the Recess
Committee brought together in 1895 and 1896 by Sir Horace Plunkett; a
Committee containing Nationalist and Unionist Members of the House of
Commons, Tory and Liberal Unionist peers, Ulster captains of industry,
the Grand Master of the Belfast Orangemen, and an eminent Jesuit.[47] In
its reunion of men divided by bitter feuds, it was just the kind of
Conference that assembled in Durban in 1908, six years after a
devastating war, to discuss and to create the framework of South African
Union. That Conference was the natural outcome of the grant of Home Rule
to the defeated Boer States. The Irish Conference, succeeding a land-war
far more destructive and demoralizing, was brought together in spite of
the absence of Home Rule, and the prejudice it had to overcome,[48] is a
measure of the fantastically abnormal conditions produced by the denial
of self-government. There lay Ireland, an island with a rich soil and a
clever population, yet terribly backward, far behind England, far behind
all the progressive nations of Europe in agriculture and industry, her
population declining, her land passing out of cultivation,[49] her
strongest sons and daughters hurrying away to enrich with their wits and
sinews distant lands. There, in short, lay a country groaning for
intelligent development by the concentrated energies of her own people.

"We have in Ireland," runs the first paragraph of the Report of the
Committee, "a poor country practically without manufactures--except for
the linen and shipbuilding of the north, and the brewing and distilling
of Dublin--dependent upon agriculture, with its soil imperfectly tilled,
its area under cultivation decreasing, and a diminishing population
without industrial habits or technical skill."

The leeway to make up was enormous. To go no farther back than the
institution of the Penal Code and the deliberate destruction of the
woollen industry, two centuries of callous repression at the hands of an
external authority had maimed and exhausted the country whose condition
the Committee had met to consider. These facts the members of the
Committee frankly recognized in that part of the Report which is
entitled with gentle irony "Past Action of the State." Here, then, was a
purely Irish problem, intimately concerning every Irishman, poor or
rich, Roman Catholic or Protestant, a problem of which Great Britain,
though responsible both for its existence and its solution, knew and
cared little