The Maynooth Debacle

The dismissal of Dr. O'Hickey has not smashed the Gaelic League or even weakened the fight for Irish in the University. Instead, it has had results entirely opposite to those which its authors expected it to produce. Men who until now scarcely knew they had a country are beginning to inquire into Irish affairs and are finding that there are only two parties and two interests in this country—English and Irish.

They fail to see why Maynooth should join the enemy, and the natural result is that Maynooth and those who control it have fallen in the respect of all who value fair play and admire patriotism. Less than six months ago the Standing Committee of the Bishops went out of their way to state that the question of essential Irish was a matter for fair argument, but before and since that statement was made they have been employing all the powers which Church discipline gives them to crush fair argument, and, as we have seen, they have not stopped even at suppression.

The late president of the Columban League, the Rev. Fr. Walsh, was refused ordination and excluded from Dunboyne (to which his brilliant college career had won him the right to enter) by the Maynooth authorities because he had publicly expressed the opinion that in the National University the national language should be treated fairly. Several other students were refused minor orders, and now the young priests of the Dunboyne Establishment who are suspected of patriotism are to be sent out of Ireland, not in accordance with the ordinary regulations of their dioceses, but because they are hateful to West Britain.

One of these young priests, An tAthair Aindrias O Ceileachair, is a man of whom his Church and the country of his birth may well be proud, for he has trained and developed, to a high degree, the gifts God gave him to use in the service of both. He has a rare knowledge of the Irish language, and if left in Ireland would have done much-needed work for Irish scholarship and literature. With some other students in Dunboyne he joined in sending a message of sympathy to the promoters of the students' meeting held in Dublin last Spring.

For that little incident he is suspected of patriotism—the latest crime—and is being sent on a foreign mission, so that the foreigner's mind, no less than the foreigner's rule, may hold sway in his native land. The clever and patriotic priest is to be ostracised and exiled, and men who are not suspected of patriotic ideals will be kept at home, ana considered good enough for the Irish mission.

There was a period in Irish history when Dublin Castle allowed no patriotic priests to remain in Ireland. Are the penal laws it administered to be revived by the Irish Bishops? The persecution of Irish-Ireland priests will serve one good purpose. It will draw a sharp line of distinction between West Britain and Ireland. The Bishops may remain on the wrong side for some time, but we are confident that the determination of Irish Ireland to have no trucking with the Garrison will, sooner or later, convince Irish churchmen that Catholics mean to have as much freedom to fight for national ideals as those who deny Ireland's right to nationhood employ to suppress them.

We hope that Irish Catholics will always remain good Catholics, but we must say that the man who would make his religion an excuse for disloyalty to his country deserves all the odium which is ever the lot of the traitor or the apostate.

The feeling excited by the petty persecutions of the Bishops is one of sorrow and anger, and we believe that their foolish and unpatriotic action will have no other result than that of strengthening the case for an Irish University. Even those Senators who have been strongest in their opposition to Irish denounce the tyranny that has been employed against the League, and many who are in no way interested denounce the methods that have been employed against it.

What makes the affair so painful to patriotic Irishmen is the consideration that it is not Dublin Castle, nor the Grand Orange Lodge that has employed such methods, but a body of Irishmen who claim to be patriotic, and that they have used them not against an anti-Irish or irreligious organisation, but against the Gaelic League. It was said of the Bourbons that they would never learn from experience. We trust that the Irish Bishops will be wiser.

They have betrayed a great dread of Irish Ireland and have failed woefully in the attempt to transfer the feeling to the object that inspired it. The resolution of the Dublin Coiste Ceanntair shows how Dublin Leaguers feel. The testimonial to Dr. O'Hickey to which the resolution refers will be supported as a duty by every Gael worthy of the name. His fearless courage in defence of the Irish language, and his action in resisting a tyranny, that would deprive every Catholic of freedom, of speech have placed all Ireland under a debt to him that this generation cannot repay.