|
|
The Thomas Mc Donald
|
It is probably a matter of coincidence rather that rooted in any enigmatic attraction that three priests of radical and even revolutionary tendencies have served in the Curacy of Poulpeasty. Fr Philip Roche was sent there as a punishment to serve under Fr Tom Rogers: in that far distant era clergymen liked to live near to their family and relatives who supported them with food, modes of transport and money. Others have spoken and written on Fr Roche and his role as a leader of the rebels in 1798. Circa 1847 the feisty and confrontational Fr Denis Doyle-a scion of a Courthoyle, Adamstown family that gave sons to the Church over succeeding generations was sent to Poulpeasty. When Lord Carew evicted Hugh Kinseallaigh of Poulpeasty in 1852 Fr Doyle broke with the long established tradition of clerical support for the Carews and in defiance of his superior Fr Tom Furlong, the pastor of the then Killegney parish, wrote letters to the Wexford Guardian making bitter and visceral attacks on the Carews. These missives did serious damage to the bid by young Bob Carew-the future second Baron Carew-to win election to Parliament in his ill-fated campaign of that year.
In March of 1883 Fr Thomas Staples was transferred from Sutton's parish (the modern Horeswood) to Poulpeasty. As the 19th century progressed the intensity of the popular affinity to the Catholic clergy was expressed in an increasingly formal and theatrical manner with an undeviating choreography of adulation to mark certain watershed moments in a priest's life.
The transfer of a priest from one parish to another represented such a moment. The procedure or custom was that shortly after a priest took residence in his new parish a deputation from his previous parish visited him with a laudatory and adulatory address plus a present usually of a considerable amount of money.
On March 18th 1883 a deputation from Sutton's Parish visited Fr Staples at Poulpeasty and after partaking of his hospitality the address of appreciation of Fr Staples was read. The initial part of the address referred to Fr Staples 18 years spent in Sutton's parish. The address then focussed on the centrality of the great political issues of that era in Fr Staple's mindset:
"but it must be forever remembered that whenever a political difficulty arose you always placed yourself in front of battle. You were our head and front, our guiding spirit and controlling power and when landlords and agents sought to solicit the aid of the tenants farmers of Sutton's Parish, in support of the monster of ascendancy, t'was your stout arm that caught hold of the attacking sword and hurled them back; and the aristocracy dare not to ever again lead the people. It is needless to say that your removal from amongst us has created a feeling of the deepest regret amongst all who have the welfare of the farmers and labourers at heart and amongst the enemies of or country and creed a corresponding feeling of joy and triumph."
Those remarks resonate with Land League rhetoric and polemics. The branches and local spokesmen of the Land League may have used template of speeches prepared by the leadership of the movement. I have no doubt that during his time in Horeswood that Fr Staples would have scripted the published reports of proceedings at the local branch of the Land League.
After noting that Fr Staples eschewed the friendship of the local aristocrats the address declared that he
"you nobly preferred to take your stand under the shadow of the blood-baptised banner in support of the cause of Faith and Fatherland; and since the immortal Michael Davitt first hoisted the green banner of social liberty on the hills of Mayo you were always found in the ranks of the advocates of Ireland's good old cause."
The concept of a sacrifice of blood, analogous to the Christian Calvary, animating Irish nationalism, is present in these words but as we shall see, Fr Staples-unlike the Fenians and later Pearse-abhorred political violence.
The socialism of Michael Davitt was utterly revolutionary and his expectation of sacrifice on the part of the farmers excessive and unrealistic. His comment after the cruel evictions on the Brooke estate in Coolgreaney that the men of Wexford were only good at talking and correspondingly useless at fighting caused deep offence to the evicted people. The Land League movement, however, under his influence opted towards a reformist form of socialist aspiration-the Land League favoured the legislation to build labourers' cottages and was sympathetic to increased wages.
The ordinary precedent in Irish society was for others to take land from which others had been evicted. This often led to rancour and violence. The Carews usually gave evicted land to a family member or a near relative of the evicted tenant in the expectation that the new tenant through a sense of family duty would provide a rudimentary care for his evicted relative. The very opposite often happened: in the late 1830ies when a Byrne man in Chapel was evicted his brother got the farm and the evicted man lived in a cabin of some kind in a corner of one of the fields and issued vicious threats to his brothers over some years.
The Land League applied the trade union concept of solidarity to their struggle: the acceptance of lands from which another person had been evicted became the great new taboo of rural Ireland; the names of such persons were published in the local media. My suspicion is that the threat of violence may have discreetly been resorted to compel less socially concerned farmers to retreat to the default setting of land grabbing.
The deputation from Sutton's Parish gave Fr Staples a purse of fifty sovereigns; a sign in itself, of an economy doing well.
Fr Staples in his reply defined the core aspects of his guiding philosophy:
"I shall be allowed to remark how I hope you shall long continue to work and pray in the same holy union of Faith and Fatherland. I can give bail you have not sullied with a single stain the cause you have so zealously laboured for-the cause of Irish nationality-to enkindle in yourselves the holy and patriotic spirit of Nationality without which the body politic appears lifeless." The obvious means of sullying the national cause was to resort to violence, a course that Fr Staples disapproved of.
The primal and Christian motifs of kindling are more than likely used most deliberately by Fr Staples: to him the task of building a free Irish nation was a religious obligation. The Catholic clergy of that era had become convinced that God had a special purpose for Ireland in the sacred purpose of bringing the Catholic faith to all other countries; that is a missionary purpose.
At a mass meeting in Enniscorthy in early January1887 Fr Staples repeated this constant theme of his public utterances:
"It has always been a maxim with us that next to love of God comes love of country; they are inseparable and can never be separated&ldots;.The war has been continued from your grandfather's time; it is a war of the masses against the classes&ldots;."
This reference to a war going back to their grandfather's time is less than historically correct; the land struggle certainly did not go back to their grandfathers' time. The fathers and grandfathers of the generation involved in the Land League lived, at least, in outward adulation of the landlords. When an heir was belatedly born to the wife of the second Lord Carew in June 1860 the people of Clonroche after receiving the news stayed out very late on the street of the village in exultation and massive and colourful celebrations took place all over the estate. The Land League represented a veritable sea-change in the disposition of the farming and labouring people: when the future 2nd Lord Carew told the crowd at his 21st birthday party on Robinson's Lawn in Clonroche in August 1839 that the axis of landlord and tenant was part of the natural order his audience would have agreed with him. Hugh O'Neill the famous schoolmaster had effectively served as the great propagandist of the House of Carew of Castleboro; yet his second son Henry Hugh became passionately involved in the land agitation and was one of the celebrated suspects arrested in December 1881. Every fresh generation has the prerogative of looking afresh at the familiar: the land agitation denoted a new generation taking a more ideological approach to the issues of social and economic order. The speeches given at the Cloughbawn/Poulpeasty branch of the Land League, as reported in the People newspaper, are informed by theories of democracy, social reform and solidarity: the problem for the historian is that such speeches may have been scripted by Fr Staples or he may have written in the reports of the meetings sent to The People what he felt the speakers at the meetings should have said. The Land League may have provided templates of speeches to be made: the speeches made by officers of all the branches are near identical in the ideological allusions and themes.
All through the 19th century men had anticipated a new ordering of society which at its extreme expression inclined idealists to seek to create utopian communities; at a more pragmatic level this same urge led to politics of social reform. Governments and especially that of Great Britain experimented with expensive schemes of social and educational reform. The Land League was in essence another development in this striving to find a better social order. Given its historical and geographical context in Ireland it also became enmeshed with the national struggle and related issues of political violence.
Fr Staples certainly envisaged that the agrarian utopia sought by the Land League would represent an unprecedented emphasis on the rights of labour: he told the Cloughbawn/Poulpeasty branch in March 1885-
"The movement to spread the national spirit was fast making progress, as can be proved and tested from the large gathering that surrounded the Messers Redmond and T.P O'Connor on the feast of our national saint, St Patrick. Certainly the modern apostles of the national spirit, together with the gospel of labour (that labour has its rights as well as its duties) appear to us to be making rapid strides in the right direction, labouring in the cause of country; like the Irish of olden times when the sons of Erin preached the Gospel of light, truth, justice, public morality, hand in hand with patriotism and nationality in foreign countries where often the light of true faith was only slumbering and in swaddling clothes." The core purpose of Irish nationality for Fr Staples was that of its missionary impulse.
His time at Poulpeasty was a mere three years and speaking as Parish Priest of Ballyoughter in January 1887 he spelled out more explicitly his conviction of the necessity of worker rights:
"the wants and privations of the industrial democracy of this country shall always have my honest and strenuous advocacy; right and justice is always vested in the poor man's cabin whereas felony and injustice is generally hatched in the rich man's castle."
The address given by Martin Furlong to the Cloughbawn/Poulpeasty branch of the Land League on Sunday January 6th 1886 resonated with the themes of democracy and industrial democracy:
"he meant unity of purpose on the part of the industrious democracy and resistance to all species of oppression no matter from what quarter it came-be it landlord or tenant, priest or prelate. They all now could understand what was a fair day's work and what was a fair day's wages and they all meant to stick to their principles and to carry out them in detail."
The metaphysics of mediaeval times had insisted that earthly authority replicated the powers of God: thus justices on the bench were called Lords of the law; bishops of the Church were addressed as Lords and in parallel to this the mega proprietors of land were called the lords of the soil. The Land League directly contradicted the concept of landlords as placed there by providential will and theorised that God created the land and all the resources of the world for the benefit of mankind. Martin Furlong put it better at that meeting in January 1886:
"All knew well how that functionary [Lord Carew] was playing the role of a usurer, especially charging an illegal interest for that species of property which he could not call his own, or which was never created by him or his predecessors in title, only that he had seized on what the Almighty God, the mighty architect, has been pleased to make for all."
At a meeting of the branch in December 1885 Myles Bolger of Clonleigh who was in the chair scorned the claims of the Carews to own land by divine prescription:
"It may be remarked how they are losing all belief in the exploded dogma of rent paying righteousness. (A voice-Pay for what? Pay for what God made for all?) Because Lord Carew claims a legal right which he calls ownership. From what does he claim that ownership? Certainly it is not a divine right, in its origins or its consequences but quite the contrary. It is a diabolical right-a civil, a tolerated right; in other a tolerated, an open wrong.-an abusive term-a landlord felony-a landlord theft-land thievery.
As society moved into the closing decades of the nineteenth century there was on the part of ordinary people an escalation of expectations; in his address of January 1886 to the Cloughbawn/Poulpeasty branch Martin Furlong spoke pungently if inelegantly on this issue:
"The duty of the hour is resistance to all oppressive exactions. We are not wanting the earnings of Lord Carew or his family&ldots;.Hands off, Mr Carew, we want no more than justice. We will take no less, in justice to ourselves, our friends, our wives and our children. Do you mean to rob us all? Are we not accountable to those children? Must we rear them, like Hotttentots, without education and give their earnings, their bread to indulge Lord Carew's vanity"
Henry Hugh O'Neill the son of the feted schoolmaster and Carew propagandist of old expressed similar theories in a more homely mode at a meeting in September 1885:
"He said that the tenant should provide himself and his family with all the necessaries, even a little drop of whiskey if they wished it, for he was fond of a little drop himself and to pay his honest debts, then to hand the landlord the balance and he was surely entitled to that and no more."
All through the nineteenth century men theorised as to the nature of value: Karl Marx famously asserted all value is created by labour. Fr Staples's concept of property is less-to paraphrase a famous Irish politician-than crystal clear but it is, perhaps, best stated by quoting him as he anticipated a roseate independent Ireland:
"We will be better able to understand the laws and regulations that govern and distribute real property-namely land. We will also be in a better position to understand the laws that govern manufacture, property, the result of manual labour-namely supply and demand. There should be no confusion between these two species of properties-one the result of the labour of Almighty God; the other manufactured property, the result of the labour of man."
The issue of the role of the labouring man pre-occupied and perhaps, anguished him as he told a meeting at Rathnure in October 1885:
"The Rev. Speaker went onto say that the labourers were the bone and sinew of the land and should meet with consideration."
The themes of democracy and worker activism resonated in the speeches of leaders in the lower echelons of the Land League, as this excerpt from an address by Pat Kavanagh of Donard to the local branch in February 1886 denotes:
"However, the tenantry have the Press, and a most Patriotic Press, as their advocates; they have the priesthood; they have the prelates; they have the artisans; they have the labourers; they have the whole democracy on the side of the tenantry. In this social warfare the tenantry have justice and good order on their side-the landlords have injustice, occult robbery-rents levied on the tenants improvements."
Essentially the Press on their side was the People newspaper which reported all the Land League activities in minute detail. The media in Britain and influential sections of the British political establishment were sympathetic to the Land League.
I think that democracy as interpreted by Fr Staples meant the entirety of the national population fixed on a goal of a Christian republic, not completely a Catholic republic-near enough to it but not exactly so. Priests like Fr Albert Lennon of Courtnacuddy and Fr Paul Kehoe, Parish Priest of Cloughbawn were later inspired by this vision. I am not sure if Fr Staples would have been at ease with the concept of democracy as an intellectual context for an infinite diversity of ideas.
As history replicates life it is full not only of paradoxes but also and equally of contradictions. Fr Staples venerated Charles Stuart Parnell-at least in these years: therefore he could not have been adverse to the proposition that a man, not of the Catholic faith, should lead the holy and patriotic Irish people. This excerpt from Fr Staples's address at Rathnure in October 1885 encapsulates all these tangled threads of ideology;
"The democracy of Ireland was now every place triumphant, whether in amusements or elsewhere; the same spirit animated them that animated the old rebels in former times in the county of Wexford. Now that they were in the ascendancy, they should use their power with moderation and temperance. Their leader, Mr Parnell, told them so from the Mansion House in Dublin. He was a leader they all revered and would follow with obedience and humility. For the amelioration of the people's condition and for the country's good, he had fought in a foreign Senate-in the House of Commons. He had brought peace and plenty to their country. He had brought them a Land Bill of as comprehensive a character as under the circumstances could be expected (cheers)"
The phrase about moderation and temperance was a shaft against the advocates of physical force; the momentum of the Land League was in the direction of the new nationalism and the sacrifice of Easter 1916. When Archbishop Mc Cabe died Fr Staples had the Cloughbawn/Poulpeasty branch pass a resolution of sympathy to his relatives; the Carrickburne branch publicly attacked Fr Staples for so doing as Archbishop Mc Cabe had condemned the Fenians and the more extremist aspects of the Land League. Fr Staples in letters to the media argued that Archbishop Mc Cabe had condemned the "dynamite-ards", i.e., the men using explosives to win freedom and charged the Carrickburne men with anti-clericalism. When the latter denied his charge Fr Staples riposted that they were certainly guilty of what he termed anti Episcopalianism; that is opposition to Archbishops. Fr Staples habitually used obscure semantics.
The main project of the Land League was the Plan of Campaign whereby the tenantry offered to pay the Landlord an amount usually equal to Griffith' valuation. The landlords resorted to the Courts to obtain decrees to evict but as a general rule the tenants bought these farms back at the Sheriff's auction for the arrears of rent plus legal expenses. Men like David Doran of Tominearly and Henry Hugh O'Neill engaged in raucous humour at these auctions but evictions were inevitable.
There was utter and widespread revulsion at the eviction of Tom Dunne an aged man and his equally aged wife at Poulpeasty in the bitterly cold weather of early January 1887 by agents of the 3rd Lord Bob Carew. This eviction sealed the fate of the Carews. The Land League-masterly at propaganda-pointed to the presence since time immemorial of the Dunnes at Poulpeasty in contrast to the much shorter time that the Carews were in Ireland. Henry Hugh O'Neill at a Sheriff's auction in Wexford boasted that his wife's people, the O'Gormans, were three hundred years in Coolroe.
Jim Canning an employee of Lord Carew refused a direction by his employer to fence the lands from which the Dunnes were evicted. Lord Carew dismissed him from his employment and proceeded at the Clonroche Petty Sessions to seek and obtain a decree to have Canning removed from the house immediately outside the village of Courtnacuddy which he held as an employee of Lord Carew. The Land League arranged for Canning to live in a house in Boolabawn Lane; Dr Keating wrote that a man would not put a valuable animal in a house like it. The Land League gave him small sums of money to enable him and his family to survive. In the Court proceedings to evict him and his family from his comfortable home at Courtnacuddy Jim Canning seemed to imply that it would be impossible for him to go against public opinion in the matter of the Dunne eviction. He was utterly intractable on the issue of not working on the evicted farm. Mr Canning told David Bruce the steward and gamekeeper on the Carew estate that "he could not go against his conscience and it was not fair to ask him to become an emergency man by working on a farm against the opinions of the neighbours and country." Emergency men were the name given to men who worked on evicted farms.
In August 1887 the Davidstown branch resolved:
"That we congratulate Mr James Canning, Courtnacuddy, on the spirit of independence he has shown by refusing to work on the evicted farm of Tom Dunne, Poulpeasty. We will show the agent of Lord Carew that those who make a sacrifice for the public good will not be forgotten by the people."
If God had indeed created the land for all the people then it followed that He created it, also, for the labouring classes. Davit's paradigm of communal and/or state ownership of all land while totally idealistic was simply impractical if for no other reason than that the British political establishment favoured peasant proprietorship-that is that the tenant would be given ownership of his farm. The principle of making the occupant of each farm the owner was clearly the most practical. The successive pieces of land legislation sought to weaken the hold of the landlords while conversely enhancing the legal status of the tenantry. The Land Commission was established to set up the land courts which determined what was called a judicial rent: the result of these deliberations was to reduce rents as a general result. The later land acts invited, or in effect, directed the landlords to sell their estates-through the Land Commission-to the tenants.
The rhetoric of social reform is difficult to realise in reality. The working class around Clonroche in the time of the Land League were dreadfully poor and the Clonroche Labour League opted for reformist type socialism. A meeting of the Labour League in late June 1882 was chaired by John Cullen, Poor Law Guardian, Tominearly, and Edward Buckley on behalf of the members proposed:
"That the primary object of this League is to obtain suitable dwellings for the labourers with half an acre attached, from the fruits of which the labourer may support himself in bad weather and when there is a scarcity of work.
That the holder of every forty acres of land and upwards be requested to erect a labourer's dwelling and set apart one acre of land attached to the dwelling for the labourer's use and occupation&ldots;."
Under legislation some years later the Poor Law Unions were enabled to erect labourers' cottages. The meeting of the Clonroche Labour League asserted that "the interest and well-being of the farmer and labourer are identical". A correspondent from New Ross who observed the meeting claimed that there was not a dozen farmers present and he sourly prophesised that "the labourers may expect little assistance from the farmers in the parish of Cloughbawn." My own view is that this correspondent was wrong. The amount of reform that could be achieved in 1882 was meagre of necessity but with the coming of national freedom and modern prosperity the rhetoric of 1882 and such years would be more than realised.
Very close to Christmas 1881 the police under Balfour's Coercion Act arrested five men in the Clonroche locality for intimidating tenants from paying rents. They were:
Henry Hugh O'Neill, Clonroche; David Doran, Tominearly; Pat Sinnott, Coolroe; John Williams, Forrestalstown and Laurence Bowe, Tominearly. These men by their arrest entered into immortality like All-Ireland winning hurlers in a later era.
John Redmond asked questions about their detention in the House of Commons, in itself, a sign of the importance of the Land League. These prisoners were allowed to have visitors come on a regular basis to them in prison. Henry Hugh O'Neill, a larger than life personality, provocative, pungent and witty in turn, intelligent but mercurial and idiosyncratic won a much publicised handball contest in prison upon which big wagers were laid.
When David Doran was released in late April 1882 he was greeted with a massive demonstration of welcome by the people of the Clonroche locality "on his return to his home."
John Williams was confined at Clonmel prison. He entered into the pantheon of Land League immortals via his death in November 1885. He left Enniscorthy on the evening of the 16th of November 1885 "about six o'clock that evening, driving the horse as far as Clohadan where he handed the reins to his wife and told her to drive. He then laid his head in her lap. Mrs Williams covered it with her shawl, to keep off the cold night air. She drove along for about three miles until she arrived at their home, when to her horror and dismay she found that he was dead."
Recalling Mr Gladstone's maxim that eviction is death the Land League opportunistically blamed Lord Carew for the death of John Williams. The People observed:
"It appears that on Friday last, Mr Williams was in the town of Enniscorthy, where he was served with a writ for a year's rent, at the suit of Lord Carew. So great was the shock Mr Williams received that he never rallied and on Monday he died somewhat unexpectedly, thus proving of the exactness of the similitude instituted by Mr Gladstone between the eviction notice and a sentence of death."
The repulsion felt by Mr Gladstone the towering British political leader, at evictions represented a clear signal that the British political establishment were seriously hostile to the land system in Ireland.
The Land League was adept at a toxic, lethal and potent humour- and in the case of John Williams's funeral- macabre wit:
"During the wake the writ was laid on the coffin as it was believed that to it was due the cause of the death of this most respectable, industrious farmer. The scene when the remains were about leaving the house was heart-rending. The widowed wife and her eleven orphaned children sent up such piercing shrieks that few assembled could remain unmoved. When the coffin was borne from the house, the writ was laid conspicuously upon the lid."
@Copyright 2010
