Ireland as it is, and as it would be under Home Rule — A Reader’s Guide

Voices of Dismay and Defiance

Buckley lets his interviewees speak at length, preserving dialect and rhetorical habits. An Athlone politician, for instance, insists that moonlighting and incendiarism are 'concocted and paid for by the Tories of England,' adding, 'Ye might talk for a month an' ye'd never change my opinion.' The phrasing—'I have it from them that knows'—reveals a closed belief system, anchored in deference to 'insthructors since I was twelve inches high.' Elsewhere, a 'steady, well-clad yeoman' in Castlebar declares he has 'looked at the thing in a hundred ways' and remains Unionist, suggesting that even among the 'decent minority' the debate is internalized as a personal calculus. Buckley does not editorialize heavily; he lets the speakers' own words expose the gulf between Unionist and Nationalist reasoning.

The Clergy as Followers and Leaders

A long passage from a 'phœnix priest' near Turlough's Tower offers a sophisticated analysis of clerical power. He argues that the Irish priesthood 'does not lead, but follows'—that popular movements coerce clergy into joining, after which they 'endeavour to direct the current of opinion.' This priest dissents from the majority, believing that closer union with England would better serve the Catholic Church than a Home Rule bill that would bring 'progressive decline.' He warns that 'many of the so-called Catholic Nationalists are atheists at heart' and that modern education is 'decidedly materialistic.' Buckley presents this as a minority view, supported by 'a very few,' yet it complicates any simple reading of clerical nationalism. The priest's language—'Let well alone'—contrasts sharply with the Athlone politician's fiery certainty.

Conspiracy and Credulity in the Provinces

Buckley's method is to juxtapose testimony. The Athlone politician's conspiracy theory—that Tories pay gangs to create disorder when Liberals govern—is immediately followed by Colonel Winter's dry comment: 'He has read a good deal, but his reading seems to have done him no good.' The effect is to highlight a pattern: Nationalist informants often attribute violence to English machinations, while Unionist observers dismiss such claims as self-deception. In Castlebar, Buckley notes that 'the decent minority, the intelligence of the place, being Unionist, as in every other Irish town'—a sweeping generalization that frames Unionism as the rational, property-holding position. The letters thus become a record not only of political opinion but of the rhetorical strategies each side uses to explain the other's intransigence.

Buckley's letters are best read as a primary source for Unionist self-perception in 1893, not as an impartial survey. The author's sympathies are clear, but he preserves enough contradictory voices—the priest who fears Home Rule will weaken the Church, the yeoman who has weighed the question a hundred ways—to allow a reader to see the complexity beneath the polemic. Pay attention to who gets the last word in each exchange; that is often where Buckley's own argument emerges.

Reading the 1893 interviews, I remembered my grandfather’s ledger—same anxious margins, same dread of change. Thirty Years' View (Vol. 2 of 2) or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850 — A Closer Reading gave me that same hush, watching old certainties dissolve into compromise. Both books whisper: the fear is always louder than the fact.