claim himself, however, and I made no allusion to this aspect of the matter. "I have been living here for fifteen years, and they listen to me as to n.o.body else."

In these affairs with the agents, he had always told his people that "whenever a settlement came to be made, cash alone in the hand of the person representing them could make it properly." "Cash I must have," he said, "and hold the cash ready for the moment. When I had worked out a settlement with Captain Hill, I had a good part of the money in my hand ready to pay down. 1450 was the sum total agreed upon, and after the further collection, necessitated by the settlement, there was a deficit of about 200. I wrote to Professor Stuart," he added, after a pause, "that I wanted about 200 of the sum-total. But more has come in since then. This remittance, from America yesterday, for example."

"Do they send such remittances without being asked for them?" I inquired.

"Yes; they are now and again sending money, and some of them don't send, but bring it. Some of them go out to America now as they used to go to England--just to work and earn some money, and come back.

"If they get on tolerably well they stay for a while, but they find America is more expensive than Ireland, and if, for any cause, they get out of work there, they come back to Ireland to spend what they have.

Naturally, you see," said Father M'Fadden, "they find a certain pleasure to be seen by their old friends in the old place, after borrowing the four pounds perhaps to take them to America, coming back with the money jingling in their pockets, and in good clothes, and with a watch and a chain--and a high hat. And there is in the heart of the Irishman an eternal longing for his native land constantly luring him back to Ireland. All do not succeed, though, in your country," he said. "We hear of two out of ten perhaps who do very well. They take care we hear of that. The rest disappear, and are never heard of again."

"Then you do not encourage emigration?" I, asked, "even although the people cannot earn their living from the soil?"

Father M'Fadden hesitated a moment, and then replied, "No, for things should be so arranged that they may earn their living, not out of the country, but on the soil at home. It is to that I want to bring the condition of the district."

At this point Lord Ernest Hamilton came up and knocked at the door. He was most courteously received by Father M'Fadden. To my query why the Courts could not intervene to save the priests from taking all this trouble on themselves between the owners and the occupiers of the land, Father M'Fadden at first replied that the Courts had no power to intervene where, as in many cases in Gweedore, the holdings are subdivided.

"The Courts," he said, "may not be, and I do not think they are, all that could be desired, though they undoubtedly do supply a more or less impartial arbitrator between the landlord and the tenant. It is an improvement on the past when the landlords fixed the rents for themselves."

I did not remind him of what Lord George Hill tells us, that in the olden time at Gweedore the tenants fixed their own rents--and then did not pay them--but I asked him how this could be said when the tenant clearly must have accepted the rent, no matter who fixed it. "Oh!" said Father M'Fadden, "that may be so, but the tenant was not free, he was coerced. With all his life and labour represented in the holding and its improvements, he could not go and give up his holding. It's a stand-and-deliver business with him--the landlord puts a pistol to his head!"

"But is it not true," I said, "that under the new Land Bill the Land Commissioner's Court has power to fix the rents judicially without regard to landlord or tenant during fifteen years?"

"Yes, that is so," said Father M'Fadden. "Under Mr. Gladstone's Act of 81, and under the later Act of the present Government, the rents so fixed from '81 to '86 inclusive are subject to revision for three years; but the people have no confidence in the const.i.tution of the Courts, and, as a matter of fact, the improvements of the tenants are confiscated under the Act of '81, and the reductions allowed under the Act of '87 are incommensurate with the fall in prices by 100 per cent.

And there still remains the burden of arrears. I feel that I must stand between my people and obligations which they are unable to meet. To that end I take their money, and stand ready to use it to relieve them when the occasion offers. That is my idea of my work under the 'Plan of Campaign'; and, furthermore, I think that by doing it I have secured money for the landlord which he couldn't possibly have got in any other way."

This struck me as a very remarkable statement, nor can I see how it can be interpreted otherwise than as an admission that if the people had the money to pay their rents, they couldn't be trusted to use it for that purpose, unless they put it into the control of the priest or of some other trustee.

Reverting to what he had said of the necessity for some change in the conditions of life and labour here, I asked if, in his opinion, the people could live out of the land if they got the owners.h.i.+p of it.

In existing circ.u.mstances he thought they could not.

Was he in favour, then, of Mr. Davitt's plan of Land Nationalisation?

"Well, I have not considered the question of Nationalisation of the land."

To my further question, What remedies he would himself propose for a state of things in which it was impossible for the people to live out of the land either as occupiers or as owners--emigration being barred, Father M'Fadden, without looking at Lord Ernest, replied, "Oh, I think abler men who draw up Parliamentary Acts and live in public life ought to devise remedies, and that is a matter which would be best settled by a Home Government."

The glove was well delivered, but Lord Ernest did not lift it.

"But, Father M'Fadden," I said, "I am told you are a practical agriculturist and engineer, and that you have contrived to get excellent work done by the people here, dividing them off into working squads, and a.s.signing so many perches to so many--surely then you must understand better than a dozen members of Parliament what they can be got to do?"

He smiled at this, and finally admitted that he had a plan of his own.

It was that the Government should advance sums for reclaiming the land.

"The people could live on part of their earnings while thus employed, and invest the surplus in sheep to be fed on the hill pastures. When the reclamation was effected the families could be scattered out, and the holdings increased. In this district alone there are 350 holdings of reclaimable land of 20 acres each, the reclamation of which, according to a competent surveyor, "would pay well." And the district could be improved by creating employment on the spot, establis.h.i.+ng factories, developing fisheries, giving technical education, and encouraging cottage industries, which are so vigorously reviving in this district owing to the benevolent efforts of the Donegal Industrial Fund."

Father M'Fadden spoke freely and without undue heat of his trial, and gave us a piquant account of his arrest.

This was effected at Armagh, just as he was getting into an early morning train. A sergeant of police walked up as the train was about to start, and asked--

"Are you not Father M'Fadden of Gweedore?"

"What interest have you in my ident.i.ty?" responded the priest.

"Only this, sir," said the officer, politely exhibiting a warrant.

"I had been in Armagh the previous day," said Father M'Fadden, "attending the month's memory of the late deceased Primate of All Ireland, Dr. M'Gettigan, and stayed at a private residence, that of Surgeon-Major Lavery, not suspecting that while enjoying the genial hospitality of the Surgeon-Major my steps were dogged by a detective, and that gentleman's house watched by police."

Of the trial Father M'Fadden spoke with more bitterness. His eyes glowed as he exclaimed, "Can you imagine that they refused me bail, when bail had been allowed to such a felon as Arthur Orton? Why should I have been locked up over two Sundays, for ten days, when I offered to pledge my honour to appear?" He made no other complaint of the magistrate, and none of the prosecutor, Mr. Ross. He praised his own lawyer, too, but he strongly denounced the stenographer who took down his speech, or the parts of it which I told him I had seen in Dublin.

"Why, just think of it," he exclaimed; "it took the clerk just eight minutes to read the report given by that stenographer of a speech which it took me an hour and twenty minutes to deliver! I do not speak from the lips, I speak from the heart, and consequently rather rapidly; and a stenographer who can take down 190 words a minute has told me I run ahead of him!"

I suggested that the report, without pretending even to be a full summary of his speech, might be accurate as to phrases and sentences p.r.o.nounced by him.

"Yes, as to phrases," he answered, "that might be; but the phrases may be taken out of their true connection, and strung together in an untruthful, yet telling way. Even my words were not fully set down," he said, with some heat. "I was made to call a man 'level,' when I said in the American way that he was 'level-headed.'" _A propos_ of this, I am told that the American word "spree" has become Hibernian, and is used to describe meetings of the National League and "other political entertainments."

When I told Father M'Fadden I had just come from Rome, where, as I had reason to believe, the Vatican was anxious to get evidence from others than Archbishop Walsh and Monsignore Kirby, of the Irish College, as to the att.i.tude of the priests in Ireland towards the laws of the United Kingdom, he said he knew that "some Italian prelates neither understood nor approved the 'Plan of Campaign,' nor is the Irish Land question understood at Rome;" but this did not seem to disturb him much, as he was quite sure that in the end the "Plan of Campaign" would be legalised by the British Government. "I think I see plainly," he said, "that Lord Ernest's government is fast going to pieces, though I can't expect him to admit it!" Lord Ernest laughed good-naturedly, and said that Father M'Fadden saw more in Donegal than he (Lord Ernest) was able to see in Westminster. Upon my asking him whether the "Plan of Campaign" did not in effect abrogate the moral duty of a man to meet the legal obligations he had voluntarily incurred, Father M'Fadden advanced his own theory of the subject, which was that, "if a man can pay a fair year's rent out of the produce of his holding, he is bound to pay it. But if the rent be a rack-rent, imposed on the tenant against his will, or if the holding does not produce the rent, then I don't think that is a strict obligation in conscience."

In America, the courts, I fear, would make short work of this theory of Father M'Fadden. If a tenant there cannot pay his first quarter's rent (they don't let him darken his soul by a year's liabilities) they promptly and mercilessly put him out.

Interesting as was our conversation with the parish priest of Gweedore, I felt that we might be trespa.s.sing too far upon his kindness and his time. So we rose to go. He insisted upon our going into the dining-room, where, as he told us, he had hospitably entertained sundry visiting statesmen from England, and there offered us a gla.s.s of the excellent wine of the country. He excused himself from joining us as being "almost a teetotaller."

On our return to the hotel I met the Galwegian strolling about. When I told him of Father M'Fadden's courteous hospitality, he said, "I am very glad you took that gla.s.s he offered. I really believe his quarrel with Captain Hill dates back to Hill's declining that same courtesy under Father M'Fadden's roof."

GWEEDORE, _Monday, Feb. 6._--Another very beautiful morning--as a farmer said with whom I chatted on my morning stroll, "A grand day, sorr!"

Errigal, which in this mountain atmosphere seems almost to hang over our hotel, but is in reality three or four miles away, stood out superbly against a clear azure sky, wreaths of soft luminous mist floating like a divine girdle half way up his bare volcanic peak.