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Page 21
The writers go on to ask for the repeal of the local duty on coal in
Dublin, and to suggest that the necessary revenue should be raised by a
duty on spirits. This course Belfast had been permitted to follow--one
of the numberless make-weights thrown into the scale so steadily on the
side of the Protestant North. In my part of the country the people used
to say of any very expert thief: "Why, he'd steal the fire out of your
grate." Under the Union arrangements Great Britain stole the fire out of
the grate of Ireland. And having so dealt with capital and coal the
predominant partner next proceeded by a logical development to muddle
transportation.
The Drummond Commission, appointed in 1836 to consider the question of
railway construction in Ireland, issued a report in 1838 which
practically recommended public and not private enterprise as appropriate
"to accomplish so important a national object." What came after is best
related in the official terminology of the Scotter Commission of
1906-10:
"This report was presented in July 1838, and early in the
following year a great public meeting, held in Dublin, passed a
resolution that inasmuch as an adequate system of railways could
not be constructed by private capital, the Government should be
urged to take the work into its own hands, thereby saving the cost
of Private Bill legislation. Promises were also made that the lands
necessary for railway construction would be given free of cost.
Similar resolutions were adopted at another meeting held about the
same time in the north of Ireland. In addition, an address to the
Queen was presented by a number of Irish Peers, headed by the Duke
of Leinster, praying that action might be taken on the Drummond
Commission Report."
The government saw the light, and proceeded to sin against it. They
embodied the Dublin programme in resolutions which were adopted by the
House of Commons in March 1839, and they then abruptly abandoned the
whole business. The last chance was not yet lost. During the Great
Famine of 1847 the Opposition proposed to raise, �16,000,000 by State
loans for the construction of railways as relief works. A suggestion so
sane could not hope to pass. It was in fact rejected; the starving
peasants were set to dig large holes and fill them up again, and to
build bad roads leading nowhere. And instead of a national railway
system Ireland was given private enterprise with all its waste and all
its clash of interests.
The two most conspicuous gifts of Unionism to Ireland have been, as all
the world knows, poverty and police. Soon after 1830, that is to say
when the first harvest of government from Westminster was ripe to the
sickle, Irish destitution had assumed what politicians call men-acing
proportions. One person in every three of the population never had any
other alimentary experience than the difference between hunger and
starvation. In these circumstances a Royal Commission was appointed to
consider the advisability of extending the English Poor Law to Ireland.
Their report is a pioneer document in the development of economic
thought. Just as the Railway Commission a few years later was to give
the watchword of the future, nationalisation, so the Poor Law Commission
gave within its province the watchword of the future, prevention before
relief. They pointed the contrast between the two countries. I quote the
words of the later Irish Poor Law Commission of 1903-6:
"Having regard to the destitution and poverty that were prevalent
in Ireland owing to want of employment, the Royal Commissioners in
their Report of 1836 came to the conclusion that the English
workhouse system would be unsuitable for Ireland, because after
unchecked demoralisation by profuse out-door relief _in England,
the Work-house system was devised in order to make the lazy and
idle seek ordinary employment which could be got. The situation in
Ireland was, on the contrary, one in which the able-bodied and
healthy were willing and anxious to work for any wages, even for
twopence a day, but were unable to obtain such or any employment_."
Ireland at the end of a generation of Unionism was suffering, as the
commissioners proceed to point out, not from over-population, but from
under-development. They tabled two sets of recommendations. The relief
programme advised compulsory provision for the sick, aged, infirm,
lunatics, and others incapable of work; in all essential matters it
anticipated in 1836 that Minority Report which to the England of 1912
still seems extravagantly humane. The prevention programme outlined a
scheme for the development of Irish resources. Including, as it did,
demands for County Fiscal Boards, agricultural education, better
cottages for the labourers, drainage, reclamation, and changes in the
land system, it has been a sort of lucky bag into which British
ministers have been dipping without acknowledgment ever since. But the
report itself was, like the Railway Report, too sane and too Irish to
stand a chance. There was sent over from England a Mr Nicholls, who,
after a six weeks flutter through the country, devised the Poor Law
System under which we still labour. Mr Nicholls afterwards became Sir
George, and when he died it is probable that a statue was erected to
him. If that is so the inscription must always remain inadequate until
this is added: "Having understood all about Ireland in six weeks he gave
her, as the one thing needful to redeem her, the workhouse."
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