FROM THE ARCHIVES:County councils were introduced in Ireland under an Act of 1898, increasing the political power of nationalists who controlled almost all of them outside Ulster. At the same time, one of the growing Catholic-nationalist demands was for a Catholic university. In this letter to The Irish Times, the Catholic bishop of Limerick, Edward Thomas, challenged the paper to say where it stood on the university question. JOE JOYCE
THERE IS nothing so galling to a high-spirited people as a sense of inequality. It cuts a man to the quick to be told, “Stand down, you are a Papist.” Yet is not that what you Protestants now tell us when we ask for a University. You say to us: “You have Trinity College; that suits us; therefore it must suit you. Come in there, or, if you will not, then remain as you are.”
Do you think, Sir, that such an answer, which breathes nothing but the spirit of ascendancy and insolence, can have any effect upon Irish Catholics than to rouse feelings of anger and retaliation?
Read the proceedings [of the Conservative Party] at Bristol on Wednesday last.
There you have two Irish Protestants, one of them from this province of Munster, going over to England to rouse the lowest feelings of bigotry against our humble appeal for justice and fair play. You report these proceedings, you give the speeches of these anti-Catholic Irish Protestants with great fullness, but not one word of comment.
May I ask you if you are not taxing our generosity too far in asking us not only to put up with such treatment, but to transfer to the party that inflict it the power
over our own local affairs, which at long last has come into our hands?
But I beg you not to mistake me. I do not desire to see the gentry and Protestants excluded from County Councils, but I beg to tell you plainly that your own attitude, and that of men like Mr. Corbett and Mr. Hall [the conference speakers], make such a result inevitable.
If there is to be peace in Ireland between men of different classes and different creeds, it can never be founded except on the firm basis of perfect equality. As long as Catholics are deprived of a single privilege that Protestants enjoy, they would be contemptible slaves if they submitted to it with patience.
Now, Sir, an influential Protestant journal, such as the “Irish Times,” can do much towards bringing about that state of peace which we all desire. Much more influential for the same purpose is the great body of Irish Protestants. Let them speak out [. . .] Let the Grand Jurors assemble and state with all the weight that must attach to their words that they are in favour of granting Irish Catholics what they want in education, on the sole condition that no one interferes with Trinity College, with which the Protestants are entirely satisfied.
In any case, for or against, I think we have a claim to ask you to speak out plainly and unequivocally. Are you for us or against us?
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