CHAPTER XII

PRIESTS

I have been asked, since my friends became aware that I am perpetrating my reminiscences, whether I was going to write anything supplemental to Mr. MacCarthy’s Priests and People, and Five Tears in Ireland.

My reply was:—­

‘Certainly not.’

To begin with, I have many friends among Roman Catholics, and plenty of cheery acquaintances among the priests.  Secondly, the state of feud and hostility on which Mr. MacCarthy dilates is more likely to be found in Ulster and Leinster than in Kerry, where the Roman Catholics form more than nine-tenths of the population.

On one occasion, when a distinguished Englishman was staying at Killarney House, I told him that he should go to the north to see the strangest sight in the world—­two races hating one another for the love of God.

It is not my business to estimate what would happen in Kerry if a few thousand rabid Orangemen were plumped down among the present inhabitants; but according to existing circumstances creeds are not torn to tatters nor religion disfigured by strife and slander.

All the same, I am bound to say that the Roman Catholic priests, when I was young, were much superior to those of to-day.  They were drawn from a better class, because, having to be educated at Rome, or, at least, as far away as St. Omer, entailed some considerable outlay by their relatives.  Moreover, they brought back from their continental seminaries broader ideas than can be acquired in purely Irish colleges.  Their interest had been stimulated at the most impressionable age in much of which the farmers and labourers had no conception.  Therefore the priest could address his flock with authority, and was invariably looked up to as well as obeyed.

The parish priest at Blarney erected a tower in commemoration of the battle of Waterloo, and a public house in the vicinity bears the name to this day.

What parish priest would raise a memorial to any English victory in the twentieth century?

The greatest curse to the Irish nation has been Maynooth, because it has fostered the ordination of peasants’ sons.  These are uneducated men who have never been out of Ireland, whose sympathies are wholly with the class from which they have sprung, and who are given no training calculated to afford them a broader view than that of the narrowest class prejudice.

As for the much discussed Irish university, I do not myself believe it will be founded.

Should even an English Government be blind enough to allow it, an Irish university could only become a hot-bed of treason, and practically all educated members of the Roman Catholic community would avoid sending their sons to such a seminary of sedition, where the influence would be insidiously directed to make the undergraduates even more hostile to England than they already are by inherited instincts and by all they have been told in their own homes.