THE FINANCIAL GRIEVANCE

OF IRELAND

It need not be a matter of surprise if a good deal is heard next Session of Parliament of the financial grievance of Ireland. At any rate, the Irish public of all sections and all political parties are just now giving fair and ample warning on the subject. It is unfortunately true that there are not many matters on which Nationalists and Unionists, landlords and tenants, peers and peasants, Catholics, Protestants, and Presbyterians are united; but there are some, and one of them is the robbery of Ireland which has been conclusively exposed by the report of the Financial Relations Commission and by the evidence on which it is founded. For the present it would appear as if the political campaign on the one side and on the other in Ireland were about to be suspended in favour of an agitation, participated in by all parties, in support of the demand that the robbery referred to should cease. In Cork, a requisition signed by Unionists, Parnellites, and anti-Parnellites has been presented to the Earl of Bandon, as Lord Lieutenant of the county, to call a general meeting of the county and city to consider the question and pass resolutions in reference to it; Irish public bodies of all kinds are almost every day expressing their minds upon it in emphatic terms; and there can be little doubt that, before Parliament meets, a body of opinion will have been obtained in favour of the popular view, the national character of which cannot possibly be questioned. Even Englishmen will probably admit that it would be strange if all this were not the case. If England were a part, say, of France, as at one time it seemed not impossible that it would become, and if, after several generations of common government and indiscriminate' taxation, it were declared by a tribunal mostly composed of Frenchmen that England had been despoiled at the rate of some millions sterling a year by 'the predominant partner,' Englishmen would almost to a certainty take advantage of such a declaration to declare, in their turn, that they would not submit longer than they were compelled to so great an injustice. Moreover, it is felt that this financial grievance is not recognised or admitted in England as

widely as could be desired, and that accordingly a vigorous agitation is necessary if redress is soon to be obtained. But the great fact to be noted is that, for the first time probably since the Union, the whole population of Ireland is, as has been said, united on an Irish question, and that, should England resist the Irish demand, it will have, at least on this occasion, no Irish aiders or abettors.

The conclusions of the Financial Relations Commission, which' are sufficiently remarkable in themselves, are rendered more so by remembering the constitution of that body. Putting out of account the Irish members of the Commission, who may by some persons be regarded as prejudiced in favour of the Irish view of the question inquired into, but who, however, include Unionists as well as Nationalists in their number, let us see how the rest of the Commission was constituted. To English and Scotch readers it will be sufficient to mention the names of the late Mr. Childers, Lord Farrer, Lord Welby, the late Sir Robert Hamilton, Sir Thomas Sutherland, M.P., Sir David Barbour, Mr. Bertram Currie, and Mr. W. A. Hunter, ex-M.P., to enable them to know that British interests and the interests of the Treasury in especial were amply represented. Indeed, it may be said, without any disparagement whatever to the Irish Commissioners, that British interests were better represented than the interests of Ireland, for no Irish Commissioner possessed the expert knowledge which comes and can only come of such lengthened official experience as that of Mr. Childers, Lord Farrer, Lord Welby, Sir Robert Hamilton, Sir David Barbour, and Mr. Currie. Yet, of the eight British representatives on the Commission, four have signed the joint report to which all the Irish representatives have attached their names; two others, Mr. Childers and Sir Robert Hamilton, would undoubtedly have done so if they had lived; one other, Sir David Barbour, has presented a report of his own, which shows that he too might have followed suit without outraging his conscience; and even the remaining member can hardly be said to deny the main facts. Never before, it may safely be said, has an inquiry by men of such widely divergent views on political and other subjects into a question so complicated, and involving such antagonistic interests, resulted in so practically unanimous a verdict. But this verdict is unusually remarkable for another reason also. The facts and figures on which it is based were mainly supplied by the officials of an English Government, and made out under the directions of the various departments of that Government. No such objection, therefore, can be taken to the evidence by Englishmen as that it was one-sided or insufficient. It is doubtful, however, if such an objection may not properly be made by Irishmen. In this matter Irishmen have always been at a great disadvantage. Not only have they not had the expert skill which official experience alone brings, but they have not had access to the sources of information necessary

to determine the question. I do not, of course, suggest that any fact of importance has been deliberately kept back from the Commission; but it is quite possible that if Irishmen, unconnected in any way with the Government departments, had before them all the official information possessed by those departments, they might, by reason of looking at matters from a different point of view, not only put a different meaning on some facts and figures that have been furnished, but might even see importance in other facts and figures that have been passed over as of no significance.

But to come now to the actual findings of the Commission. They are five in number, and are as follows:

I. That Great Britain and Ireland must for the purpose of this inquiry be considered as separate entities.

II. That the Act of Union imposed upon Ireland a burden which, as events showed, she was unable to bear.

III. That the increase of taxation laid upon Ireland between 1853 and 1860 was not justified by the then existing circumstances.

IV. That identity of rates of taxation does not necessarily involve equality of burden.

V. That, whilst the actual tax revenue of Ireland is about one-eleventh of that of Great Britain, the relative taxable capacity of Ireland is very much smaller, and is not estimated by any of us as exceeding one-twentieth.

To an Irishman who has been following the course of this financial controversy, the first observation that suggests itself, on reading this series of conclusions, is that they completely justify all that has ever been said upon the subject from the point of view of Ireland. From time to time during the last half-century Irishmen of every political party have complained of the over-taxation of their country. The late Mr. O'Neill Daunt, a Repealer of the old school, of whom it may be said that neither his pre-eminent abilities nor his public services have ever met with adequate appreciation; The O'Conor Don, a Liberal Unionist; the late Colonel Dunne, a Conservative, and sometime member of Parliament for Queen's County; Sir Joseph McKenna, a Home Ruler, and other representative Irishmen, whose names it is needless to mention, have all at various times laid down the main propositions just quoted; the exact amount, of course, of the excess of Ireland's contribution to the Imperial revenue beyond her proper share being with them all a matter of doubt. But they have all been, as it were, laughed out of court. That Ireland was unjustly treated in financial matters, either at the time of the Union or afterwards, was a circumstance which no British statesman would admit. The contrary, indeed, was asserted-namely, that Ireland was unduly favoured. The fact that she was exempt from certain taxes to which Great Britain was subject, the 'exceptional' grants and remissions of loans made to her, and the abnormal expenditure upon the government of Ireland, were all pointed to as conclusively showing that that country was really the petted and

pampered member of the United Kingdom, and that it was England which really suffered from the working of the existing financial system. Statesmen of both the great British parties have continuously and consistently committed themselves to this view, but most of all, perhaps, Mr. Lowe (afterwards Lord Sherbrooke) and Mr. Gladstone. Again and again Irish members have laid the Irish case before the House of Commons, and have invariably been met with the same answer from the Treasury bench, no matter who might be its occupants. At last, however, the Irish complainants stand justified and their opponents confounded. At last an authoritative declaration has been made that Ireland has, at all events for the last forty or fifty years, been grossly overtaxed, and that at present the over-taxation amounts to at least a sum approaching three millions sterling a year. It is a tremendous admission,' as Mr. Morley has said, and Englishmen may still doubt it or refuse to believe it; but there it is, and it will not be and cannot be got rid of by any special pleading however plausible, or by any protests however vehement. It is scarcely too much to say that since the Commission spoke the cause has been finished.

The findings of the Commission, as set forth in the common or joint Report, take up but a very small space, but they embrace practically the whole case; and it may be added that the Supplementary Reports, to speak broadly, are concerned either with setting forth the grounds for those conclusions, or, as regards two of the reports, with vain attempts to explain some or all of them away. Once it is established or admitted-(1) that Great Britain and Ireland are to be treated in this matter as separate entities; (2) that the Act of Union imposed a burden on Ireland which she was unable to bear, and led to her being taxed on the high British level; (3) that the conspicuous increase of taxation laid upon Ireland between 1853 and 1860 was wholly unjustifiable; (4) that so-called uniform rates of taxation do not necessarily involve equality of burden; and (5) that the actual contribution of Ireland to the Imperial revenue is oneeleventh of that of Great Britain, while her taxable capacity is not higher than one-twentieth-almost every other point involved is comparatively unimportant. The establishment of the last-mentioned point alone would be, to use Mr. Morley's phrase, a tremendous' fact. Fancy Ireland contributing in the last thirty-five or forty years to the Imperial revenue a sum equal to the cost of some of the biggest wars of the century! No wonder that she has in that very time declined in every element of wealth. Some persons are for ever diving into the depths of economic science, looking here, there, and everywhere for the secret of Ireland's poverty, inventing specious theories, and twisting and turning endless tables of statistics. Is not one, at least, of the chief causes of that poverty big as a mountain, open, palpable? What nation in Europe could long endure a drain

of money similar in proportion to that just mentioned? People talk oftentimes of Ireland's great difficulty being want of capital, and of the great advantage to her, in view of that difficulty, of having the credit of England secured to her by the Legislative Union. Does it not strike one irresistibly that she would have capital enough of her own if only the working of the Legislative Union were such as to allow her to keep what she has after paying her proper share of the Imperial expenses? Fancy what could be done for the povertystricken West of Ireland if the Congested Districts Board had at its command, not the beggarly sum of 40,000l. a year which is its present income, but a million a year of the excess sum now paid by Ireland to the Imperial Treasury! Fancy what could be done. throughout the rest of Ireland in reviving industries, in imparting technical education, in constructing railways, in making piers and harbours, if the balance of that sum, amounting at the lowest estimate to a million and three-quarters sterling, were at the disposal of an Irish representative authority! To the ordinary Irishman it is not so much disgusting as maddening to be obliged to listen to farfetched and often absurd theories regarding Ireland's decline in material prosperity, to homilies on Irish want of thrift and consequent want of capital, to refusals of demands for grants for public purposes, and to lectures on the great virtue of self-reliance as contrasted with the vice of 'looking to the Treasury for everything,' when he knows all the time that that very Treasury is the receptacle into which have flowed during the last forty years alone at least a hundred millions sterling, and probably much more, of Irish capital which, under any fair financial arrangement, would have either remained in the pockets of the Irish people or would have been used in Ireland on reproductive national undertakings.

One great result of the work of the Financial Relations Commission is, as has been said, that the controversy as to the facts of the financial grievance of Ireland may be said to be ended. That controversy has no longer any life in it. It may henceforth be regarded as dead and buried. But it is scarcely possible to imagine how completely it is a thing of the past without reading the Supplementary Reports of various members of the Commission, including those of the two Commissioners who dissent from the findings of the main body. The truth is, controversy as to the facts is and has been impossible, if we are to assume the truth of the first of the findings of the Commission-viz. that Great Britain and Ireland are to be treated as separate entities. We shall presently deal with that finding; but, assuming it for the present to be true, that asserting the over-taxation of Ireland must necessarily be admitted. It is only by denying its truth that the over-taxation can be disputed by any one, and it is only in this way that Sir David Barbour and Sir Thomas Sutherland do dispute it, if indeed the former can really be