FROM THE ARCHIVES:The pro- and anti-Home Rule campaign was fought on religious as well as political platforms, and in England as well as in Ireland. Some 8,000 Protestants attended a meeting in London's Albert Hall to hear these opening remarks from the chairman, Sir Robert Kennedy.
- JOE JOYCE
UNDER A Dublin Roman Catholic Parliament, all the elementary classes of the religious Orders would be included in the primary system, and, to quote a Roman Catholic Bishop – “the primary schools will be pervaded with the aroma of Catholicity”. (Hear, hear.)
Not content with attempting to turn public education in Ireland into an agency for Roman Catholic propaganda, the laws of the State were being overridden, and the privacy of the homes overridden by the priests in a manner of which those who lived in England could form but a small conception, unless they could go to Ireland and see with their own eyes the actual state of affairs. No one who had lived in foreign countries, especially in those countries which had partially or wholly thrown off the temporal power of the Vatican, could fail to be struck by the extraordinary power of the priest over the peasantry in Ireland.
How long would it take to produce a population of Irish Roman Catholics able or free enough to defy their priest? Considerable time must be given for such an important development, and in the meanwhile, the restraining, the moderating, and the impartial rule of the Imperial Parliament was necessary in order that progress might at once be continuous and calm, or, to quote Mr T. W. Russell’s forcible words – “in order that Home Rule may not bring with it twenty years of Hell to Ireland”. (Hear, hear.)
The fact was incontestable that in Ireland there were two races, with two religions, neither of which would submit to the ascendancy of the other, and their mutual rivalry had been basely utilised in England and Ireland.
Between these rival races, whose sectarian animosities had almost died out, until they were recently revived in an acute form by the ill-advised Home Rule measure; devised for the purpose of keeping a party in office, the Imperial Parliament could alone hold the balance even. But that balance must be held with a firm hand, and guided, regardless of party considerations, by a lofty spirit of justice. Was the task of governing Ireland, he asked, so beyond the power of the government that they must abandon the duty in a spirit of wearied boredom, similar to that which nineteen hundred years ago actuated a Roman governor, when he publicly washed his hands in a basin of water, and relieved himself from all responsibility for his appalling dereliction of judicial duties?
They were told by critics it was a cardinal principle of democratic government that the minority must yield to the will of the majority There were rare occasions when the minority had the right, after all constitutional means had been exhausted, to resist, even by force of arms, the tyranny of the majority.
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