A tourist's guide to Ireland

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A TOURIST'S
GUIDE TO IRELAND

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A TOURIST'S
GUIDE TO IRELAND

BY
LIAM O'FLAHERTY

LONDON:

THE MANDRAKE PRESS
41 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.i

T)A

CHAPTER I

THE tourist is at the mercy of every kind
of ruffian. Although every country holds
out welcoming hands to him, it is only for
the purpose of robbing him of all he pos-
sesses, and if he is caught escaping, at the
end of his holiday, with even a small silver
coin in his pockets, it's more than likely
that the Customs officers are going to fine
him to that amount for taking away on his
shoes some of the country's mud. And
yet, even though the tourist is mulcted in
this scandalous manner, in every country,
he is always looked upon as a low fellow,
an inquisitive, vulgar beggar, a loud-
mouthed trot-about, a coarse eater, a

5

6 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

foreigner. There are jokes in every
literature about his capacity for snoring,
about his clothes and about his wife, who
seems to be always either very fat or very
skinny.

Now, why is this ? I have come to the
conclusion that it all results from the
tourist being ignorant of the countries
into which he goes for a visit. True
enough, he is provided by the railways
and by the tourist agencies with a great
deal of information, but very little of it is
credible except by a gullible and excitable
person like a tourist. Information is scat-
tered broadcast, on handbills, in news-
papers, on posters produced by artists who
should have more respect for their art than
prostituting it to the service of such sharp
practices (to put it nicely). But this infor-

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 7

mation concerns itself solely with the
geographical nature of the country, with
hotels and railways and such things. In-
formation as to the character and habits of
the people is never given, at least to my
knowledge.

Yet this is the information that is most
necessary. For to know the habits and
character of one's enemy is to be able to
over-reach him at his own game of exploita-
tion. Therefore, as I am an honest man
and am not connected with the Tourist
Industry -, I propose to save the tourist, at
least in this country. And as I suppose all
countries, as far as robbing the tourist is
concerned, are more or less alike, I'll save
him in every country too. And, mark you,
by doing this, I'll also confer a benefit on
the Tourist Industry. For, since the tour-

8 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

1st in future will come to Ireland impreg-
nable within the armour provided by my
information, he'll come without fear and
in great numbers. In this manner the
Industry will benefit, as by a greater turn-
over of small profits it will gather a greater
income than by its former method of
looting the few without shame or con-
science.

How many kinds of tourists are there ?
Obviously there are a great many kinds of
tourists, a myriad. But they may safely
be divided into four main classes, those
who come for knowledge, those who come
for pleasure, those who come for a rest and
those who come for profit. This last class
is a small one, composed of robbers,
swindlers, shysters and confidence trick-
sters. As I have no respect for these

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 9

people, I'll leave them to the mercy
of the Irish Tourist Industry. It's a
very fitting punishment. I therefore
dismiss this class and I propose to
deal solely with the remaining three
classes.

Having examined and classified the tour-
ists, it is now necessary to examine and
classify the Irish people, or such of them
as come into conflict with the tourist. I
think, as far as the Irish people are con-
cerned, it will be necessary to study the
priests, the politicians, the publicans and
the peasants. I omit the hotel-keepers,
the garage proprietors, the shop-keepers,
the dairymen and the boarding house
keepers, because in every country these
types openly fly the flag of commercial
piracy and even the most ignorant tourist

io TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

will not fail to recognise them and to
beware of them. However, if I discover,
in my examination, any particular local
eccentricity, I am going to set it
down.

CHAPTER II

No doubt the tourist will have heard, long
before his arrival in this country, that
Ireland was once known as the island of
saints and scholars. Every tourist worth
his salt knows this, for the tourist is noted
for his catch-cries and his ingenuous belief
that by uttering these cries he is going to
impress the natives by his knowledge of
their history, their habits and their virtues.
Here, I must warn the tourist against
making any reference to Ireland as the
island of saints and scholars. Nobody in
Ireland nowadays believes that legend and
the well-meaning tourist giving voice to it
will be suspected of trying to give offence.

12 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

If the tourist wishes to show his interest in
the religion or learning of the country and
thereby ingratiate himself, he may remark
casually : " Well ! I suppose there are as
many priests in Ireland as when my father
was here forty years ago ? " And the
reply will be, gloomily or proudly, as the
case may be : "As many as ever."

That reply will be a true one. The
priests are as numerous as ever they were,
and perhaps even more numerous, if that
were possible. Whether their existence,
and in such numbers, is to the benefit of
the country does not concern me here, as
this book is for the enlightenment of the
tourist. And as the tourist does not have
to live in this country, one cannot expect
him to be interested in its welfare. There-
fore, as impartially as possible, I propose to

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 1 3

examine that numerous and respectable
class of our community, the priests.

There have been priests in Ireland for
thousands of years. Indeed, the island was
very probably discovered by a priest or
priests, who, noticing that the configura-
tion of the country and the climate were
remarkably adapted towards producing
mystical inclinations, brought hither some
lay followers to act as the nucleus of a con-
gregation. Nobody knows the name of
the religion exploited by those first priests,
and even their God is long since deceased.
In fact, numbers of Gods and religions
have found followers and emoluments and
temples in this country since then and have
disappeared again, leaving no trace, other
than the fairies, which are worshipped in
mountainy places by incurably conserva-

14 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

tive peasants. But even though the Gods
and the religions change and disappear, the
priests remain, always the same ; and to
my mind they seem to get sturdier and
fatter as the centuries pass.

The religion at present authorised by the
priests is the Christian religion. It has
been in vogue for something like two
thousand years and is still very flourishing,
without any sign of a rival. When I say
there is no rival to the Christian religion in
this country I mean that no other religion
has officiating priests, and without priests no
religion can be considered seriously. It has
no backbone and no real terror. The
various tribes of fairies that are so esteemed
by remote peasants and by some of the old-
fashioned poets of the last generation are
merely very charming spirits. Nobody

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 15

pays them any material respect by the
building of temples or the sprinkling of
holy water, and although W. B. Yeats and
George Russell, and others, have written
poetry in their honour, these poems have
had no result whatsoever in changing the
allegiance of the priests. I would earn-
estly warn all tourists against having any
truck with fairies or with those that boost
fairies. Any tourist who meddles with
them will only succeed in antagonising the
priests. And that would be very dan-
gerous.

The power of the priests in Ireland has
always been very great, and it is still as
great as ever. Those foolish people who
say that the priests are losing their power
make, in my opinion, a great mistake.
Whenever the priests appear to be losing

1 6 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

power it merely means that they are
changing their outward appearance. When
the Druids, a former dynasty of priests,
gave way to the Christian hermits they
merely transformed themselves into Christ-
ians. How they did this I know not.
They may have changed themselves into
spirits and flown down the throats of the
Christians. Whatever happened, it is cer-
tain that the priests nowadays have all the
characteristics of the Druids. They merely
worship a different God. In the same
manner the priests of the present day may
change into some other dynasty of priests,
but the tourist may be sure that they have
no intention of losing their power. Be-
cause, as long as the Irish climate remains
what it is and the Irish mountains bring
mist and fog, there will always be a vast

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 17

proportion of the population under the
influence of mystical dreams and mystical
terrors. And to counteract these terrors
and dreams priests are absolutely necessary.
So let the tourist beware of toying with any
new-fangled notions that the priests may
be scoffed at with impunity. Let him
beware of Dublin drawing-rooms, where
it is now fashionable to preach liberalism
and to refer to the priests as the cause of
the country's ignorance, poverty and
apathy. Although it may be true that the
priests are the cause of all this, the fact re-
mains that it is not safe to say so in a country
district. Let the tourist carefully note this.
Let him be a sane man. He is bound to
go into a country district if he wants to see
Ireland, and if he goes into a country dis-
trict, he cannot avoid coming in contact

1 8 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

with the local priests. If he follows my
advice, he will act as follows.

In each parish there are two or three
priests. One is a parish priest. The
others, if there are two, are curates. The
tourist need pay no attention to the cur-
ates. They have no power as far as the
tourist is concerned. If a tourist is a
woman, however, she may interest herself
in the curates. Some of them are very
spiritual, and have been known to inspire
women of a certain type with passions of a
very refined sort. But for the male tourist,
the curates are of no account. They are
very poor. They are under the thumb of
their parish priest. They are merely
priests in training. On the other hand, the
parish priest must be carefully studied and,
•where possible, exploited.

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 19

On arriving in a country district, unless
the tourist has already made arrangements
for his hotel, he should make subtle
inquiries before choosing a hotel. There
may be several hotels or boarding houses
in the district. He should therefore en-
deavour to find out if the parish priest
has an interest in any particular one. It is
more than likely that he has, financial or
otherwise. Having discovered which is the
parish priest's hotel, the tourist should go
to it.

This may seem extraordinary, but it is
true that in remote parts of Ireland, usually
the parts of interest to tourists, the parish
priest has a finger in every pie. He is the
great and only power in the district.
Confident in the blind worship of the
peasants and the village loafers and the

ao TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

fishermen of the seaside, he forces the
wealthier people to obey him in the most
minute matters. He is practically master
of the body and soul of every individual.
When they are born they are brought
before him and he baptizes them for a few
shillings. When they begin to go to
school they come under his supervision.
He hires and sacks their teachers at his
discretion, very often at his whim. He
flogs them if they mitch from school or if
they fail to learn their catechism. When
they become striplings he watches them
carefully lest they make love clandestinely.
When they reach marriageable age he
marries them for a few pounds. If they
don't get married he nags at them, eager
for his fees. He abuses them from the
altar unless they pay him what he con-

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 21

siders sufficient money at Christmas and
Easter. When they die he buries them,
but before doing so, he levies a further toll
in hard cash over their dead bodies. This
toll is levied from all their relatives.

From their first yell at birth until the
sod falls on them in their grave their
actions and thoughts are under his direc-
tion. He is, almost invariably, himself of
peasant abstraction and almost invariably
he is just about as well informed as a well-
informed peasant. So he is not burthened
by a very refined religious conscience in
the civilised sense of the word. Being
mentally on a level with his peasant flock,
he is up to all their tricks. He knows
what is passing in their minds, of what they
are afraid, how to tickle their greed, how
to overawe them with threats of hell, or

22 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

to enthuse them with promises of indul-
gences and eternal happiness. So they are
proud of him, as of something that has
sprung from their loins, that satisfies their
innate greed by giving a promise of
Heaven and that is just a little cleverer
than themselves. Not too clever, for too
much cleverness inspires a peasant with
distrust.

This sense of power leads the parish
priest inevitably into the commission of
various excesses which may be of interest
to the tourist and which may very well
redound to his benefit. Finding himself in
the position of a dictator, the parish priest
usually assumes the manners of a parvenu
aristocrat. As the aristocracy has been
wiped out during the tumults of the past
couple of generations, he has no com-

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 23

petitors. And it is in the character of the
lord of the manor that he is vulnerable at
the hands of the subtle tourist.

Having installed himself in the parish
priest's hotel, the wise tourist makes the
acquaintance of the parish priest. The
best form of introduction is a small dona-
tion of about five pounds for a charitable
cause. There is bound to be one in the
pocket of every parish priest. It is either
a church that is being built or a church
that is being mended or some poor family
that has lost its bread-winner. Sometimes
it may be one of the good priest's relatives
that needs a place or a dot, but the tourist
must not be too inquisitive. He is merely
to hand over his few pounds as quietly as
possible, and the trick is done. He'll get
much more in return than the value of his

24 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

money. For, once he has been admitted
to the parish priest's house as a guest he is
received in the district as one of the people.
The tradesmen no longer dare rob him,
and if his motor car breaks down, due to
some slight defect, the garage proprietor
will not dare tamper with the engine in
order to get further custom. If he has no
motor car and wants to take a ride on an
Irish jaunting car to visit some ruin, he is
accompanied by the parish priest, and the
only expense will be probably a pour boire
for the driver and a few coppers for the
stray children that are peeping from behind
ditches. He may take a boat on the lake
or on the sea and fish to his heart's content
and the parish priest's mandate insures him
against the usual extortion. Old men,
hearing that he is the priest's friend, are

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 25

quite content to tell him the usual stories,
ones that were first invented to amuse
people like Lady Gregory, without sug-
gesting at the end of their recitation that
their pipes are without tobacco. The
local sergeant of police will look the other
way when the tourist wants a drink after
hours and if he is seen flirting with a pretty
girl of the locality, the parish fanatic will
not dare send a scurrilous letter to the
Authorities in Dublin. In fact, the wise
tourist can enjoy himself immensely for
five or ten pounds. He'll enjoy seeing his
fellow tourists being mulcted right and
left by the shark of a hotel proprietor,
while he himself is treated to all kinds of
luxuries, with the assurance, from the
parish priest, that it will not cost anything
extra and that the bill is going to be

26 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

moderate. At the same time, if he wants
to do so, he may dine every day at the
parish priest's house and drink as much
whiskey, licit and illicit, as he likes.

These dinners at the parish priest's house
are well worth any tourist's trouble, and if
the business of attracting the tourist were
taken over by the Government instead of
being left to the mercy of the hotel people,
the parish priest's dinner would stand out
as Ireland's great delicacy on all the
advertisement hoardings of the world. It
is not a modern meal in the French manner,
with a great deal of sauce and suspicion.
It is a plain business, above board, without
any doubt as to the authenticity of the beef
or fish. The only thing that is old is the
whiskey. Everything is in vast quantity.
The parish priest himself does the carving,

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 27

and he stands up to whet his knife, which
he brandishes like a Chinese headsman.
Appetite is whetted by the sight of such
abundance, and it is goaded to excess by
the exhortations of the parish priest, who
sees in the dinner the culminating point of
the scheme which has caused all this
hospitality.

For there is a scheme and the tourist
must be warned of it. Without due warn-
ing he is a helpless victim at the end of the
meal. For his unsolicited donation will
have persuaded the parish priest that he is
both rich and foolish and a man to be
exploited. In return for this feasting the
parish priest expects to be able to put the
tourist on his list of donators for the rest of
his life. For this reason it is absolutely
necessary for the tourist to conceal his

28 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

address. Otherwise the parish priest will
pester him with letters and it is useless to
try and ignore these letters. They are
quite able to draw blood out of a turnip.
On the other hand, if the tourist is a subtle
fellow, after my own heart, he will give a
false address and then go away laughing to
himself, after having done what no man
has yet done, having got something for
nothing out of a parish priest.

Of course, I must also warn the tourist
that there are some parish priests who are
too much of a handful for even the most
subtle tourist. These are of the thin,
furtive type. They have small eyes and
they are nervous in their movements up to
a great age. They hover about the rail-
way stations and the steamboat landing
places, and they fix their eyes on every

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 29

stranger, with the searching glance of a
detective. Nothing escapes them. They
know everything. Their servants are thin
and so are their horses. They argue over
their petty bills. Their village beggars are
ragged and hollow-cheeked. Their school
teachers have a haunted look. Even in the
most remote district the police sergeant
wears his uniform every day, when under
the observation of one of those gentlemen.
They are no good to anybody, least of all
to the tourist, and the tourist must avoid
them like a plague. For they have all the
shamelessness of the miser, and are quite
prepared to use threats and insults, and
even to go down on their knees in order to
extract money out of the tourist's pockets.
But when the tourist sees that the parish
priest is fat and jovial and owns a good

30 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

horse and wears riding breeches and goes
around everywhere with a horsewhip, then
he should go ahead. That type of parish
priest has a good disposition, and he is a
man of the world and, as far as the subtle
tourist is concerned, a fool.

The tourist must also know what to say
to the parish priest. He should on no
account be drawn into a discussion of any
religious matter. For the parish priest
has no great interest in religion. It is his
business, and a very private one, and as he
does not know very much about the
philosophy of religion, he prefers to make a
mystery of it. Neither must the tourist
refer to books or to art of any description.
The parish priest dislikes books, except a
few books which it would be tiresome for
the tourist to read. But the tourist may

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 31

casually refer to Canon Sheehan as the
greatest novelist the world has ever pro-
duced. Try to remember the name Canon
Sheehan. There is no need to learn by
rote the names of his books because the
parish priest is likely to be ignorant of
them himself. Apart from this reference
to Canon Sheehan^ literature must not be
mentioned on any account. And if the
tourist is taken around the parish church,
he must not try to be polite by referring to
the statues or the pictures as works of art.
Of course they are sure to be monstrosities,
but a tourist is quite capable of telling any
lie in order to ingratiate himself. To a
parish priest, the St. Francis of El Greco is
just a Holy Picture and must be referred
to as such. Other than Holy Pictures the
only pictures that may be referred to are

32 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

the photographs in the daily newspapers.
Neither must education be discussed. The
parish priest regards any references by a
layman to education as a sign of Free
Masonry. No form of amusement must
be discussed, except after a long intimacy,
which, in itself, is to be avoided. For
the parish priest regards any form of
amusement as irreligious and dangerous to
faith and morals.

In fact, there are only two forms of con-
versation allowed. They are politics and
gossip. Gossip may concern itself with
scandalous stories about people who are
not Catholics. These scandalous stories
may be as obscene as possible, but always
told in a gloomy voice. The parish priest
himself is bound to have a store, which he
is quite eager to untap.

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 33

Politics must also be approached in a
subtle way. The conversation should open
on the part of the tourist by a pathetic
reference to the deplorable state of the
country, due to inability of the politicians
to establish some sort of a common agree-
ment that would stop the younger genera-
tion in its mad career to material and moral
ruin. The evils of all-night dancing and
reading English Sunday newspapers should
be vaguely attributed to the lack of a
common understanding among the poli-
ticians. That is non-committal and is quite
sufficient to set the parish priest in motion.
The tourist need say no more. He may
nod his head occasionally in agreement, or
strike the table or empty his glass at the
precise moment when the parish priest is
stressing some point with particular vio-

34 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

lence. He must restrain his laughter or
his amazement, and if he has scruples
about morals he should do his best to hide
his indignation. For indeed, my tourist
must be very subtle if he successfully under-
goes this test of listening calmly to a parish
priest giving his views on politics.

In fact, properly speaking, no parish
priest has any convictions on politics. At
the back of his mind, he regards the state
as an enemy that has usurped the temporal
power of the Pope. Being an enemy, the
state must be exploited as much as possible
and without any qualms of conscience.
Because of this innate and perhaps uncon-
scious hostility to the state as an institution,
the parish priest cannot see that it is the
duty of a citizen to endeavour to make
political life as morally clean as possible.

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 35

He cannot see that the community as a
whole must always come into the forefront
of every citizen's political consciousness
and that personal interests must be sacri-
ficed to the interests of the nation. No.
The parish priest regards himself as the
commander of his parish, which he is
holding for His Majesty the Pope. Be-
tween himself and the Pope there is the
Bishop, acting, so to speak, as the Divi-
sional Commander. As far as the Civil
Power is concerned, it is a semi-hostile
force which must be kept in check, kept
in tow, intrigued against and exploited,
until that glorious day when the Vicar of
Christ again is restored to his proper posi-
tion as the ruler of the earth and the
wearer of the Imperial crown.

This point of view helps the parish priest

36 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

to adopt a very cold-blooded attitude
towards Irish politics. He is merely either
for or against the government. If he has
a relative in a government position, he is in
favour of the government. If he has a
relative who wants a position and cannot
get it, then he is against the government.
But his support of the government is very
precarious and he makes many visits to
Dublin and creeps up back stairs into
ministerial offices, cajoling and threaten-
ing. He is most commonly seen making
a cautious approach to the Education
Office, where he has all sorts of complaints
to lodge and all sorts of suggestions to •
make. Every book recommended by the
education authorities for the schools is
examined by him, and if he finds a single
idea in any of them that might be likely

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 37

to inspire thought of passion, then he is up
in arms at once. Like an army of black
beetles on the march, he and his countless
brothers invade Dublin and lay siege to
the official responsible. Woe to that man.
Woe to them all, all the ministers and
responsible officials. For our parish priest
has an interest in everything. For every
public position they have their candidates.
In every representative body they are
present, either as Chairmen or Honorary
Presidents, and they keep a stern eye on
everybody. To be accused by a parish
priest in one of these assemblies as a man
of revolutionary or unchaste sentiments is
to suffer social extermination. And even
in parliament, where the parish priest is
refused admission as a member, the hapless
members feel themselves under the same

38 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

supervision. Every word they utter, every
move they make reaches the ears of the
parish priest, and when the next election
comes, if they have erred, they are thrust
out into the darkness.

As he is thus a sort of grand master of
a secret society, the parish priest abhors
rival secret societies. He always denounces
them and he really fears them. Free
Masons, Communists, Liberals, and even
such harmless people as members of the
Frothblowers, come under his displeasure,
As for the Fenians, who believe in armed
revolt and the establishment of a militant
republic, he loathes them. For he sees in
all these societies and ideas a tendency
towards strengthening the power of the
state and robbing the confessional of some
of its terrors.

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 39

He has an idea that Ireland is the only
moral country in the world. And yet his
personal view of the Irish people as indi-
viduals is a very poor one. He is firmly
convinced that the English people are
immoral, principally on the score of lech-
ery. The French are even worse. The
Americans are very doubtful people, on
account of the facility for divorce in that
country. Germany is not so bad, because
Bavaria is a Catholic country. The Rus-
sians are altogether beyond the pale of
civilisation as they have nationalised women
and overthrown the Church. The Italians,
Spaniards and Belgians are very nearly as
pure as the Irish. The Chinese are rather
bad, but there is great hope for them, on
account of the Irish Mission to China, for
which he may touch the tourist, if he (the

40 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

parish priest) has a relative in that organisa-
tion. The Mexicans are even worse than
the Russians and he spends his spare time
intriguing with newspapers and politicians
in order to get Ireland to get England to
get America to make war on Mexico.

This conversation and these extra-
ordinary views will first inspire the tourist,
if he is an educated man interested in the
progress of civilisation and culture, with
disgust. But on second thought, after he
has taken a walk by the sea shore or along
the mountain slope in the moonlight and
digested his heavy dinner and scattered
the fumes of his whiskey, he will begin to
see the parish priest in a correct perspective.
Then he will understand, if he is kindly,
as I hope he is, that the parish priest is not
a monster or an evil genius, but a poor

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 41

grown-up child who is the victim of his
environment. He errs through crass
ignorance rather than through a natural
predestination towards evil. As a rule he
is a kindly soul, and if he is a harsh tyrant
of manners and social activities, it is the
forgiveable tyranny of the big boy in the
village school who is more fond of showing
his muscle than of giving pain through a
love of pain in itself. The parish priest
himself has had no education worth speak-
ing of, so he dislikes others receiving one.
His training in the seminary has been one
of unhealthy suppression of all natural
inclination, so his simple mind is convinced
that all men must be lashed with scorpions
and clothed in sack when the little pretty
devil of the flesh shows its frolicsome head.
Himself born in poverty and forbidden by

42 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

his Divine Master to accumulate wealth,
he gets rich furtively like Pere Grandet
and the secrecy of his penny-gathering
inspires him with the distrust, the glower-
ing eye and the dreadful yellow lust of the
miser. He is hemmed in on all sides by
fetishes and dogmas, so that his crude mind,
which was destined by nature to under-
stand no more than the mechanism of the
plough and the habits of the plodding
horse, is forced to undergo a continuous
travail in the unravelling of his cupidity
from the meshes of his religion.

Finally, he is forced by the priestly law
of celibacy to remain a savage to the end
of his days. For all men that are cut off
from the gentle companionship and the
refining influence of women are perforce
savages. Their corrupted and unscattered

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 43

seed grows within them like a foul weed
poisoning the growth and flowering of all
healthy passions. Their gift of life is
brought by them to the grave and they
refuse to hand it on to some lovely child
that would grow about their withering
thighs and charm their old eyes with an
image of their youth. Let the tourist then
pity them and forget the passing evil of
their minds. Let him even feel a little
ashamed of having exploited them as he
goes away.

But here . . . No more sentiment.
The tourist must stand fast. He has been
robbed too often. And no man can feel
so capable of fine feeling as he who has
been often robbed and has robbed in
return. After revenge comes reconcilia-
tion.

44 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

However, I have no doubt but that
among the many kinds of tourists, there is
going to be an Englishman of the idealistic
type who insists on getting to the bottom
of every social evil that he comes across and
then tries to remedy it. That type of
Englishman is as obstinate as a mule, and
there is no use in my appealing to him to
go away quietly, after he has investigated
my parish priest. He will consider him-
self in duty bound to make a thorough
investigation of the whole order of the
priesthood and very probably he'll leave
the country hot with passion, which may
lead him to write a letter to The Times, or,
indeed, to write a book entitled, perhaps,
Clericalism in Ireland and Its Effects on
the Social Organism, with a sub-title Being
The Result of a Fortnight's Carejul Study of

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 45

the Growth of Church Property in Ireland.
Together with Some Thoughts on the Lack of
Personal Initiative among the Populace
Caused by the Evils of Clerical Control of
All Branches oj Social Activity.

Lest the idealistic tourist may commit
any indiscretion owing to the heat of his
passion and the limited time at his disposal
for investigation, I think I am in duty
bound to give him a general outline of the
method in which such a work should be
approached so that a fair result may be
achieved.

The idealist must understand before
proceeding to study the priesthood as a
whole that it is quite a hopeless task. For
the organisation is directed from Rome and
he cannot obtain admission to the archives
of the Sacred College. He may wander

46 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

around Ireland and note different classes
of priests with different activities, but he
will be at a loss where to begin to study
them. For like a worm, it will be very
difficult to distinguish the head from the
tail. To the ordinary unsophisticated indi-
vidual, the barbarian or the non-Catholic,
the Cardinal seems to be the head. But
that is utterly false. The Cardinal is
merely the Officer Commanding the in-
fantry. The Bishops are Colonels Com-
manding Battalions. The Canons are the
Company Captains. The Parish Priests are
the hefty Sergeant-majors. The Curates
are the Corporals who do all the routine
work. Just as the British Army is based
on the efficiency of the sergeant-major and
the corporal, so is the army of priests.
But without that wise body of thinkers at

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 47

the War Office, the tacticians, the propa-
gandists and the intelligence officers, the
British Army would be a rather futile
mechanism of brawn and swear words, and
courage and beer. In the same way, the
army of priests would be entirely in-
effectual without the Religious Orders.

Just as the parish priest is a stupid, good-
natured sort of village tyrant, so is the
religious priest the exact opposite. He is
almost invariably an educated man. He
is subtle, refined and as a general rule
ascetic. Living within a college or mon-
astery, he practises a certain very definite
form of Christianity and thus inspires the
laity with respect and the parish priests
with envy. In fact, the parish priest
always thinks and speaks of the regular
priest in the same manner as the fighting

48 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

soldier thinks and speaks of the Brass Hat.
Yet, if the priesthood is an evil in this
country, the religious priest is more respon-
sible than the parish priest, in spite of his shy
ways, his refinement and asceticism. But
how is he an evil to the tourist ? That is
the point. If he is not an evil to the tourist
he is not an evil at all, and he does not con-
cern us ; for I am already sick of my
friend, the idealist, and I have come to the
conclusion that he deserves no assistance in
the concoction of his horrible book with
the atrocious sub-titles. I hope the Jesuits
catch him at it.

Yes . . . the Jesuits. Let us begin with
the Jesuits. Are the Jesuits then culpable
of robbing the tourist ? They are, because
they rob him of pleasure. For every
tourist understands how pleasant it is to go

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 49

into a country where the middle classes are
well informed, energetic, urbane, cultured,
and with a high standard of social morality;
where those pleasures which are fostered
by the middle classes in all countries are
everywhere to be tasted : music, the theatre,
the cabaret, the all-night cafe, and perhaps
delicate facilities for the more choice kinds
of amorous affairs. These pleasures, alas,
are at a discount in our country owing to
the strange disease that has fastened on our
priesthood since the Jesuits set the tone and
the pace of national educajtion. For in
this land where the Gael was once noted
above all the races of the earth " for beauty
and lasciviousness " (to quote an ancient
poet), the heavy, hairy garment of Pur-
itanism has fallen and enshrouded the
whole of society. Laughter, that music

50 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

most sweet of all human music, the gift of
Dionysian wine, is seldom heard, for the
lamentations of the damned are extolled
by the Jesuits as the only fitting cry for an
unfortunate human being. The drinking
feasts of Fionn and his gallant roysterers
have given place to secretive sousings in
dirty public houses, where no female dare
enter, unless she be clothed in rags and
bleary in the eye. Here, where the poets
once received a herd of cattle for a poem,
the divine fire of song in the eye is as hate-
ful as the gleam in the eye of a courtesan.
To be a poet is to be an anti-Christ, unless it
be the drivelling doggerel composed over
the death of a Papal Potentate. The
theatre, except for the solitary exception
of the Abbey Theatre, is left in the hands
of " the lecherous English," as being

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 51

suitable solely for that " immoral race." It
is as difficult to get a licence for a cabaret
as it is to grow a pine tree on the Aran
Islands. All this is due to the Jesuits and
to their fellow-workers, the members of
the numerous other religious orders.

Just as the secular clergy control primary
education, secondary education is in the
hands of the religious clergy, principally
in the hands of the Jesuits. As the parish
priest moulds the mind of the peasant, of
the small town idler, of the fisherman and
of the cattle drover, the Jesuit moulds the
mind of the middle class citizen. And the
result is that the middle class citizen is
generally much less intelligent than the
peasant. For the peasant has the earth,
the sea and nature to wash his mind with,
clearing away much of the drivel that he

52 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

has learned at school, whereas the middle
class citizen has no such opportunities.
Rather he is confounded at every step in
his career by the antagonism between the
teaching of the Jesuits and the accumulated
knowledge of the other countries where
Jesuits have not throttled human culture
with the tanned noose of dogma. Being con-
founded in this manner, he becomes a
confounded nuisance to every clear think-
ing person. He allows himself, even when
fully grown and perhaps bearded, to be
herded into organisations called confra-
ternities and Catholic Truth Societies, and
swashbuckling organisations whose pur-
pose is the militant overthrow of every-
thing that is not pleasant to the minds of
the Jesuits. The Jesuits, being subtle and
educated men, never use their muscles like

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 53

the parish priests, but utter frozen words
after the manner of Rabelais, and sending
out these words into the minds of their
subjects prevail upon their subjects to do
their bidding. Like those monks in Rabe-
lais that were fed upon wind, our middle
class citizens are so bloated by this un-
healthy sort of feeding that they are
absolute fanatics on certain matters. And
the tourist must treat them very gently,
lest on the least provocation they belch
forth hurricanes of fanaticism that might
blow the tourist across the ocean to the
farthest confines of the western world.

The Jesuits are also the propagandists of
the Church. In this capacity they carry
on campaigns in the newspapers. They
publish periodicals and they prevent free-
thinking citizens from publishing period-

54 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

icals that challenge their concept of the
universe. Although without legal author-
ity, so great is their power that no group of
free-thinking citizens dare band together
for the purpose of producing a periodical
that is manifestly non-Christian or purely
intellectual. On the rare occasions when
groups of citizens have tried to publish
periodicals of that sort these periodicals
have come to a sudden end. For this
reason, the tourist desirous of finding out
what the intellectuals of the^country are
thinking and doing will have to run from
one drawing-room to another and from one
public house to another and from one
studio to another, instead of going to the
news shops as in other countries where there
is freedom of intellectual expression. As
a matter of fact, if he really wants to find

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 55

out what the chief intellectuals of Ireland
are thinking he'll have to go abroad to
England, America and to Paris, where the
author of Ulysses is living in exile. He will
search the Irish newspapers for any sign of
intellectual life and he will find none, and
if he is an educated man, used to the
amenities of a cultured life, he will find it
very tiring to be forced to adopt ancient
methods of satisfying the craving of his
soul, the method of conversation, practic-
ally in secret. His sense of dignity will be
offended by the sight of penniless scholars
and of all culture being held in suspicion
and treated with contumely.

He'll see other orders of religious clergy
who make it their business to go around
the country on missions terrorising the
unfortunate lower classes with threats of

56 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

fire and brimstone in the hereafter, while
in their train march countless vendors of
statues, medals, scapulars and agnus Jets,
which are used by the ignorant in the place
of medicine. He'll find other orders that
live simply by begging. And on every
side, among all orders, he'll find a rapid
accumulation of property, which threatens
to turn the whole country into a clerical
kingdom. He'll meet nuns, also accumu-
lating property. He'll meet Christian
Brothers, who are in the teaching business,
midway between the secular clergy and the
religious orders. And he'll finish up, if he
is any way sensitive, by getting an im-
pression of Ireland, as a beautiful sad-faced
country that is being rapidly covered by a
black rash.

CHAPTER III

NEXT to priests, the politicians are easily
the most important class of the Irish com-
munity. It is very difficult to estimate
whether they are enemies or friends of the
tourist. They give him a great deal of
pleasure and amusement, but at the same
time they cost him a lot of money. If he
is rich he will not mind the money, and he
will know that nowadays it is not every-
where that amusement can be found. The
rich have been moaning for thousands of
years that the genius of man is capable of
inventing everything but a new vice. We
in Ireland may not be able to claim the
invention of a distinctly new vice, but our

57

58 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

politicians have undoubtedly made the
vice of politics much more interesting than
it is in other countries.

Of course, the tourist, being here only for
a short period, cannot indulge in this vice
by actual participation, but he can watch
it. If he listens to me carefully, he'll know
how to set about watching it, where to get
in touch with the more interesting types of
addicts and when to come to the country if
he gets enthusiastic and wishes to see this
vice rampant.

We have seen in our study of the priests
that the art of conversation is the only one
recognised by the priests. This breeds a
veritable passion for talking among us.
The tourist wandering in lonely country
districts may chance to see two peasants
standing in adjacent fields, at a considerable

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 59

distance from one another. Each may
have a plough or a spade, but neither is
paying any attention to his tool. They
are both talking in a loud voice. And if
the tourist is patient, he may watch them
for hours and find that they go on talking
to one another for hours, speaking very,
very loudly, so as to be able to hear one
another. Their conversation will probably
surprise the tourist, for it is conducted on
the same high level of sophistry, casuistry
and lack of reason that is common in par-
liaments, in the lectures of philosophers
and in the discussions of theologians. Here
he will see the art of politics in the germ
and he will recognise in these two simple
peasants choice material for the manu-
facture of Prime Ministers, Diplomats and
Jesuits. And he will notice, by looking

60 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

from the peasants to the land, that their
power of nonsensical argument is so great
that it has charmed the, very weeds of the
earth, which have sprung up in myriads to
listen. The hedges, ditches and houses
round about are dishevelled with riotous
amusement, listening to this discussion and
the whole countryside resembles some
drunken debauch, by the unkempt posture
in which it is sprawling, while the words
fly back and forth from one peasant to
another and the plough and the spade,
stuck idly in the earth, with their metal
shining in the sunlight, represent the
dangers of war that may follow on a dis-
agreement between the two talkers. If
the tourist waits until evening, he will see
the two peasants go to their village. After
supper the whole village gathers and car-

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 61

ries on the conversation until near midnight,
perhaps at cross-roads, perhaps in a public
house, perhaps in the house of some old
bachelor. Then, utterly exhausted with
conversation, they all go to bed.

It is this passion for conversation that
makes our politics so amusing and interest-
ing ; for once a man finds himself able to
speak well, nothing can prevent him from
seeking an audience ! A platform. A
kingdom for a platform ! This mania for
finding a platform first leads the peasant
into opening a little shop, where he can
talk all day from behind a counter. He
can bang the counter and pretend that it
is the rostrum of a public house and as his
customers come and go, he gets that insight
into human character which is necessary
for the politician. Thus the tourist will

62 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

be surprised, as he travels around the
country, to see countless numbers of huck-
sters' shops, and he will very probably
come to the conclusion that Ireland should
be called the island of hucksters, just as
Napoleon called the English a nation of
shopkeepers. But he will be mistaken if
he thinks that the hucksters are hucksters
through pure love of huckstering. They
are merely hucksters through love of con-
versation and of politics, to which huckster-
ing is an apprenticeship. All hucksters,
however, are not called to politics. Some
of them make the mistake of going immedi-
ately into the political battlefield by stand-
ing for some petty local election and getting
stuck there. The subtle hucksters wait
until they can change their huckster's shop
into a public house. Then they are at the

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 63

door of higher politics. Here again the
tourist must be warned about these public
houses. But hold . . . We must deal
separately with the public house and the
publicans.

The huckstering peasants supply the
rank and file of politicians. The leaders
and the officials come from the middle
classes. The legal profession supplies most
of them. The tourist may have been a
little surprised and somewhat offended
that I did not undertake to examine the
legal profession in this country, but he
must now understand that I did not do so
because the legal profession here is so
soaked in politics that it is impossible to
make it stand on its own feet and submit
to being examined. Let them be exam-
ined as politicians. Doctors and strong

64 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

farmers and labour leaders also act as
political leaders, but in lesser quantities.
Pig jobbers, cattle men and geniuses with-
out any economic label have been known
to come forward on occasions, but the pig
jobbers and cattle men proved too bar-
barous even for our none too polite public
life and the geniuses were exterminated as
soon as it became known that they were
geniuses. In the background of course
are the priests, who hold the scales of
judgment and decide what politicians are
to be supported or condemned. But in
this study the priests must play second
fiddle.

However in studying the character of
the politicians it must be remembered
that it was the priests who moulded them,
by regulating their education. And as

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 65

we have seen that the priests regard the
state as an enemy to be exploited, it is
only natural that our politicians do like-
wise. Thus, although patriotism is held
in greater esteem in this country than in
any other country in the world, there is
no other country in the world where
patriotism is less in evidence among pol-
iticians and among the general mass of
the community. For patriotism and the
state are so closely allied that love of one
is necessarily love of the other. And if
any man considers the state an enemy and
an institution to be exploited, it follows
naturally that he is no patriot. Thus the
amazed tourist will see that it is very
fashionable for Irish politicians who are
not in the government to denounce the
government and then when they get into

66 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

the government it is equally fashionable
for them to use the powers of government
for the purpose of robbing the country.

In point of fact, as a result of clerical
education, the whole population suffers
from an extraordinary psychological dis-
ease and the politicians, being that portion
of the population that finds greatest expres-
sion for its energies, suffer from this disease
to an extraordinary degree. This disease
is the attempt to unite mysticism with
reality. It is all very well in religious
matters to start off by saying that God is
a mystery and then to prove his existence
by logic, because after all God is a hypoth-
esis and his hypothetical existence cannot
interfere with the growth of crops or with
the rainfall. Further, the Jesuits who
make it their business to discuss the status

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 67

of God are so clever with words and are
so well trained in the matter of juggling
with words that this dangerous business
has no evil effect on them ; at least so
far as the public can see, although they
may very well hide those that break
under the strain and become jabbering
idiots. But politics, or the business of
managing the state, is altogether different
from the business of regulating the affairs
of the Heavenly World. And nothing
concerned with the state should be a
mystery or hypothetical.

The disease of which I have spoken
manifests itself among our politicians prin-
cipally in the belief that Ireland is a living
being ; a woman in fact. This woman is
claimed by them to be a very beautiful
creature and very unfortunate and they

68 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

consider themselves in duty bound to
succour her. They love her under different
names and it appears that the wench has
a very great number of aliases ; in other
words that she has changed her lovers
more often than she should if she wanted
to lead a quiet life. At one moment she
is Caitlin Ni Houlihain, at another Roisin
Dubh, at another The Old Woman of Beara.
She changes her name to suit the particular
character of the politician that courts her.

Having started with the hypothesis that
Ireland is a woman, the politicians conduct
themselves exactly like suitors. They use
every means, fair and foul, to win possess-
ion of the woman's body, for all is fair in
love and war. When they have obtained
possession of her body, they remember
suddenly that they are not the first by any

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 69

means who have had that pleasure and in
jealous rage they loot her of all her
trinkets and then desert her. Their suc-
cessors, very probably finding her pen-
niless and in rags, call her the old hag of
Beara. They in turn pull out her teeth,
cut her about the face and force her to go
and beg for them, from her children in the
United States of America. No politician
seriously thinks of making a decent home
for the woman, of educating the children
she has had by former lovers or of trying
to cure her of her naughty ways ; which
they might very well succeed in doing if
they treated her kindly and remained
faithful to her. They are doubtless pre-
vented from adopting this latter humane
course by the teaching of the priests, who,
as we have seen, regard women and the

70 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

amorous pleasure of intercourse with them
as the source of all evil.

This must be clearly borne in mind by
the tourist if he ever hopes to understand
Irish politics and if he does not under-
stand them he cannot properly enjoy
them. And he must further under-
stand that since the priests regard the
salvation of the human soul of much
greater importance than the feeding, cleans-
ing and civilising of the human body and
the human mind, so do the politicians
regard the soul of the nation as of greater
consequence than the mere welfare of
the nation's citizens. Like true libertines
they preach sermons to their lady between
embraces. And even, when by their greed
and stupidity they have reduced the woman
to starvation, they point with a proud

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 71

finger at other wealthy countries, where
politicians are not mystical and say that
Holy Ireland is above such coarse ambit-
ions as wealth, culture, bathrooms, tooth
brushes and machinery.

However, I must say that when our
politicians attain power they show signs
of trying to become realistic and they seem
to sneer at mysticism ; but the priests
are there in the background and it is so
far impossible to do anything really sen-
sible while the priests stand threatening in
the background. Because even though the
politicians discover that Ireland's body is
more important than her soul, they also
know that if they act on that discovery the
priests are going to join the opposition and
throw them out. So the politicians who
form the government are always forced to

72 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

be cynical ruffians and to speak in divers
tongues and to conduct the business of the
state like a man playing many instruments
simultaneously. As it were, they have the
deafening drum of mysticism tied to their
chest and the cymbals of patriotism
strapped to their elbows, while other instru-
ments are tied to their toes and to their
hands and a penny whistle is held between
their teeth. By the discordant roar of
these many instruments everybody is con-
fused and the politicians try to play to
every sort of an audience.

Of course the tourist will want facts.
He will principally want to know why
taxation is so high, why Dublin is the most
expensive city in Europe, why Irish
whiskey is dearer in Ireland than it is in
England, why Irish roads are bad for

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 73

motorists compared to English roads. He
will accuse the politicians of causing all
this expense and inconvenience to the
tourist. He may also say that if the poli-
ticians were more concerned with their
proper business than with the soul of
Ireland they would see to it that the
art of cookery was taught in the schools,
so that Irish hotels and restaurants might
be able to feed the tourist in a civilised
manner. I admit all that, but I beg of the
tourist to remember that people who seek
the spectacle of vice must pay extra. High
taxes, bad food, bad roads, expensive
whiskey and slow trains might be an incon-
venience without recompense in a dull
country like Switzerland, but in Ireland
the pleasure to be had from politics makes
one forget all the drawbacks.

74 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

Is there any tourist in the whole world
of such dull wit as not to be moved to an
ecstacy of delight by the spectacle of a
whole nation arguing for a number of
years about the nature of an oath ? In
most countries wars are waged over intel-
ligible things like territory, money and
real estate, but our politicians waged a civil
war over the wording of an oath. Even
after the war had been finished, they still
went on arguing. The argument has now
ceased and the result of the whole business
is that the position is exactly what it was
before the war and the argument. Nobody
knows yet what is an oath and which oath
of the oaths about which the war was waged
is the better oath. Indeed, as a result of the
war and the argument the people have
come to the conclusion that an oath is

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 75

worth very little, and they abuse it on
every manner of occasion to the great
detriment of the state. The tourist will
remember the casuistry of the two peasants
he heard talking in the fields, by the idle
ploughs. He will also remember that
famous assembly of clergy that argued for
a long time about the possession by woman
of an immortal soul. Then he will under-
stand how an extremely intelligent people
like ourselves could argue for years about
an oath. I know he'll find it amusing, for
the tourist in matters like this is a rascal
without conscience. Just as people at a
theatre never pause in their laughter to see
the human suffering behind the clown's
grin, so the laughing tourist will not
trouble to see the hunger and misery in
the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes of our

76 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

people, while our politicians are arguing
and laying waste the country because of
an oath.

However, let the tourist have his day.
I feel it is my duty, as a man who has a
sense of the dignity of his country, to let
the tourist have as much amusement as pos-
sible in return for all the mulcting from
which he suffers. Just as he got in touch
with the parish priest, he must now get in
touch with the politician. In this case he
will not go to a country district. There
he would only get small fry like county
councillors and the secretaries of branches
of political parties and mysterious youths
who are members of mysterious organisa-
tions, known only to the police. Dublin
is the hunting ground in this instance.
Dublin is the seat of government. It is

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 77

the headquarters of the principal banks.
The treasury is there. The important
politicians, therefore, never go very far
away from it. For as the honey bee settles
on the honeyed flower, so does the poli-
tician settle near the money.

In this instance, it is absolutely no use
for the tourist to go up to a politician and
make him a donation of five or ten pounds
for his cause. The tourist must pose as
somebody whom the politician thinks of
importance. If he wants to go among the
government politicians he should pose as a
foreign capitalist who has money to invest
in the country. Among the opposition,
who are at present the party known as
Fianna Fail, he should pose as an American
of Irish descent, who is fairly well off for
an American and wants to start a newspaper

78 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

in Ireland on strictly national lines. In
this case he should stress the importance of
bringing home to the government the
blame for having started the Civil War, as
that seems to be the principal plank in the
programme of the opposition. If he wants
to approach the labour leaders, he should
stay at his hotel and spare himself the
trouble, because they are dull and identical
with labour leaders in his own country. If
he wants to approach the revolutionary
groups, he should pose as having come
from Russia.

Among the government politicians, he
should be extremely tactful, and point out
to each that all the others are incompetent
and owe their existence in political life
solely to the man to whom he is talking.
In return for this just remark, the poli-

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 79

tician will unbosom his inmost soul to the
tourist, who is posing as a capitalist. He
will point out that of course he, the poli-
tician, is of different stuff from all the
other politicians but that he is hampered in
his efforts to place the country on its feet
by the poor material with which he has to
work. He will tell the tourist that the
peasants are hopeless. The opposition is
appealing to the greed and ignorance of the
peasants and for this reason, in order to
counter the opposition, the government
must do likewise. In the same manner, he
will tell the tourist that in order to counter
the opposition, the government has to toy
with the idea of resurrecting the Irish
language, which is the chief plank in the
opposition platform, next to proving that
the government was responsible for the

8o TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

Civil War. This toying with the lang-
uage, he will say, wastes a lot of time and
energy, but it is going to be gradually
sidetracked and will eventually die out, as
soon as the last native speaker has emi-
grated to America ; because the politician
will be careful to point out, as a pheno-
menon discovered by a new statistical
system invented by the government, that
it is impossible to prevent native speakers
from emigrating to America, for the sup-
posed reason that they feel more at home
in that country than in Ireland and have
more relatives there. Personally, I doubt
this. I am rather inclined to believe that
the reason why it is impossible to keep
Irish speakers in Ireland is that since they
live on doles from their relatives in America
they go over to that country in order to

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 81

be nearer their source of revenue. But
the politician will point out to the supposed
capitalist that the government's policy of
reviving the language and cutting the
ground from under the feet of the opposi-
tion is in no wise hampered by the dis-
appearance of the native speakers. The
government have hired a few men in
Dublin to manufacture Irish words accord-
ing as they are needed.

When he hears that the tourist is a
capitalist who has got money to invest, the
politician will be very glad indeed, because
he has got one or more relatives who are
quite willing to be directors and he him-
self might be willing to have some interest
in the business ; because he never knows
when he may lose office and while he is in
office he must feather his nest, since it is

82 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

more than likely that he had no nest
before he came into office. He is quite
ready to get the state to subsidise the
tourist's projected industry, because, as we
have seen before, no politician in this
country considers the state in any other
light than as an institution to be exploited.
He will treat the tourist to a dinner or two.
He will likely take him to a race meeting and
tip him a few winners. He will take him
to a dance and to a party, where the tourist
may meet other notabilities and many
women, without any very great attraction,
who are ready to lionise him because he is
a foreigner.

On the other hand, if the tourist prefers
to meet a politician of the opposition camp,
he must refrain from meeting a politician
of the government camp, because he will

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 83

be considered an enemy of the country by
the opposition if he is seen in the company
of one of the government. I must say
that on second thoughts I don't advise the
tourist to mix with the politicians of the
opposition. Not being in office, they are
poor, and being poor, they are more in
the power of the national characteristic vir-
tue of Puritanism, which fattens on empty
pockets. They will oppress the tourist
with rambling accounts of all the murders
committed by members of the government,
of the corruption practised by all branches
of the Civil Service, of the inefficiency of
the police and with lamentations on the
dreadful state of the country. I must
warn the tourist not to pay much heed to
these statements. Our politicians are inept
and perhaps a trifle corrupt, like all poli-

84 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

ticians, but as a race we are not murder-
ously inclined, and even the members of
the government are quite harmless fellows.
And I must say that our police are the most
efficient force in Europe. So let the tourist
sleep quietly in his bed. In fact, he may
take the statements of the opposition as a
lot of stuff and nonsense, just as he would
take the statements of any jealous lover
who is moaning on the doorstep of his
mistress, while his rival is within making a
merry noise with champagne glasses and
reclining in boudoirs, whence gentle sounds
ensue, suggestive of kisses.

But it would pay the tourist to make the
acquaintance of the revolutionary groups.
As I stated already, he might claim to have
come from Russia or some other country
that is reputed by the newspapers to have

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 85

gold to throw about for the purpose of
starting revolutions. Why Russia has got
the reputation of having gold to scatter
broadcast for this purpose I know not, be-
cause she is poorer than our country, and
goodness knows we are poor enough. But
she has that reputation, just as in England
we have the reputation of being violent,
whereas ours is the most peaceful country
in Europe, and we are guilty of violence
only in our minds and on our tongues.
The tourist must understand this, when he
comes in contact with our revolutionary
groups. Their passwords, their secret
movements and their hair-raising pro-
grammes must be taken with a smile
because they mean nothing of it. Here
again he will see the result of the priestly
culture of the art of conversation, for the

86 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

activities of these groups never lead any
further than conversation, unless it be some
utterly purposeless act committed by what
Dostoievsky called the" Contemplatives " :
those fellows who meditate for years
and then suddenly, for no apparent reason,
burn a house, murder a man, or go on a
pilgrimage to Lourdes or Jerusalem. Of
revolutionary groups, with constructive
programmes and with leaders that are
clear-thinking and ambitious men, the
tourist will see no sign here. Our educa-
tional system does not provide for them.
Yet there is no country in the world where
a Cromwell or a Lenin is more needed.

Let the tourist then be warned against
Irish politics and let him have no more
truck with Irish politics than he would have
with Irish fairies. We have had many

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 87

instances in the last and the present genera-
tions of foreigners coming here as simple
tourists and staying here in the role of
patriots who want to free the country.
But their efforts seem to have resulted in
giving us more politicians, whereas if the
country is really to be freed, it should be
freed from priests, politicians, ignorance
and various other diseases. The love of
woman in the flesh may lead man to grave
excesses. But the love of a mystical woman
like Caitlin Ni Houlihain does untold
harm. For that reason, let all foreigners
keep a grip on their purses and on their
minds, lest they be induced by the whisper-
ing winds that float about our beautiful
mountains to see spirits in the air. There
is where, I am told, Irish mystical patriot-
ism originates The country needs real

88 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

patriotism badly, and it oozes in red blood
from rich beefsteak, just as it does in
England and in other prosperous countries.
If the tourist wants to benefit his children
who may come as tourists to Ireland, he
should mock and jeer at our mysticism
until he shames us out of it. Then we
may learn to cook him a good meal and
not try to use him as our solitary source of
real revenue. For if our politics progress
as they are at present, our whole population
will shortly be receiving a pension from
the state and there will be no other means
of levying the revenue to pay this common
pension than by mulcting tourists. This
is true. The present government have
pensioned a great number. The opposi-
tion, if they come into power, are likely
to pension as many more. Add to that the

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 89

number of politicians who do no useful
work. Add to that all the priests who do
no useful work. Add the lawyers who do
no useful work. Add to that the police,
the army and the civil services, who do not
produce wealth. Add the shopkeepers
who do not produce wealth but merely
distribute it. There remain only the peas-
ants and Guinness's brewery and a few
industries that are rapidly dying out.
The peasants are going to America as
rapidly as they can. Those that remain
are living on the old age pensions of their
fathers and mothers, and cursing the gov-
ernment for not providing them with
sufficient doles. Nobody thinks of the
solution of the problem of this universal
poverty and universal discussion.
What is it ?

CHAPTER IV

WHAT should be the attitude of the
tourist towards the publicans ? Righteous
fury and nothing less. If any man in
Ireland robs the tourist it is the publican.
He robs him in every way that it is con-
ceivable to rob a tourist. Here it must be
understood that I refuse to consider the
case of those tourists who are inhuman tee-
totallers. For any tourist who refuses to
recognise that the most beneficent pro-
ducts of human labour are the grape, the
hop and the ear of barley is a low ruffian
and only fit to be incarcerated in some
remote part of Texas, where throats are as

dry as the climate and the lack of invigor-
90

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 91

ating stimulants produces a mania called
Fundamentalism ; which is presumably a
disease first discovered by Dr. Rabelais, for
he was always referring to the falling of
that part of the human anatomy in dire
stress. I cannot conceive of a tourist going
on a tour anywhere, unless it be for the
purpose of drinking at leisure. Although
not a "great drinker myself, because of
poverty and constitutional disability, I
have noticed, with envy, that when my
own countrymen go on a little tour any-
where, be it to a distant* race meeting or
a football match, or to see a ruin, or to
attend a congress, or a political meeting,
or a funeral, or a wedding — in other words,
when a party of my countrymen set out
anywhere for any purpose beyond the
three-mile limit of their wives and families,

92 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

their tour becomes a drinking bout and
they forget the purpose of their tour, if it
had any purpose other than an excuse to
get away beyond the three-mile limit of
their wives and families. This tour, or
even the sight of it, seems to me to be the
most glorious sort of human amusement,
for it combines all the human concepts of
happiness, motion, leisure, company, free-
dom from observation, intoxication and,
mayhap, the sweets of love sucked by the
way. In this way, when I see a charabanc
laden with Dublin dock labourers coming
out from the city and heading for the
country, en route no doubt to make a
pious pilgrimage to St. Kevin's bed at
Glendalough, I make a mental bet that
they'll never get farther than Tallon's of
Enniskerry. Or if they do pass Tallon's,

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 93

will they pass Tally's of Kilmacanogue ?
Or perhaps they will pass Talty's and
climb the Sugar Loaf as far as the Moun-
tain Tavern ? And even farther than that.
. . . But it's certain that they'll never go
beyond Roundwood. For even if en route
they drink dry the three public houses I
have mentioned, Roundwood will be well
able to floor them. Then delirious with
happiness and perhaps with a multitude of
bandages on their skulls they return to Dub-
lin, roaring out bawdy songs. Ah ! These
are sights that might still cheer Oisin, the
son of Fionn, if he returned to the country
from the Land of Youth on his old white
steeplechasing nag. But if he saw a party
of dry Americans on the same tour and
mistook them for Irish people, I'm afraid
he'd lay waste the whole countryside as far

94 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

as the Yellow House at Rathfarnham.
There no doubt he'd be so thirsty after the
slaughter that the good proprietor of that
famous pub could make him blind drunk
and save the city from sacking.

This little rambling discourse was under-
taken with the express purpose of showing
the tourist that the glorious instinct for
revelry is still alive in our country and that
is indeed a great tribute to our people,
considering the monstrous hindrances that
are placed in the way of drinking and
revelry by the publicans. The tourist, if
he is a drinking man, will have often heard
it said of some worthy fellow that he would
drink whiskey out of a sewer. Well, that
man that would drink whiskey out of a
sewer would probably not notice that the
average Irish public house is different from

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 95

a decent tavern in any other country. But
he would be the only one. No decent
tourist will fail to notice that the average
Irish public house is a melancholy and
often foul-smelling hut, where a dour-
visaged individual stands behind a counter
and looks at his customer with a forbidding
glance. Very often, on the counter, be-
side the glass that is pushed towards him,
the tourist will see a great piece of salty
American bacon, or a little sack of flour on
which somebody has spilled some sugar or
some hayseed. On the floor, among the
dried expectoration of all the customers
that have visited the place for twenty
years, he'll see new and ancient refuse of
all sorts, and in the corner perhaps he may
see an old bitch of a dog that has given
birth to pups on a litter of straw. He'll

96 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

swallow his whiskey and feel a pang of
terror as it goes down his throat and he'll
rush out into the open air wondering
whether water or poison has made the
whiskey taste different. I can assure him
that both guesses are right. Or if he
drank the wine of the country, Guinness's
black beer in bottle, he will wonder to an
equal degree how such a famous drink can
taste so sour, until he chances to read in
the newspapers the numerous public apolo-
gies that are offered to the firm of Guinness
by the publicans that have sold a mixture
of bog water and boot blacking as stout. If
the tourist is cycling, walking, motoring
or riding in remote places and he gets
hungry in the course of the journey of one
hundred miles or so from one good hotel
to another, he may hope to get a meal at

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 97

a public house. He may have read Dick-
ens, who knew so well how to describe the
pleasure of arrival at an inn and of getting
the smell of roast beef or of chicken broth.
Alas ! Tea, bread of a kind and salt
mixed with a little American bacon is the
only food he can find. And let him not
ask for this food in a public house. As we
say, " they'll look sideways at ye." And
this look will be for the purpose of seeing
which part of your anatomy is the most
susceptible to a good kick. For it must
be known that an Irish publican does not
believe that a customer should eat. He
should only drink. Food is troublesome
to cook and the profit is not more, at the
highest, than one hundred per cent. But
drink costs very little trouble to serve in a
glass that has not been cleaned very well,

98 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

and the profit is anything up to a thousand
per cent.

My tourist is undoubtedly a civilised
man, a man who is aware of the customs
prevalent among human beings, during
the great ages of history. And he will
know that eating and drinking are the
foundation stones of all true culture. How
do people eat ? How do they drink ?
Answer me these two questions, and I will
answer and tell you whether these people
in question are great, civilised and cul-
tured, or whether they are just barbarous
louts. During the reign of Queen Eliza-
beth in England, and again in the eight-
eenth century, the English ate and drank
like Gods. For who has not envied the
age when one could see with Shakespeare
a " fair round belly with fat capon lined " ?

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 99

In France and over the Continent, the
reigns of Francis I and of Charles V and of
the great pope that arrived in Rome with
a horde of mistresses synchronised with an
age when feasting and drinking were regal,
and as a result of this good feeding and great
drinking, art, culture, beauty and genius
flourished in abundance. The tourist will
know this, and when he sees his meal of
bread, tea and salty American bacon set
before him in a dusky, murky room, full
of photographs of popes and priests and
patriots, he'll rush forth and execrate the
name of Ireland. For here, food or drink
does not receive that respect that is owed
them, considering their divine purpose in
preparing the human body and the human
mind for the fulfilment of human greatness.
Here one must eat like a hermit in the

ioo TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

desert, in order that the parish priest may
have abundance for his table. Here one
must drink, standing up like a cab-horse at
a drinking trough, black beverages that
remind us of the death that is the common
destiny of us all. And one must drink
quickly, on an empty stomach, drink after
drink, diluted and weakened, so that the
publican may rake in quickly, with little
labour, enough money to make his sons
priests, doctors, lawyers and politicians,
and then to build a new church or repair
an old one, as a duty to God and to save
his immortal soul in payment for all the
robbery he has committed.

There should be no calling more noble
than that of the country publican. No
calling, to my mind, has contributed more
to the development of civilisation. For at

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 101

the village inn, the village wits are sharp-
ened, and the village genius is fanned into
flame by the fumes of good liquor and
the competition and adulation of other
minds. There the pleasure and profit of
association is discovered, and it may very
well have happened that it was at an inn
that the first city was planned, the first
theatre, the first song. There new food is
tested, being brought hither by some
traveller and brought to the households by
husbands who urge their wives to cook
similar dishes. There that silence and
introspection which leads to insanity is
driven from the mind of the peasant by
the laughter of his fellows and the cheerful
gleam of polished pewter and the cheerful
roar of great inn fires in winter. There
thought of passion springs into the heart of

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

youth, fanned by wine and spirits, and the
race is perpetuated by means of the courage
and energy generated in the munificent
inn. The damsel who seemed to stand
walled within her skirts as within a fortress
stands nude and beseeching and beautiful
before the mind of -the village gallant who
staggers from the good inn with vine leaves
in his hair. And the fat, laughing pub-
lican, with bare arms folded on his capa-
cious belly, is the god of all pleasure and of
all good to his customers. No matter how
remote from the city and from the centre
of civilisation, there in the inn, the great
rights, the great races, the great battles,
the great acts of heroism are recounted and
commented upon, and they live again and
are enacted amidst shouts and bravos and
bursts of laughter on the bar-room floor,

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 103

while the amber-coloured beer and the
gleaming wine and the sly whiskey are
poured from glass and pewter measure into
wide-open throats. No priestly confessional
can wash away sin as effectually as the bar-
room can wash away the cares and miseries
of existence and within its precincts the
devils of sorrow and death cannot find
service, no matter how loud they may shout.
For they are forgotten, despised, unknown.
Forsooth, there is the land of youth.

I speak of good inns and of merry pub-
licans, men who are conscious of their great
position in society and of their duty to their
fellow men. But of Irish publicans and of
Irish public houses the exact opposite must
be told. There is no darker stain on our
national honour than our public houses.
And I am firmly convinced that the cause

104 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

of this is the close association between the
publicans and the priests. For the pub-
licans are, as a general rule, the fathers of
our priests, and the perverted conception of
the universe and of man's mission on this
earth taught by the priests leads the pub-
licans into those evil ways of which I have
spoken. Old Job, that most disreputable
of Jews, scraping his filthy sores on a dung-
hill instead of going to a doctor, seems to
be the patron saint of Irish publicans ;
but our publicans have apparently dis-
covered more about the habits of Job than
has been disclosed in the Bible, for, accord-
ing to the publicans, he also had a fair-
sized treasure hidden in the dunghill, and
that is why he was sitting there and why
he could not go to a doctor and put it in
danger of being stolen.

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 105

Now that I have told the tourist the
truth about the Irish publican, it is as well
to remind him that there are a few honour-
able exceptions. There are a few manly
fellows that struggle against the tide of
dirt, corruption and melancholy, and my
friend, Mr. Byrne of Duke Street, Dublin,
must understand that anything I have
said to the detriment of Irish public
houses has positively no reference to his
excellent house. There is a house where
one may find good company and good
liquor at any hour of the day or night, and
a good host into the bargain. There are
others, scattered about the country, but
they are very few, and it would pay the
government to draw up a list of good
public houses and thus save the honour of
the country. But it is too much to expect

io6 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

of any government. The publicans are so
powerful here, almost as powerful as the
priests, that it would be suicidal for any
government, no matter how powerful, to
gainsay them. There has been an effort
to limit their number, but it is still difficult
to find a small village where there are less
than ten. The numbers of these public
houses would lead one to suppose that we
are a nation of drunkards, and yet we
drink less than any nation in Europe.
The cost of the drink consumed in our
country is very great, but that is no proof
that we drink a lot. We simply cannot
afford it. The price is too high.

CHAPTER V

THE tourist must pity and admire the
peasants. He may also despise them, be-
cause any man that is deserving of pity is
also deserving of contempt. But it is only
an Irish peasant that can merit at one and
the same time both contempt and admira-
tion. Of course the opinions of a tourist
are worth very little, as he judges every-
thing from a purely selfish and material
point of view. Like George Moore, con-
fronted with the Venus de Milo, he only
thinks of writing his name in pencil on the
statue's rump. His attitude to the Irish
peasant will be one merely of curiosity, and

he will carry in his brain all that he has
107

io8 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

ever heard of the Irish peasant, and he will
be pleased if the peasant is like what he
has heard and displeased if he is different.
The tourist may take it for granted at
once that the Irish peasant is quite different
from what he has been painted. English
writers and historians have claimed him to
be a good-natured buffoon, no doubt with
the desire that he might become one and
remain one and remaining one after
having become one, go on paying rents
and living in huts and tipping his hat
to officials, and if he saw an English-
man fouling the outer wall of his cabin,
asking him courteously to do a like service,
with greater comfort, to the inner walls.
Such is the peasant of a conquered country,
and, indeed, of all countries where the
feudal system prevails and the lords have

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 109

to use field glasses when trying to pick
out a peasant from among their dogs.
But in my own generation, the Irish
peasant has become quite a different char-
acter. He is in process of transformation,
and goodness only knows where he may
get to and what he may become. Per-
sonally, I like him, and he is the only
natural type of human being in this
country that I consider an honour to the
country and to mankind. As he forms
ninety per cent, of the community, it will
be seen that I consider the Irish race a very
fine race. But, like a mangy dog, the
peasant needs a good and continuous treat-
ment with some stringent sort of medicine
in order to rid him of all the parasites I
have named in preceding chapters.

Of course the parasites do not wish him

no TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

to clean himself, and the literary hirelings
of the parasites are even more fanatical
than the English Government was for-
merly in trying to persuade the Irish
peasant that he is a harmless idiot and that
he should remain one. In a later chapter
I propose to deal with those literary hire-
lings that still dishonour our country by
trying to persuade us that the peasant is a
babbling child of God, who is innocent of
all ambition, ignorant of guile, midway
between heaven and earth, enveloped in a
cloud of mystical adoration of the priests
and of Caitlin Ni Houlihain, the Raparee
with a pike in his thatch, the Croppy Boy
confessing his sins on his way to the
scaffold to suffer a patriotic martyrdom, a
violent primitive who runs wild, naked
and raving mad, once the gentle hand of

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 1 1 1

the priest is raised from his back, a holy,
sexless ascetic whose loins never cry out
for the pleasure of love, a quantity as
fixed and unchangeable as the infallibility
of the Pope. If a peasant is indeed such a
fellow, then there is no hope for the race,
and I am wrong in thinking that our race
has a great future, and that out of the
loins of our washed peasantry is going to
spring a tribe of human beings that is
going to do honour to mankind.

No doubt all peasants in all countries are
used by frantic writers to form the basis
of some idealistic concept of the universe
or the basis for a jingoistic patriotism.
Even the English yokel, whom I know
personally to have no more than sixty
words or so in his vocabulary, is always
referred to as a sturdy yeoman and the

1 1 2 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

material out of which English greatness is
built, the backbone of the country, and a
great deal of other rubbish. Of course,
the truth about the greatness of the English
is that they save all except the most stupid
from the horrors of a peasant life and use
these most stupid as serfs and cannon
fodder. No responsible newspaper will
allow an English writer to blether about
the superior virtues of a peasant life as
compared to that of a town life, or that the
peasant is the superior of the townsman.
From the casual observations that I have
made in England, both in the cities and
in the rural districts, it seems to me that
the London cockney, when well fed and
fairly well informed, is the superior in
every way of any peasant in any country,
physically, morally and mentally.

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 1 1 3

Our writers, who are paid to preach the
righteousness and the divine mission of the
priests, exalt the peasants by ascribing to
them virtues that demoralise and degrade
them, just because our towns are a disgrace
to civilisation and morality and the Grace
of God, which must result from such
numbers of priests must fall among the
peasants, since it does not fall among the
townspeople. On the other hand, while I
do not ascribe to our peasants in their
present state any exalted qualities of civili-
sation and culture, I see in them the germs
of future greatness.

Peasants, as compared to civilised human
beings, are children. All civilised races
have begun by scraping the earth, and it is
only when they stop scraping the earth
and build cities that they grow up and be-

ii4 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

come responsible, thoughtful citizens, that
are not surprised at natural phenomena
and that struggle to obtain mastery over
nature by the construction of machinery,
by the investigation of unknown places on
the earth and in the firmament, by the
destruction of old Gods and by the forma-
tion of new ones, by the development of
the human mind through intricate pro-
cesses of thought, by a continual accumula-
tion of knowledge, and by learning to
offer to culture and to art the respect that
was formerly given to spooks and fetishes
by savage men and peasants.

As in the life of the individual, childhood
is the age where the brute instincts hold
sway over the undeveloped mind, so in the
life of the human species the peasant stage
is that in which man is also under the con-

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 115

trol of the brute instincts. The word in
this instance is divorced from its usual mean-
ing. For peasants and children have many
endearing qualities. Their laughter for in-
stance, the ease with which they amuse
themselves, their simplicity, their lack of
vulgarity, that dreadful quality which
seems impossible to disassociate from the
struggle to pass from a peasant life to that
of an educated person and which it is
impossible to analyse excepting by adding
to it the word bourgeois. The peasant has
also another quality which makes him very
charming, and that is his uniformity with
nature. Seeing him with a cow, his slow
gait and his downcast head, strike no jarring
note. Even his jaws moving slowly as
they chew a wisp of straw move in unison
with those of the cow that is chewing her

n6 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

cud. He responds to the seasons like a
bird or beast, clothing himself heavily or
lightly, ploughing, reaping, sowing, or
hiding in his hut, according as the cold or
heat of nature bids him. He reproduces
his kind methodically, without any concept
of romantic love, and he dies practically
without effort, since his imagination is not
strong enough to torment him with visions.

But on the other hand, his life is as
miserable as that of a child, and he is really
as cruel as a child and as selfish and as
obstinate. He has all the horrible qualities
of the child. Just as the child is a menace
to the household, so is the peasant a menace
to society and to good government.

And as nothing is more pitiable than a
father with a score of children, so is the
state, in which ninety per cent, of the

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 117

citizens are peasants. The father with
twenty children is haggard, with furtive
eyes and furrowed forehead. He is thread-
bare. He is penniless. He has to shun the
companionship of his fellow men. Be-
cause of the dread menace of hunger in his
house, he is narrow minded and bigoted, a
hater of all progress, a toady to his superi-
ors and a violent hater of all pleasure and
leisure, since he has none himself. His
house is like a bedlam, and no guest cares
to enter the place, for the number of
the children has rendered it impossible for
the father to control them or teach them
manners. They grow up wild and in a
natural state, and it's odds on their burning
his house for their amusement, or cutting
him into small portions and drowning him
in a river like a cat, or robbing him of all

1 1 8 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

he possesses and turning him out of doors.
Terrified by their numbers, he uses all
sorts of subterfuges in the hope of keeping
them within bounds, and he is afraid to
give them any decent sort of education,
which would develop their natural traits
along decent lines, lest they discover his
failings and despise him.

In the same way, a state that has a multi-
tude of peasants has to spend a great
portion of its time using as many tricks
and subterfuges as a conjuror. And es-
pecially a state like ours, that is based on
the mystical power of priests and extra-
ordinary politicians, has to resort to divers
evil tricks for keeping the peasants in their
state of ignorance and helplessness. For
nothing makes a man more cunning than
hunger and adversity. And our politicians,

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 119

being the curious sort of people that they
are, under the impression that their business
is to rob the state and not to civilise the
country, just try to keep the peasants quiet
instead of trying to educate them.

There are countries like France where
the peasant is a valuable economic asset to
the state. But in our country, a great
number of the peasants are of absolutely no
value to the state. A great number of
them are a part of the national debt. Not
only do they not produce a surplus of
wealth, but they do not produce enough to
feed themselves. For this they blame the
government. Their sole capital seems to
be a capacity for producing children. They
manage to rear these children somehow or
other and send them to the United States,
where the children go to work and feed

120 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

their parents. Those peasants who are not
clever enough to send their children to the
United States in time develop famines and
portion off some of their number to die of
hunger. Then there is a national collec-
tion and the proceeds of this charity is
used to send the children of the remaining
peasants to the United States, whence they
send home money to feed their parents.
Thus the twin ambitions of a great portion
of our peasants are to send their children
to the United States and to go to Heaven
after death. The state makes no effort to
change these ambitions, for it is obvious
that if the peasants changed their minds
and stayed at home, their numbers would
become so great that they would get out of
control and murder their father the
state.

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 121

Of those peasants that do produce wealth
an almost similar story has to be told.
Instead of producing children in great
numbers they produce cattle, which they
sell in England. This money, resulting
from the sale of cattle, might be of use to
the country if it were not used in the manu-
facture of publicans, lawyers, priests and
politicians. Thus, no matter how you
look at the peasant, he is not an economic
asset. He is merely the mainstay of the
extraordinary and unstable state of society
prevalent here at present. And it seems
to me most unfair that the tourist should
be called upon to pay for all this ; for now,
having seen that the peasants, upon whom
we depended so far, produce nothing of
the real revenue of the country, there
remain only the tourist and Guinness's

122 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

Brewery to pay the piper. Where else
would it come from ? Answer me that.
There is no Manna nowadays, and even
if there were, no Jewish food would fall
in this priest-ridden country, so hostile to
Jews.

Another extraordinary arrangement in
this country is responsible for the useless-
ness of the peasants as a national asset.
That is the distribution of the land. Prac-
tically all the rich land of Ireland is lying
idle and uninhabited in the centre of the
country, while the great bulk of the
peasants live on the rocky coasts and among
the rocky mountains. This is quite true,
although the tourist may want to see it
before he believes it. I can explain it in
no other way than by supposing that the
priests have ordained it so ; finding it

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 123

easier to send souls to Heaven from rocky,
barren land, where life is miserable and
fasting is easy, than from rich juicy land,
where life is comfortable and fasting diffi-
cult. That may not be the case, really,
but there is a plausibility about it which is
worth consideration. Whatever is the ex-
planation, the tourist should look into the
matter, for it concerns him very gravely.
While the peasants, who are, after all, the
workmen that supply the tourist's table,
live on rocky land, the tourist will be
without vegetables.

The Irish peasant lives on tea, bread,
potatoes and sometimes American bacon,
though that is a delicacy which is only
tasted by the richer peasants. He does
not object to cabbages, which he cultivates
occasionally, but he abhors all other vege-

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 124

tables. Turnips and mangolds he culti-
vates for his cattle, and he sometimes eats
a turnip. But he considers that lettuces,
carrots, radishes, parsnips, peas, beans,
spinach and cress are only food for animals.
And indeed he would not risk giving them
to his cow. He rarely drinks, for he rarely
has money to buy drink. Only on fair
days, when he has sold cattle or pigs and
has received luck penny from the buyer,
does he go into a public house and, standing
at the counter, rapidly drinks, one after the
other, from six to fourteen pints of porter.
Then he is dragged home by his wife,
singing or weeping, according to his tem-
perament, to another long period of absti-
nence. He very rarely dances, sings or
laughs, as there does not seem to be any-
thing to gain by these amusements and

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 125

perhaps if the gombeen man caught him
at either pastime there might be trou-
ble.

For the tourist must understand, finally
and definitely, that the pivot of Irish life
is not even the peasant, although we had
hopes in that direction, but the gombeen
man. What is a gombeen man ? He is
the vice of usury. He is not really an
occupation, because he appears under
many different guises, and as a rule under
many different guises simultaneously. But
as a general description it suffices to
describe him as the man for whom the
peasant works.

We have seen that the peasant is ex-
ploited by the priests and by the poli-
ticians, but the greatest exploitation is that
done by the gombeen man. It works out

ia6 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

this way. A young peasant couple get
married. As a rule their marriage por-
tion is exhausted by the marriage cere-
monies, the priest's fees and the furnishing
of the home. If the husband had little
drinking bills, these bills absorb whatever
is left of the money brought in by the
wife. The husband is sure to have brought
in no money, as it required the expenditure
of whatever money he had to summon up
courage to get married. Finding them-
selves without money, they have to go to
the local shopkeeper for credit until their
pigs are fit for sale or until the next cattle
fair arrives. The shopkeeper accepts their
stock as a sort of pledge. When they sell
their stock they may have just enough to
pay off the debt and begin again on credit.
The shopkeeper is not particularly anxious

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 127

to have them pay off all the debt at any
time. He advises them generously to
keep a little for the priest or for the current
political movement to save the country.
For the more they get into debt the better
it is for the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper
knows the value of their land and he will
give them credit until they have mort-
gaged in this manner not only their stock
and their labour power but their real
estate to about half its value. Then the
shopkeeper may suggest that they emi-
grate to Canada or the United States, and
in return for their fares he takes their
land.

It is only in rare instances that the shop-
keeper or gombeen man adopts this latter
course. As a rule the peasant couple go
on all their lives living on credit, producing

1 28 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

cattle and pigs in order to pay off their
debt to the gombeen man, and they never
succeed in paying it. Even when they
rear large numbers of children and send
them to America, they still go on paying
the debt with the money that is sent home
by the children. One often sees, in remote
parts of the country, a lonely old couple,
on the brink of the grave, decrepit,
twisted about the body, bent double, with
dead minds and lips that are continually
mumbling, but with a proud gleam of hap-
piness in their eyes. These are happy
peasants. They have at last paid their debts
and they are living in peace on the old
age pension. Their children have fled to
America. One perhaps has taken the
land and has begun the torture of pro-
ducing another family and living on credit.

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 129

But the old couple are secure with the old
age pension. This is a rare sight, but it is
worth seeing, and the tourist should hunt
about until he sees it. But he must make
sure. For many old couples of that sort
are not happy. The son who has got the
land very often takes the old age pension
off his parents and uses it to pay his debt
to the gombeen man. I have seen horrify-
ing scenes, where the son pursues the old
father and tears the pension out of his
palm. I have seen the old father resist,
with tears and curses, and I have seen
the son push him brutally to the ground
and even kick him and call him horrible
names. And then I have seen the old
fellow, robbed of his pension, go about the
village begging for tobacco. Such is the
rapacity of the gombeen man, that it

130 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

drives the peasant to commit all manner
of atrocities, even the robbery of an old
father.

I have also seen a mother take off her
flannel skirt in winter and rip it open and
sell the cloth to the gombeen man in order
to feed her children. And the gombeen
man gave her one-third the price of the
good cloth in flour of poor quality. I
remember that the same woman died of
consumption shortly afterwards, leaving
six children ; and her husband got three
barrels of porter on credit from the pub-
lican to bury her properly, using his pigs
as pledges. He also borrowed money to
pay the priest for saying a mass over her.
The last time I saw him, he was a haggard,
shifty wretch, and his children were all in
consumption and neither the gombeen

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 131

man nor the publican were paid for the
funeral.

I say the tourist may see wonderful
sights among the peasants, horrifying ones,
and if he is a civilised man, he will be
amazed that any society, not to mention
the society of saints and scholars, could
allow human beings to live in such a man-
ner in their midst ; and then prate to the
world about these human beings being mid-
way between Heaven and earth, patriots,
croppy boys, sexless ascetics, mystic loons.
He will see a great horde of stupefied
peasants, surrounded on all sides by rapa-
cious rogues that fall upon every little
morsel produced by the peasants and tear
it to pieces in their ravenous beaks. He
will see the decent peasants becoming
fatalists and hopeless wrecks, who wave

132 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

their hands in despair and say that it is no
use to labour or to produce wealth, since
all things pass into the pockets of the
priests, the gombeen men and the poli-
ticians. He will see these decent peasants
shiftless, dirty, hungry, without a concept
of truth or high morality, subservient,
fawning, grovelling, terrified of life and
death, eager for revenge, envious of suc-
cess, fickle in their allegiance, unstable in
their resolutions, excitable in tempera-
ment ; for it is the decent human being
who is most easily and surely broken by
an overwhelming oppression of this descrip-
tion. He will also see that it is the cunning
type of peasant that rises out of this hellish
life, using his cunning and rapacity and
his shameless indifference to honour and
decency for the purpose of making himself

TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND 133

into one of the oppressors. It is the cun-
ning and mean peasant who becomes the
huckster, the gombeen man, the priest, the
politician, and then lives, cannibal-wise, on
his own flesh and blood.

The tourist will also see, here and there,
a sign and portent of salvation, some brave
soul standing up and crying out the gospel-
of revolt and salvation. These visions are
still rare, as rare as the happy old peasants
we have seen dying in peace. But they
exist and like a white star in the sky at
dawn, they are a sign of the morning sun.
And it is through the fiery eyes of these
rebels that the Irish peasant must really be
seen and not through his dirt, his hunger,
his apathy and the helpless hands that he
waves despairingly at the sky in which he
sees no heaven of the blest. These voices

134 TOURIST'S GUIDE TO IRELAND

crying from the depths of hell shall bring
up great forces of revolt, armed with the
great wisdom of the damned, and they
shall spread over the land and inhabit it
with free men and women, free from
usurers and soothsayers.

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977 A tourist's guide to

05 Ireland

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