tenants were not to be molested. It is true that he did not directly assert that they should not be disturbed, but his complaint of ill-usage at being accused of disturbing or expelling them, was calculated to convey that impression to his audience. The real fact was that the tenants had all received notice to quit, but the notices had not then yet taken effect. The time of ejectment soon arrived. The aboriginal occupants were turned out, and new tribes of Hosfords, Applebys, Swantons, Dawleys, and Burchells were introduced. Three of the former tenants were permitted to retain a portion of their holdings; of these a man named Hurley sought favour with the noble proprietor by promising to abjure Popery. The man accordingly went to the Protestant church, pursuant to his undertaking; but conceiving that a domestic calamitythe idiocy of his son-was a mark of the divine vengeance at his change of religion, he threatened (according to the information I was given at the time) to return to his former creed. Whether he did so I know not. The whole machinery of proselytism was soon put in motion at Castletown and Shanavagh. Reverend personages exhorted; readers and teachers besieged the Catholics on highways and byways; schools were erected, to which some of the not yet extirpated Papists gave their trembling and reluctant attendance. The noble Earl's family occasionally visited these schools to watch the expansion of the nascent gospel seed, and to accelerate the process of its ripening by the warmth and light of their countenances. They are, I have no doubt, sincere enthusiasts; and when we consider the vast influence their station and fortune if properly used might invest them with, it is deplorable to witness the direction their zeal has taken; to contrast what they are with what they might be; to see them take their stand in the front ranks of the antinational interest, instead of being the honoured, cherished leaders of their countrymen to national independence. I cannot help remarking that there was a time when Francis Bernard, afterwards first Earl of Bandon, was associated with the people of Ireland in demanding the restoration of the Irish constitution. On the 25th March, 1782, at a meeting held at Bandon, he occupied the chair. There were three resolutions passed, of which the last affirmed, "That no power on earth can make laws to bind Ireland, except the King, Lords, and Commons thereof. (Signed) "S. STAWELL, Colonel, Bandon Cavalry. "F. BERNARD, Colonel, Bandon Infantry." Grattan had then fired the mind of the nation, and the sacred flame ignited many persons who themselves, or whose descendants, have degenerated into anti-nationalists. At Shanavagh the politico-religious movement produced its natural results. A man named Hurley (a suspicious patronymic, it would seem, in these districts) attended the school with great assiduity, and after a due course of instruction, professed his willingness to attend the Protestant church. He accordingly became a church-going Protestant, and his new confreres thought that a valuable fish had been hooked. One day a tenant of mine met this convert on the road, and asked him wherefore he had quitted his earlier faith to adopt Protestantism. "Musha, God help us!" responded the convert, "I have got a small family to support, and I thought by turning I could maybe get a lase of the ould ground from Lord Bandon." "But you'd lose your poor sowl," remonstrated the other. "Och, maybe not-maybe not. I expect God won't take me so short entirely, but that I may quit them all and go back to Mass once more afore I die." The convert also told my informant that by way of an additional safeguard, he did not give attention to the preaching or prayers of the Protestant service, but rehearsed his own prayers mentally whilst the parson performed the service. Some time subsequently to the above conversation (which I took down from the lips of one of the parties) Mr. Hurley's duplex policy was curiously exhibited. He fell ill, and being afraid of death, despatched a messenger to bring the parish priest to administer the last rites of the Catholic Church. "But, hark ye!" added the politic invalid, "tell his reverence not to come up here till after dark, for fear any of the Protestants should see him and tell the minister." Mr. Hurley had considered his alternative-death, then Popery and Father O'Sullivan; but if he should recover, then Protestantism and another attempt to conciliate his landlord's patronage. Father O'Sullivan (then priest of the parish) informed me that he refused to attend him, stating that his pertinacious duplicity at that awful period totally disqualified him from the profitable reception of the rites of the Church.* He recovered, and continued to attend the Protestant place of worship; but although he was permitted to remain in his * A reviewer, commenting on this narrative, said that it cut two ways, and that the priest must have left Hurley in a state of great ignorance. But Hurley was not ignorant that his conduct was criminal. He was farm, I am not aware that he obtained a lease of it. About the period referred to, he sent an infant child to the priest to be christened; the child was smuggled in a covered basket to escape the observation of the Protestants.* It is but justice to say that the Protestant clergy then, and since, in the district have been men of irreproachable morals. They, in common with their brethren all over the kingdom, were startled at the march of nationality; they trembled for the stability, if not of their Zion, at least of its temporalities. Hence their itching and uneasy zeal to make an inroad on the enemy's territories. I suppose Mr. Hurley's conversion has plainly acting against conscience, and the priest had nothing to do with his conduct except to condemn it. *Whilst the first edition of this work (1845) was passing through the press, public attention became excited by the case, tried at the Tralee assizes, of the Rev. Charles Gayer, one of the leaders of a proselytizing establishment at Dingle, county Kerry, versus Patrick Robert Byrne, proprietor of the Kerry Examiner newspaper. The defendant was convicted of what, in the rigid acceptation of the law, was deemed libel; but the organized system of rank bribery to proselytise the Catholics which the evidence disclosed must, I think, have received a salutary check from the publicity thus entailed upon it. TIMOTHY LYNCH, a witness and ci-devant convert, deposed that he got from Gayer the sum of £12 10s. and two half-crowns as the price of his adhesion. EDWARD HUSSEY, another witness, also deposed to having received money from Gayer in consideration of his becoming a Protestant. JOHN POWER, a fish-jolter, deposed to having received from Gayer "about £5 or £6" for a similar consideration. THOMAS HOGAN deposed to having got from Gayer seventeen shillings in two different sums and two pecks of potatoes, and a house rent free from another proselytiser named Moriarty; in consideration of which benefits he became a Protestant. JAMES Kearney, another convert, deposed that the considerations for which he conformed were plentiful employment and good wages from Gayer, and a house and garden rent-free; "he never paid a farthing rent; taxes and all are paid for him; has a garden behind the house the same way, and every one else has the same; none of them pay any rent." MAURICE POWER, a second fish-jolter, deposed to having bargained with Gayer to become a Protestant for the price of a horse to carry his fish. These statements were uncontradicted by Gayer, who was in court during the trial; and some of them (such as that of the houses being rent-free for converts) were of such a nature as from the public notoriety of the facts rendered denial in Kerry impossible. It is difficult to resist a smile at the ludicrous character of the proselytising system, thus exhibited on the uncontradicted oaths of competent witnesses. But the horrible moral results of that system, the spiritual recklessness which it necessarily engenders, suggest solemn and mournful reflections. The total insensibility to real religious conviction of what nature soever, the organized hypocrisy resulting from the traffic of the people with "the Dingle Mission," appears in the following incident. A batch of fifteen of Gayer's proselytes, finding their adhesion to the State enemy's territories. I suppose Mr. Hurley's conversion has been chronicled in some exulting report of the progress of "the gospel." He is certainly entitled to some notice, if it were only for the clever expedient of neutralizing the iniquity of his conversion by abstracting his mind, while in the Protestant church, from the services in which he externally protended to participate.* Well, Castletown was now peopled with a Protestant tenantry. Shanavagh also was pretty well dotted with the new settlers. A sort of miniature millennium was to be exhibited amidst the Kinneigh furze-brakes for the edification of the surrounding community. The noble landlord doubtless regarded his work with sentiments of self-applause. But it is pleasant to be able to say it-the proselytizing zeal of past years has died out at Shanavagh. The displacement of Catholics was not carried to the same extent as at Castletown. Among the tenants now residing on the land are Catholics, not at present molested by their landlord, who, it is needless to say, cannot be considered responsible for transactions that occurred long before he succeeded to the property. One of the present Lord Bandon's chief anxieties, much to his credit, is to extend the culture of flax in the south of Ireland. In this attempt he has been partially successful, and it is to be hoped he may be more so, for his perseverance is indefatigable. I trust the triumphs of his flax campaign may console him for the discomfiture that awaits his efforts to support the Stato Church. Church less profitable than they had expected, turned off en masse to the Rev. Mr. M'Manus, Presbyterian minister at Milltown, and inquired what terms he would give them for becoming Presbyterians. In Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Coviel denies that Monsieur Jourdain's father was a linen-draper; he had, indeed, from disinterested benevolence, accommodated the public with linens; and the public, from their grateful sense of his kindness, had gracefully and delicately presented him with certain moneys. On both sides it was an elevated interchange of practical philanthropy-there was nothing of traffic in the transaction. Precisely thus did Messrs. Gayer and Company deny that they ever bribed "converts." True, some pauper Papists, from the force of sudden and simultaneous conviction, came rushing headlong into Protestantism; true, also, the Protestant agents gave money, and free houses, and employment to the converts. But there was nothing of a quid pro quo in the transaction. On the one side it was conscientious adoption of religious truth; on the other it was the most exalted benevolence and mercy to the household of faith." 66 *The circumstances above recorded were cummunicated to me in 1844 by persons who had immediate access to the best information. All I know of Castletown at present is, that the Protestant colony continues to occupy the land. |