Tithe Bill Passed
Above : Picture Of Lord John Russell
A debate in Parliament on tithes gave O’Connell an opportunity of speaking of the various injustices under which the Catholics still suffered. Catholic lawyers, or even Protestants who had signed addresses in favour of Emancipation, were, he pointed out, never promoted. Catholic names were noted on jury-lists and their bearers challenged by the Crown ; proposed meetings of Catholics were prohibited for the most trivial reasons. The Church system, by which a miserably poor country was obliged to support a rich, and, to a great extent, useless Church, was in itself scandalous.
Peel, during his short Ministry (1835), made another attempt to settle the Irish tithe question on the basis of a rent charge, but a clause added to the Bill by Lord John Russell, by which the Irish Church surplus was to be devoted to secular purposes, caused the defeat of the entire measure.
Above : Picture Of Lord Morpeth
In April, 1835, the second Melbourne Ministry came into power, and, with Lord Mulgrave as Lord Lieutenant and Lord Morpeth as Chief Secretary, Thomas Drummond was sent to Ireland as Under secretary. This last proved a very important appointment.
Drummond soon decided that tithes collected by the aid of military and police were not worth the disorder and bloodshed to which their Section often gave rise. He, therefore, frequently refused to allow forces to be employed, with the result that, in many instances, the fact fire not Collected at a 11′. On the other hand he insisted that should has fair and conflicts between Orangemen and Catholics regarded temporary repressed. The magistrates and the gentry generally the new methods with utter disapproval. Hitherto, it had been usual to employ the police freely in cases of tithe disturbances or of evictions, but, as a rule, to suffer rival factions to settle their differences undisturbed. When, in answer to a demand on the part of some Tipperary landlords for coercion measures against the tenantry, Drummond ventured to remind them that ” property has its duties at well as its rights,” the remark was considered ” a direct incentive to outrage.”
In 1835, and in 1836, the Melbourne Government introduced Tithe Bills, but again an ” Appropriation Clause ” wrecked one after the other.
The Bill introduced by Lord John Russell was different. It wiped out arrears of tithes and transformed the advance assigned to the clergy in 1833 into a gift. The tithes were to be lowered by a quarter, and the remaining 75 per cent, made a rent charge, to be paid by the landlord directly to the clergy. This Bill was finally passed (1838), and on the whole gave satisfaction. The clergy received their money more regularly, and, being no longer brought into disagreeable relations with their Catholic neighbours, they became much more popular. Many landlords paid a portion, or even the whole of the charge, without raising their tenants’ rent; while others exacted from the latter the full amount. Owing to this, the general opinion of the Tithe Act varied considerably in different districts.
