“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, L16,000,000 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