We forgot about Michael Davitt. So it’s hard to imagine that he would be relevant today.
Less than a century ago, the founder of the Land League brilliantly attacked those who encouraged the persecution of Jews in Limerick – and exposed their hypocrisy. His excoriating words should shame the groups and provocateurs demonizing refugees in Ireland today.
Protests and demonstrations have grown over housing for refugees and asylum seekers. But some are manipulated by those with an “us and them” agenda. By stirring up resentment and actively divisive, some far-right agitators want nothing more than violence and even bloodshed.
Remarkably, something similar happened a century ago. But jealousy and strife were short-lived, partly because of Davitt’s intervention.
We see him today as an organizer of rent strikes to pursue land reform, almost as a kind of tireless office boy who acted on behalf of the real leader, Charles Stewart Parnell.
Some even know that Davitt lost an arm in an industrial accident in England’s cotton mills, but this only seems to reinforce the idea that he was an unskilled combatant at best. But Davitt possessed a first-rate brain, even if he had to study by candlelight at night and sharpen his intellect through voracious literary consumption.
And he put all his skills and rhetoric to use when a local dispute led to a rapidly spreading boycott of Jews in Limerick, actions explicitly encouraged by some clergy.
In January 1904 Davitt wrote to The Freeman’s Diary on the disturbances. His arguments not only resonate with the current refugee crisis, but also speak to the need for eternal vigilance against anti-Semitism during this Holocaust memorial weekend.
“Sir, I shall ask a little of your space to deal with a matter of general interest to all who love and revere the Catholic religion, and who have no less a measure of affection for the name and honor of Ireland “, he said. wrote.
“It has been to the unique glory of our country that its original conquest for the cause of Christianity has come without bloodshed, while the sons of St. Patrick have really upheld that reputation from then until now.
“Irish Catholics have suffered every possible form of religious oppression known to the perverse ingenuity of the authors of the Penal Code, but it is their proud boast that neither in Ireland nor in any country to which English rule compelled them to fly, they always resort to counter-religious persecution. A few years ago, perhaps a dozen, the Chief Rabbi of London, on a visit to Dublin, stated that when he set foot on Irish soil, he found himself in the only country in Europe where his race had never been persecuted.”
He criticized a sermon in Limerick that claimed that the Jews “Stephen the First Martyr and St.
The same pulpit thump continued, disgustedly: “Today they dare not kidnap and kill Christian children, but they will not hesitate to expose them to a longer and more cruel martyrdom by taking the clothes off their backs and the bits out of their mouths. fetch… they sucked the blood of other nations, but these nations rose up and drove them out. And they came to our land to cling to us like leeches.”
It was this kind of gruesome language that had led to horrible crimes and pogroms, Davitt warned. “There is not an ounce of truth in the appalling claim of ritual murder insinuated here against this persecuted race.”
It was an “invention of filthy purpose or of blind hatred,” untrue, unchristian, and reprehensible. “I, as an Irishman and as a Catholic, protest against this spirit of barbaric malice being introduced into Ireland under the pretended form of material concern for the welfare of our workers,” he said.
A protest against the housing of 100 migrants in the former ESB office building in East Wall, Dublin. Protesters and some residents claimed that there was not enough consultation with the local population. Photo: Niall Carson
“The reverend sir complained of the rags and poverty of the children of Limerick, compared with the wealth of the Jews, and on this ground he deliberately incited the people to drive the Jews out of their midst.
“Let me suggest an area for its reformative energies that does not require any poisonous sense of racial animosity or unchristian hatred.
“Let him attack the English domination of Ireland, which levy £12 million in taxes every year on our lives and industries, not for the better, but against our country.
“Let him try to get the people of this country to save a few of the millions unnecessarily spent on intoxicating liquor.
“Let him do this sort of work for the good of Limerick and the advancement of Ireland, and the rags he laments and the poverty he laments will vanish far more effectively and swiftly than through a cowardly vendetta of anti-Semitic prejudice.”
He called on the Bishop of Limerick not to allow Ireland’s reputation to be tarnished by an anti-Jewish crusade, “to the loss and disgrace of a city of which every Irishman is historically proud”. The protests soon died down.
Davitt’s scathing critique could very well be applied in other contexts today, but where are the public figures with the courage and fire to publicly follow his lead?