October 25th, 1847: The Catholic bishops speak out against Britain's Irish policy. Finally overcoming their timidity and divisions, they assert the supremacy of the right to life over the rights of property.
In common with the Catholic Church throughout postNapoleonic Europe, the Irish church is anti-revolutionary and in general its clergy exercise a moderating influence on their flocks. Yet two of the leading prelates - Murray of Dublin and MacHale of Tuam, quite different men - were marked by the rising of 1798.
Fifty years ago, Daniel Murray narrowly escaped being slaughtered with his congregation in Arklow by the Antrim militia. As a child, John MacHale was aware that his parish priest had been hanged in Castlebar for harbouring French officers.
In an extraordinary submission to Lord Clarendon, the hierarchy now rejects the view propounded by the Times that the Famine was caused by the "innate indolence" of the Irish people. The real causes are the laws which deprive the bulk of the people of the right to property and to the fruits of their labour. In Ireland, laws sanctioning injustice are enforced "with reckless and unrelenting vigour"; in those conditions, the failure of the potato precipitated a catastrophe.
While sharing the widespread fear that "mere gratuitous relief" has a demoralising tendency, the bishops' memorial shows no trace of a providentialist explanation of the Famine as God's retributive justice. Demanding a fair arrangement between landlords and tenants, it reminds Clarendon that "large tracts of land capable of cultivation are now lying waste", that the seas are teeming with fish, and that the country abounds in mineral wealth.
Requesting productive employment, the bishops consider the government relief measures wholly inadequate. The workhouses are overcrowded, fever-ridden and capriciously managed. The choice facing the people is either to starve if they do not enter them, or die of contagious disease if they do.
The bishops' call for special government intervention is out of line with established economic thought. They go beyond the strict bounds of "religion" to criticise the existing order and express principles of social justice:
"The sacred and indefeasible rights of life are forgotten amidst the incessant reclamations of the subordinate rights of property . . . Hallowed as are the rights of property, those of life are still more sacred, and rank as such in every well-regulated scale that adjusts the relative possessions of man; and if this scale had not been frequently reversed we should not have so often witnessed in those heart-rending scenes of the evictions of tenantry, `the oppressions that are done under the sun, the tears of the innocent having no comforter and, unable to resist violence, being destitute of help from any'."