The leeway to make up was enormous.  To go no farther back than the institution of the Penal Code and the deliberate destruction of the woollen industry, two centuries of callous repression at the hands of an external authority had maimed and exhausted the country whose condition the Committee had met to consider.  These facts the members of the Committee frankly recognized in that part of the Report which is entitled with gentle irony “Past Action of the State.”  Here, then, was a purely Irish problem, intimately concerning every Irishman, poor or rich, Roman Catholic or Protestant, a problem of which Great Britain, though responsible both for its existence and its solution, knew and cared little.  The really strange thing is, not that representative Irishmen should have met together to consider and prescribe for the deplorable economic condition of their country, but that they should not also, like the South African Conference, have drafted a Constitution for Ireland, on the sound ground that a system of government which had promoted and sustained the evils they described could never, with the best will in the world, become a good government for Ireland.  Yet for a brief space of time these men actually had Home Rule, and by virtue of that privilege they did better work for Ireland in six months than had been done in two centuries.

What is more, they used the Home Rule principle in their recommendations for the establishment of a Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.  “We think it essential,” they reported on p. 101, “that the new Department should be in touch with the public opinion of the classes whom its work concerns, and should rely largely for its success upon their active assistance and co-operation.”  Its chief, they added, should be a Minister directly responsible to Parliament, and on p. 103 they advocated a Consultative Council, whose functions should be—­(1) To keep the Department in direct touch with the public opinion of those classes whom the work of the Ministry concerns; and (2) to distribute some of the responsibility for administration amongst those classes.  Now these, in Ireland, were revolutionary proposals.  The idea of any part of the Government “being in touch with public opinion” was wholly new.  The idea of “distributing responsibility for administration” amongst the subjects of administration was startlingly novel.  Ireland, both before and after the Union, had always been governed on a diametrically opposite principle.  Since the Union, when Irish departmental Ministers, never responsible to the people, disappeared, not one of the host of nominated Irish Boards was legally amenable to Irish public opinion.  Not one had a separate Minister responsible even to the Parliament at Westminster, which was not an Irish Parliament. A fortiori, not one relied on the co-operation and advice of the classes for whose benefit it was supposed to exist.