Irish peasantry

“ The various collectors of Irish folk-lore have, from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of view of others, one great fault. They have made their work literature rather than science, and told us of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion of mankind, or whatever else the folk-lorists are on the gad after. To be considered scientists they should have tabulated all their tales in forms like grocers' bills—item the fairy king, item the queen. ”

“ Even the forms of the individual peasants who are associated with them in our memory, rise as it were from their humble resting-places and appear before us, again awaking our sympathies; for, we will boldly assert it, the Irish peasantry, with all their faults, gain a faster hold on the affections than the peasantry of any other country. We speak, however, particularly of them as they were in our county and in our younger days; for we fear that they are somewhat changed, and not for the better. But our present business is with the Irish fairies rather than with the Irish people. ”

“ Mendicancy and filth have become too common to be disgraceful.
“The Irish peasantry have generally an appearance of apathy and depression. This is seen in their mode of living, in their habitations, in their dress, in the dress of their children, and in their general economy and conduct. They seem to have no pride, no emulation; to be heedless of the present, and careless of the future. They do not strive to improve their appearance, or add to their comforts. ”

“ It is not possible a better defence for the imputed turbulence of the Irish peasantry could be made, than that which lurked in the unprovoked accusations of this narrow-minded sordid steward, who, it is evident, wished to forestall the complaints of those on whom he had exercised the native tyranny of his disposition (even according to his own account,) by every species of harrassing oppression within the compass of his ability. ”

“ Yet their natural character—fierce though calculating—desperate and decisive—generated a sort of independent subserviency, mingled with headstrong propensities which their lairds often found it very difficult to moderate, and occasionally impossible to restrain when upon actual service.
The Irish peasantry, more witty and less wise, thoughtless, enthusiastically ardent, living in an unsophisticated way but at the same time less secluded than the Highlanders, entertained an hereditary, voluntary, uninfluenced love for the whole family of their landlords. ”

“ The Irish peasantry, who necessarily compose the great body of the population, combine in their character many of those singular and repugnant [641] qualities which peculiarly designate the people of different nations; and this remarkable contrariety of characteristic traits pervades almost the whole current of their natural dispositions. Laborious, domestic, accustomed to want in the midst of plenty, they submit to hardships without repining, and bear the severest privations with stoic fortitude. ”

“ The social condition of many parts of Ireland is as backward, or perhaps more backward, than the condition of the rural population of England at the end of last or the beginning of this century. The Irish peasantry still live in poor hovels, often in the same room with animals; they have few modern comforts; and yet they are in close communication with those who live at ease in the cities and farms of the United States. ”

“ Why, if the specimens we get over here are any guide, if the samples are anything like the bulk, you might as well poll a flock of sheep as a crowd of British working men. I say the Irish peasantry are superior in intellect, conduct, and chayracther, and that in following the priest they are acting as reasonable as your British working-man, who follows his strike leaders and trade agitators, and is perpetually cutting off his nose to spite his face. ”

“ A very curious German publication, published in 1883, also throws further light on the German attitude. It purports to be a correspondence between two German students, one of whom is visiting in Livonia and one in Ireland, and the comparison drawn between the two ancient kingdoms is, in the light of recent events, very instructive. The Irish peasantry are ruled by English landowners, the Letts by German ones. Where the Germans conquer, he says, they reorganize, and the people benefit. Where the English conquer, they sink to the level of the peasantry they misrule. ”

“ As I have already hinted, the Irish peasant has three reasons for his desire to be "rooted in the soil." One is a traditional reason. He thinks that his forefathers were unjustly ousted by foreign conquerors. His belief rests on an utterly distorted view of history. It is true that eight hundred years ago a few of the ancestors of a few of the existing peasantry might in a sort of sense have been called landowners. But so far as the Gaelic race survives, it would be equally true to say that the ancestors of the existing peasantry had been the serfs or the slaves of barbarous chieftains. ”

“ The peasantry are drawn in caricature, usually friendly, and are shown in relation to their social superiors, not in their own life and reality. If these sketches were taken seriously, the peasantry would appear as drunken, quarrelsome, lying, dirty, unconsciously comical—with scarcely a single redeeming trait. The scene is south-western Cork.
All on the Irish Shore has been described (Irish Monthly) as “a blend of Lover and Lever (in his coarser rollicking days) refined by some of the literary flavour of Jane Barlow, but with none of the insight and sympathy of Irish Idylls. ”

“ If Ireland were an independent country, in the present state of things there would be a bloody insurrection in every county, and the peasantry would ultimately obtain the property in land, as they have obtained it in Switzerland and in France." That the Irish people will eventually become the masters of the Irish property, from which every effort has been made to dispossess them, by fair means and by foul, since the Norman invasion of Ireland, I have not the slightest doubt. ”

“ Anglicisation has indeed been carried to an extreme pitch in most parts of Ireland, and is rapidly turning the Irish peasant into the most generally uninteresting, prosy, and least spirituel of mortals. As a rule, the more Anglicised he becomes the more intolerable he is. If the peasantry living round Emania had [Pg 64] preserved their native language, while at the same time knowing English, if they were bilingual, like millions of their class in different European countries, many things connected with the history of this celebrated place would be known to them ”

“ Irish when excited are capable of dark atrocities is a feature of their character which it is useless to disguise. Debility when excited is apt to be most cruel. The trait showed itself plainly in the hamstringing of soldiers and the houghing of cattle, as well as in the torturing of middlemen and tithe-proctors. Law and police were paralyzed. The peasantry were one vast conspiracy bound together by awful pledges, the betrayal of which was death. ”

“ The peasantry are well drawn, but it is quite an outside view of their life. The conversations are clever, but sometimes tediously long, as are also the Author’s reflections.
BANIM, Michael.
⸺ CROHOORE OF THE BILLHOOK. (Duffy) . [1825] .
Has been a very popular book. The action lies in one of the darkest periods of Irish history, when the peasantry, crushed under tithe-proctor, middleman, and Penal laws, retorted by the savage outrages of the secret societies. One of these latter was the “Whiteboys,” with the doings of which this book largely deals. ”

“ God forbid that we should exult in such a feeling; but no one who knows Ireland and Irishmen can deny its existence. England, to save herself, to possess the land, has driven the Irish people over the world; but wherever they went they carried with them the bitter memory of their wrongs and hates. She has strengthened the world against herself. She is powerless and contemptible; if she were to-day to demand the return of the Fenian prisoners, the people of all nations would shout in derision, and the United States would answer with a particular sneer. ”

“ It might seem that amid centuries of conflict, ever-present danger, preyings and raidings, statutes to shut them out from learning, trade, or advancement in their church, and torrents of slander to defile their name, the Irish might in truth have fallen into the nomad barbarism and the beastly ignorance of which they were accused by the English from that time to this. In fact however the people, endowed with an immense vitality, were busily occupied with commerce and with learning. Irish princes were lively competitors with the English merchants of the Pale. ”

“ It is all one long tale of wrong-doing; wrong-doing by the English, or wrong-doing by the Protestant ascendancy. For this three quarters of a century the history of Ireland is little more than a history of political dependence, commercial restrictions, administrative corruption, and religious persecution. We see at work a long train of causes blighting the prosperity, crushing the genius, and degrading the character of the Irish people, and we realize clearly all those forces which were inevitably leading them into a hatred of England and distrust of the law. ”

“ Throughout every single hour of seven hundred long years, Ireland has been secretly plotting or openly fighting against England. Not one solitary reign, from Henry II down to Victoria I, but has been marked with Irish dissatisfaction of English rule. Either in the aggregate or in detail, the Irish people have, throughout that long period, been constantly asserting their right to independence, and their unalterable antipathy to the presence of a foreign power upon their shores. ”

“ This merciless system has depopulated the land, and in the enforced emigration the Irish peasant has found no powerful government to aid him in his going; he has paid, to the last farthing, the exactions and robberies of English domination, and then has made his own unassisted way, dogged by an inflicted poverty but with his gallant spirit still unbroken. What has England gained by this conflict of centuries with Ireland? She has sapped her own strength and merited the condemnation of mankind. ”

“ When you destroy national enthusiasm and pride, you have killed a nation. To destroy Ireland as a nation, she must not only be conquered, she must be obliterated. Her people must be swept away and the land filled with Englishmen. And even then the latent life in the soil, the traditions, the sacrifices, the buried patriotism, would come out like an atmosphere and be breathed into the blood of the newcomers, until in a generation or two they would be as Irish and as distinct as the original Celtic people. Irishmen cannot become provincials. ”

“ Yet not merely civilization, but the extreme grandeur and magnificence of Ireland in "former times," is the first postulate of all Irish discontent. It is because England has dimmed her glory and overthrown her royal state that Irishmen burn with patriot indignation, and not by any means because she has merely left barbarism and disunion still barbarous and disunited after seven centuries, and has checked, instead of encouraging, the industry and commerce of the land. ”

“ Whether they failed or succeeded in wresting the independence and ideals of Ireland for a while from the fell clutch of circumstance, they live with their race forever.
Under Plantagenet and Tudor rule, the Irish leaders presented a sullen but armed resistance. A never completed invasion was met by sporadic raids and successive risings. A race of military outlaws was fashioned, which accounts for much in Irish character today. Previously the Irish, like all Celtic civilization, was founded on the arts, on speech, and on law, rather than on war and feudalism. ”

“ No Irishman can read the history of his country from 1691-1775 without a feeling that is almost akin to horror. But these dreary annals form very instructive reading for the man of to-day who would wish to understand modern Ireland. It is always unjustifiable to blame England in any treatment of Irish history. She was, after all, the conquering nation, and the age was not an age of humanity or toleration. Still the fact must be looked squarely in the face that it was under English rule that the Irish people underwent sufferings hardly paralleled in history. ”

“ Driven forth by poverty, Irishmen emigrate in great numbers, and in whatever quarter of the world an Irishman sets his foot, there stands a bitter, an implacable enemy of England. That is one of the results of the wide- spread disaffection that exists in Ireland. There are hundreds of thousands—I suppose there are millions—of the population of the United States of America who are Irish by birth, or by immediate descent; and be it remembered, Irishmen settled in the United States have a large influence in public affairs. ”

“ By steadily neglecting everything written in the native tongue of the country, the Protestant planters, one-fourth of the inhabitants, secured to themselves the sole place in the later history of Ireland. A false history engendered a false policy, which in the long run held no profit for the Empire, England, or Ireland.
Unsuspected by English settlers, the Irish [187] tradition was carried across the years of captivity by these exiles in their own land. Descendants of literary clans, historians and poets and scribes were to be found in farmhouses, working at the plough and spade. ”