Tocqueville and Ireland

When I first returned to my ancestral home in Ireland, Mohill, what struck me was that the Protestant Church was lavishly built and the graveyard was tine and aside the Church. The Catholic Church had been built atop a hill and looked like so many Catholic Romanesque Churches in the US after WW II, red brick, long, crowded, lots of kids. The graveyard was down the street a piece, massive in size, hundreds if not a thousand or more gravestones, not as ancient as the Protestant Church. Those facts told a great deal as to what had transpired under centuries of brutal English occupation.

Tocqueville visited Ireland in the summer of 1835, after his trip to the States, and he recorded the brief trip in some notes transcribed and translated into his Journey in Ireland, translated masterfully by Larkin. This is a wonderfully written book, with a sense of immediacy and presence. It is the contemporaneous reflections, not the deep thought of his American journey. He recorded what he saw when he saw it.

On p 11 he states:

The Protestant minister is in general a holy man, whom God has not overwhelmed with work; he has twenty or so thousand francs [£800] income, forty parishioners, and a small gothic church, which is built at the top of the park. The Catholic priest has a small house, a much smaller dinner, five or six thousand parishioners who are dying of hunger, and share their last penny with him; and he fancies that this state of things is not the best possible one. He thinks that if the Protestant minister had a little less and the poor Catholic population a little more, society would gain by it, and he is amazed that five thousand Catholics are obliged to pay twenty thousand francs in taxes to support the religion of forty Protestants.

Tocqueville reflects upon the reality of the situation. At that time the starving Irish were forced to support the English Church of some small but elite class.

On p 49 Tocqueville states:

I have not yet met a man in Ireland; to whatever party he belonged, who did not acknowledge, with more or less bitterness, that the aristocracy had governed the country very badly. The English say it openly, the Orangemen do not deny it, the Catholics shout it at the top of their voices.

I find that the language of the aristocracy proves it more than all the rest. All the rich Protestants that I saw in Dublin speak of the Catholic population only with an extraordinary hatred and contempt. They are, to all intents, savages incapable of recog­nizing a kindness, fanatics led into every disorder by their priests.

Now, these same people who hold such language are those who have held, and still hold in part, the whole government of the country. How to expect that people animated by such feelings and imbued with such opinions rightly or wrongly, 1 do not know, can treat with kindness, country's money.

Aristocracy, British Aristocracy, was the burden of those occupied, distant owners of land who oppressed the people who tried to scratch an existence from land which could never again be theirs. The lands were taken from them and distributed to those friends of the crown, deprived of any means of existence, the people for centuries managed a mere pittance of a life, lower than slaves in England, they were not even considered as property. Their overseers thought them less than human, livestock had more value.

On page 51 Tocqueville states:

Asked if there is a Catholic church. Answer yes, a mile away. The parish is very large. A parish priest and two curates. Asked how many Protestants in the parish. Answer three. Where is the Protestant minister? He lives in Waterford. Do they still pay the tithe? No, they stopped paying it three years ago. How much did the tithe amount to? 10 shillings per acre of wheat or potatoes. 8 shillings per acre of barley. Meadows were exempt.

Mr. Plunkett, a Dublin lawyer, told me today (22 July 1835) it is only since 1782 that the Catholics can own land. Before that time the law prevented it. One should not be surprised therefore that the Irish population is so completely excluded from the land and that it is so little divided up.

Tocqueville is often amazed of the brutality amongst the locals but he seems from time to time to understand it. As noted above the notes the prohibition on land ownership until 1782. The over-abundance of Catholic clergy, the absentee nature of the Protestant.

On p 59 he states:

We went to see today (14 July 1835) Msgr. Kinsely, bishop of Kilkenny. We found him very simply lodged. He told us: My revenue is not large and still less fixed. 1 have only what comes to me by the voluntary gifts of the faithful, but 1 can sometimes give a dinner. I have a gig and a horse. I find myself rich enough and 1 would despair if the state wished to pay me. Last spring I went to London for the sole purpose of preventing such a measure from being proposed. It would break the union that now exists between the clergy and the people. Now the people regard us as their own work and are attached to us because of what they give us. If we received money from the state they would regard us as public officials, and when we should advise them to respect law and order, they would say, they are paid for that.

Monsignor Kinsley added: In 1828 I was in France. On arriving Rouen I saw two sentries at the gate of the archbishop. What is that? I asked a French ecclesiastic who was accompanying me. It is a guard of honor for the archbishop. I do not want such guards of honor, I explained, they make [people] think your archbishop as a representative of the king.

The observation here tells mountains. On the one hand the clergy understands the need for separation of Church and State, in fact it would be the only way. On the other hand the Irish clergy immediately saw the problem in France by its proximity and possible collusion.

Of all of Tocqueville’s works this one is the freshest, most observant and worth a read at any time.