Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) by William Henry Hurlbert

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This Burtonport "store" towers high above the modest home of the parish
priest, Father Walker. To our great regret he was absent on parochial
duty, but his niece very kindly welcomed us into his modest study, where
we left a note begging him to honour us with his company at dinner in
Dungloe.

Mr. Hammond, too, was absent, so after paying our respects to his wife,
we drove back to Dungloe, and walked about the village till dark,
chatting with the good-natured, civil people. The local sensation here
they tell us is not the trial of the priests at Dunfanaghy, but a "row"
breeding between the chief of the Sweeneys and one of his brethren over
the possession of Her Majesty's Post-office. It seems there is an
official regulation or custom that the post-office once established in a
particular building shall not be moved thence without positive cause
shown. The head of the Sweeneys, having completed his new and grand
establishment, wishes to move the post-office thither; but the brother
to whom he confided the office in the older building, where he left it
while making the change of his own business, now desires to keep the
office where it is, and, I suppose, to become postmaster himself![17] A
trivial matter enough, but not without edification for students of the
actual situation in this most curious country.

About seven o'clock Father Walker made his appearance--a fine-looking,
dignified, most amiable man. He is a teetotaller, which we esteemed a
stroke of good fortune, a bottle of port wine which we obtained, despite
the "boycott," from the Gombeen shop, proving to be of such a quality
that it might have been concocted in the last century, expressly to
discredit the Methuen treaty.

Father Walker is the President of the National League branch.

Like Father M'Fadden at Gweedore, he speaks of the landlords in this
part of Donegal as really owning, not so much farms as residential
grounds for tenants who export their thews and sinews to Scotland and
other countries, and live by that traffic mainly. It is a common
practice here, he tells me, for the children, who are very sharp and
bright, to be taken by their parents into Tyrone and other parts of the
North, and put out to live with the people there, who prize them, and
pay very good wages. I asked him if he thought the official estimate I
had seen of the proportion of these "migratory labourers" to the whole
population of Ulster, as about one-tenth of one per cent., an
under-statement. He thought it was an under-statement for this part of
the county of Donegal, but to be explained, perhaps, by the fact that so
much of the migration is merely from one county into another, and not
out of the kingdom. He agreed that the practice goes on upon a much more
extensive scale in the County Mayo, where more than thirteen per cent,
of all the adult male population are said to belong to the category of
migratory labourers. The Irish population of England seems to be
recruited at regular seasons in this way, very much as is the Albanian
population of Constantinople.

Father Walker was full of information about the granite quarries, and
much interested in the prospect of their development. He told us that a
practical engineer from Liverpool had, not long ago, been here seeking a
lease of the quarries--or, in other words, of the quarrying rights over
sixty or seventy miles of Donegal--from the agent of Lord Conyngham.
This engineer had come to Donegal on a sporting expedition last year,
and gone back full of the capabilities of the granite region. Father
Walker had been told by him that similar quarries also exist in the
County Mayo at Belmullet, where preparations are now making, he thinks,
to develop them, though on a smaller scale than would be both
practicable and desirable here.

In Mayo, as in Donegal, labour must be plentiful enough, and the
comparatively unskilled labour required in such quarries would be
particularly abundant here. It would be a great thing, Father Walker
thought, to introduce here the custom of a regular pay-day, and with it
gradually habits of exactness and economy, not easily developed without
it.

He gave me also, at my request, some valuable information as to the
stipends of the Catholic clergy, and the sources from which they are
derived. This subject has been agitated in the local press of this part
of Ireland in connection with estimates of Father M'Fadden's income at
Gweedore, which Father M'Fadden declares, I believe, to be greatly
exaggerated. Father Walker has been parish priest at Burtonport for
about nine years. In all that time the highest sum reached in one year
by the stipend has been L560; this sum having to be divided between the
parish priest, who received L280, and two curates receiving L140 each.
The annual stipend, however, has more than once fallen below L480, and
Father Walker thinks L520 a fair average, giving L260 to the parish
priest, and L130 each to his curates. Where there are only two priests
in a parish, as is the case, for example, in each of the parishes of
Gweedore and Falcarragh, the parish priest receives two-thirds, and the
curate one-third of the stipend.

The sources of this stipend are various, and in speaking upon this point
Father Walker desired me to note that he could only speak positively of
the rules of this particular diocese, as they do not cover in their
entirety the usages of other provinces, or even of other dioceses in
this province of Ireland. One general and invariable rule indeed exists
throughout Ireland, which is that every parish priest is bound to offer
the Holy Sacrifice, _pro populo_, for the whole people, without fee or
reward, on all Sundays and Holy Days, making in all some eighty-seven
times a year.

In the diocese of Raphoe, to which Burtonport belongs, there are four
recognised methods by which the revenues of the priests are raised. The
first is an annual fixed stipend of four shillings for each household or
family. "Sometimes," said Father Walker, "but rarely, the better-off
families give more than this; and not unfrequently the poorer families
fail to give anything under this head." The second is a fixed stipend of
one pound upon the occasion of a marriage. "Sometimes, but not often,
this sum is exceeded by generous and prosperous parishioners." The third
is a standard stipend of two shillings for a baptism. "This also
suffers, but on rare occasions," said the good priest, "a favourable
exception. I mention the exceptions as well as the rules," said the good
Father, "in order to make grateful allusion to the donors."

The fourth and last consists of the offerings at interments. "These vary
very much indeed, but they constitute an important, and, I may say, a
necessary item in the incomes of the clergy."

Besides these four forms of stipend, the priests derive a revenue from
"those who ask them to offer the Holy Sacrifice 'for their special
intention.'" In such cases it is customary to offer a sum, usually of
two shillings, but sometimes of half-a-crown, which is intended both as
a remuneration for the priest, and to cover the cost of altar
requisites.

Father Walker estimates the families in his own parish in round numbers
at about thirteen hundred, and in Gweedore and Falcarragh at about nine
hundred each. We had some conversation about the great fisheries, which
one would think ought to exist, but do not exist, on this coast, such
fishing as is done here by the natives being on a very limited scale.
Father Walker tells me that formerly L80,000 worth of herring were taken
on this coast, though he is not sure that Donegal fishermen took them.
But of late years he thinks the herring have deserted these waters. He
admits, however, that the people have no liking for the sea. "Going over
once," he said, "to Arranmore from the mainland in a boat with a priest
of the country, the water was a little rough, and the poor man nearly
pinched a piece out of my arm holding on to me!" Father Walker himself
thought the trip across the "sound" to Tory Island rather a ticklish
piece of business. Yet the natives make it sometimes in their little
corraghs or canvas boats, which would seem to show that some of them
must be capable of seamanship. Most of these islands, notably
Arranmore, Father Walker thought quite incapable of supporting the
people who dwell on them, without constant help from the mainland. Is it
not an open question whether an age which countenances the condemnation
of private property in houses declared unfit for human habitation ought
to hesitate at dealing in the same spirit with nurseries of chronic
penury and intermittent famine? On one of these islands, known as Scull
Island, Father Walker tells me great quantities of human bones are found
in circular graves or trenches, very shallow, and going all around the
island. There are legends of great battles fought on the little island,
and of pestilences, to account for these. But it is likely enough that
the island was simply used as a cemetery by the dwellers on the shore at
some early date. Father Walker when he was last, there had brought away
some of these relics. One he showed us, the beautifully formed jawbone
of a young child, apparently ten or twelve years old, with exquisite
pearly teeth. The chin was not in the least prognathous, but very well
formed. In this district of Dungloe, too, the women weave and knit as
well as at Gweedore; and Father Walker, before he left us for his home,
after a most agreeable evening, promised to send me some specimens of
their handiwork. He is sure that with a proper organisation this
industry might be so developed as to materially relieve the people here
from the pressure of their debts to the dealers of all kinds, a pressure
much more severe than that of the rent. According to the dealers
themselves, no tenant really in debt to them can now expect to work
himself free of the burden under four or five years. It is obvious how
much power, political as well as social, is thus lodged in the hands of
the dealers, and especially of the "Gombeen men."

BARON'S COURT, _Wednesday, Feb. 8._--Since last night I have travelled
from one extreme to the other of Irish life--from the desolation of the
Rosses of Donegal to the grandly wooded, picturesque, and beautiful
demesne of Baron's Court. We made an early start from Dungloe on a
capital car for Letterkenny, where we were to strike the railway for
Strabane and Newtown-Stewart. The morning was clear, but cold. On
leaving Dungloe we drove directly into a region of reclaimed land, where
improvements of various kinds seemed to be going on. All this our
jarvey informed us, with a knowing look, belonged to Mr. Sweeney.

"Was he a squire of this country?" I asked innocently.

"A squire of this country, sorr? He is just Mr. Sweeney, the Gombeen
man; he and his brothers, they all came here from where I don't know."

An energetic man, certainly, Mr. Sweeney, and not likely, I should
think, to allow the National League, to push matters here to the point
of nationalising the land of Donegal, if he can prevent it. In the
highway we met, two or three miles out of Dungloe, a very trim dainty
little lady, in a long, well-fitting London waterproof ulster, with a
natty little umbrella in her hand, walking merrily towards the town. How
weatherwise she was soon appeared, the rain coming up suddenly, and
coming down sharply, in the whirling way it has among the hills
everywhere. The scenery was desolate, but grand. Countless little lochs
give sparkle and life to it. Everywhere the granite. About Doocharry, a
romantic little spot, where Lord Cloncurry has a fishing-box in the
heart of a glorious landscape, masses crop out of a rich red granite,
finer in colour than any we had previously seen. In that neighbourhood
the wastes of Donegal take on an aspect which recalls, though upon quite
a different key in colour, the inimitable beauty of those treeless
North-western highlands of Scotland, upon which Nature has lavished all
the wealth of her palette. Vast spaces of brown and red and gold shimmer
away under the softly luminous mountain atmosphere to the dark blues and
purples of the hills. We passed Glen Veagh again, but from quite a
different point of view, which gave us a beautiful picture of Lough
Veagh in its length, and of the smiling pastoral landscape upon its
further shore.

As we drew near the eastern boundary of Donegal, hedges and civilised
agriculture reappeared. With these we came upon mud cottages, such as I
had not seen in Donegal, being the huts provided for their labourers by
the tenant-farmers, whose comfortable stone-houses and out-buildings
stood well back under the long ranges of the hills.

We passed through much striking scenery, perhaps the finest point being
a magnificent Gap in the hills, guarded and defined by three colossal
headlands, one of them a vast long rampart, the other two gigantic
counterscarps. The immediate approach to Letterkenny, too, from the west
is charming, passing in full view of the extensive and beautiful park
and the large mansion of Colonel Stewart of the Guards, and skirting the
well-kept estate of Mr. Boyd, the owner of the ivy-clad cottages which
so took my fancy the other day.

In the Ulster settlement under King James I. a patent for Letterkenny
was issued to one of the Crawfords. Then, as the records tell us, "Sir
George Marburie dwelt there, and there were forty houses all inhabited
by British tenants. A great market town, and standeth well for the
King's service."

Again we found a fair going on--this time attended by swarms of peddlers
vending old clothes and all sorts of small wares, bread-cartmen, and
tea-vendors. These latter aver that it is easier to sell tea in the
"congested" districts at 4s. 6d. than at 2s. 6d. The people have no test
of its quality but its price!

The town was gay with soldiers and police--whose advent had created such
a demand for bread and meat, a man told us, that all the butchers and
bakers in Letterkenny and Dunfanaghy were at their wits' ends to meet
it. "But they don't complain of that!" We reached Newtown-Stewart by
railway after dark. As we passed Sion the mills were all lighted up,
giving it the look of an English or New England town. A New England
snow-storm, too, awaited us at our journey's end; and, after a wild
drive of several miles through the whirling white mists, it was a
delectable thing to find ourselves welcomed in a hall full of light and
warmth and flowers by merry children and lively dogs, the guard of
honour of the most gracious and charming of hostesses.

BARON'S COURT, _Thursday, Feb. 9._--Among a batch of letters received
this morning I find one from a most estimable and accomplished priest in
the West of Ireland, to whom I wrote from Dublin announcing my intention
of visiting the counties of Clare and Kerry. "I shall be very glad," he
says, "to learn that no evil hath befallen you during your visit to that
solitary plague-spot, where dwell the disgraceful and degraded
'Moonlighters.' Would not 'martial law,' if applied to that particular
spot, suffice to stamp out, these-insensate pests of society?" This
language, strong, but not too strong in view of the hideous murder last
week near Lixnaw of a farmer in the presence of his daughter for the
atrocious crime of taking a farm "boycotted" by the National League,
shows that the open alliance between this organisation and the criminal
classes in certain parts of Ireland is beginning (not a day too soon) to
arouse the better order of priests in Ireland to the peril of playing
with edged tools. For my correspondent is not only a priest, but a
Nationalist. I have sent him in reply a letter received by me, also
to-day, touching the conduct in connection with the Lixnaw murder of a
priest, a curate, I think, comparatively new to the place, who,
standing by the corpse of the murdered man, endeavoured, so my informant
states, to make his unfortunate daughter give up the names of the
murderers, the effect of which would have been to put them on their
guard, and "under the protection of that public conspiracy of silence,
which is the shield of all such criminals in these parts!" Baron's Court
is a very large, stately mansion, lacking elevation perhaps like
Blenheim, but imposing by its mass and the area it covers. It was
rebuilt almost entirely by the late Duke of Abercorn, who also made
immense plantations here which cover the country for miles around. His
grandfather, the handsome Marquis of the days of the Prince Regent,
came here a great deal towards the end of his life, but did little
towards making the mansion worthy of its site. Two very good portraits
of him here show that he deserved his reputation as the finest-looking
man of his day, a reputation attested by a diamond ring, the history of
which is still preserved in the family. A fine though irregular pearl
given by Philip of Spain to his hapless spouse, Mary Tudor, is another
of the heirlooms of Baron's Court; but the ring and the note left by
Mary Stuart to Claud Hamilton, Lord Paisley, mysteriously disappeared
during the long minority of the late Duke under the trusteeship of the
fourth Earl of Aberdeen, and have since, it is said, come into the
possession of the Duke of Hamilton.

Of the three castles given to Lord Claud Hamilton by James I., to enable
him to hold this country, one which stood at Strabaue has disappeared,
the memory of it surviving only in the name of Castle Street in that
town. The ivy-clad ruins of another adorn a height in this beautiful
park. They are "bosomed high in tufted trees," and overlook one of three
most lovely lakes, stretching in a shining chain through the length of
the demesne.

Another ruined tower of the time of King John stands on an island in
one of these lakes. When the Ulster settlement was made, these lands
with all the countryside were held by the O'Kanes. With the other Celtic
and Catholic inhabitants, they were driven by the masterful invaders
into the mountains and bogs. There still remain their descendants, still
Celtic and still Catholic, and still dreaming of the day when they shall
descend into the low country and drive the Protestant Scotch and English
from the "fat lands" which they occupy. In this way the racial and
religious animosities are kept alive, which have died out in Tipperary
and Waterford, for example, where the Cromwellian English have become
more Irish and often more Catholic than the Irish themselves.

I took a long drive and walk with Lord Ernest this afternoon through the
park, which rivals Curraghmore in extent. It is nowhere divided from the
lands of the adjoining tenants, and with great liberality is thrown open
to the people, not only of Newtown-Stewart and Strabane, but of all the
country. Parties, sometimes of seven hundred people, from Belfast come
down to pass the day in these sylvan solitudes, and it is to be recorded
to the praise of Ireland that these visitors always behave with perfect
good sense and good feeling.

The "terrible trippers" of the English midlands, as I once heard an old
verger in a northern Cathedral call them, who chip off relics from
monuments, pull up flowers by the roots, and scatter sandwich papers and
empty gingerbeer bottles broadcast over well-rolled lawns, are not
known, Lord Ernest tells me, in this island. As he neatly puts it, the
Irishman, no matter what his station in life may be, or how great a
blackguard he may really be, always instinctively knows when he ought to
behave like a gentleman, and knows how to do so. In the lakes were
hundreds of wild fowl. The sky was a sky of Constable--silvery-white
clouds, floating athwart a dome of clear Italian blue. The soil here
must be extraordinarily fertile. The woods and groves are dense beyond
belief. Cut down what you like, the growth soon overtakes you, as lush
almost as in the tropics.

There was a great cyclone here a year or two ago, which prostrated in a
night over a hundred thousand trees. You see the dentated gaps left by
this disaster in the great circle of firs and birches on the surrounding
hills, but they make hardly a serious break in the thoroughly sylvan
character of the landscape. We visited the centre of the devastation,
where I found myself in what seemed to be a backwoods clearing in
America. An enterprising Scot, Kirkpatrick by name, has taken a contract
under the Duke, built himself a neat wooden cabin and stables, set up a
small saw-mill driven by steam, and is hard at work turning the fallen
trees into timber, and making a very good thing of it, both for the Duke
and for himself. He has one or two of his own people with him, but
employs the labour of the country, and has no fear of disturbance. He
thinks, however, that he must get "a good wicked dog" to frighten away
the tramps, who sometimes stray into his woodland, and put the
enterprise in peril by smoking and drowsing under haystacks.

Near this clearing is a model village, the houses scrupulously neat,
with trees and flowers, and here we met the Duchess with her devoted dog
walking briskly along to visit one of her people, a wonderful old man,
bearing the ancient name of the O'Kanes, and five years older than the
Kaiser William. Until six months ago this veteran was an active
carpenter, coming and going, about his work at ninety-six like a man in
middle age. Then he went to bed with a bad cold, and will probably
never rise again. In all his life he never has touched meat or soup, and
when they are now offered him rejects them angrily. He has lived, and
preferred to live, entirely on oatmeal in the form of cakes and
porridge, and on potatoes; so I make a present of him as a glorious
example to the vegetarians. As in so many other cases, his memory of
recent events is dim and clouded--of events long past, clear and
photographic: the negatives taken in youth quite perfect, the lenses
which now take, dimmed and fractured.

He perfectly recollects, for example, the assembling here of the
recruits going out to the Continent before the battle of Waterloo, and
can give the names and describe the peculiarities of stalwart lads long
since crumbled into dust around Mont St. Jean. With the curious
unconcern about death which marks his people, this expectant emigrant
into the unknown world chats about his departure as if it were for
Dublin, and his kinsfolk chat with him.

"Ye'll be going soon!"

"Oh yes, I shan't trouble ye more than an hour or two more."

In quite another part of the domain we came upon a Covenanter--a true,
authentic Covenanter, who might have walked out of _Old Mortality_; the
name of him, Keyes. He greeted Lord Ernest cheerily enough, nodded to me
in a not unfriendly way, and at once broke into exhortation: "It's a
very short life we live; man that is born of woman is of few days, and
full of trouble. Well for them that are the children of light--if seeing
the light they sin not against it"; and so on with amazing volubility.

There are eighty-five of these Covenanters here. They touch not nor have
touched the accursed thing. To them all parties and all governments are
alike evil. The Whigs persecuted the Solemn League and Covenant--so did
the Tories. Nationalists and Unionists are to them alike abominable,
sold under sin. Withal they are shrewd, canny, successful farmers--and,
as I inferred from sundry incidents, before Lord Ernest confided the
fact to me, not averse from a "right gude williewaught" now and then.

Mr. Keyes, I thought, was not a blue-ribbon man, nor a ribbon-man of any
kind.

The Duchess told me afterwards she had vainly endeavoured more than once
to get these people to vote at elections.

We had a sprinkling of such people, and very good people in quiet times
they were, in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War, to whom
Federals and Confederates were alike anathema.

We wound up our drive to-day just beyond "the Duke's seat," a little
rustic bench put up by the late Duke on a hill range which commands a
magnificent view over the whole domain of hill and forest and lakes, and
far away to the mountains of Munterlony. There, in the bogs and woods
James Hamilton, "lord baron of Strabane," with "other rebels, unknown,
in his company," hid himself till, after the fall of Charlemont in
August 1650, he was captured by a party of the Commonwealth's
men--whereby, as the record here runs, "all and singular his manors,
towns, lands, and so forth were forfeited to the Commonwealth of
England." Under this pressure he sought "protection," and got it a
fortnight later from Cromwell's General, Sir Charles Coote, whose
descendants still nourish in Wicklow. But on the 31st of December 1650
he "broke the said protection, and joined himself with Sir Phelim
O'Neill, being then in rebellion."

Troublous times those, and a "lord baron of Strabane" needed almost the
alacrity in turning his coat of a harlequin or a modern politician! It
is a comfort to know that at last, on the 16th of June 1655, he found
rest, dying at Ballyfathen, "a Roman Catholic and a papist recusant." As
we came back into the gardens and grounds, Lord Ernest showed me,
imbedded in the earth, a huge anchor presented to the present Duke by
the Corporation of Waterford, as having belonged to the French 28-gun
frigate, on which in 1689 James II. and Lord Abercorn sailed away from
Ireland for Prance. I believe that because of its weight the present
First Lord of the Admiralty avers that it is no anchor at all, but a
buoy fixture. It might have been ten times as heavy, and yet not have
availed to keep James from getting to sea at that particular time.

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