The Irish Peasantry

Interesting Lecture by Mr. Justin McCarthy, M.P.
This evening, under the auspices of the Irish Literary Society, London, Mr Justin McCarthy, MP, delivered an address on "The Irish Peasantry" in the hall attached to the premises of the society in Bloomsbury Mansions, Hart stree, WC. Mr Alfred Percival Graves presided, and there was a large attendance of members and their friends.

[...] The belief in the banshee existed in his days in Ireland. He did not know whether it existed now. He rather hoped it did. He had an affection for the banshee. The McCarthy family retained theirs, and they did not retain anything else (laughter). In her they had a property which could not be appraised in any court of law. Years ago a member of the McCarthy clan died in a Liverpool hospital from the effects of an accident, and the nurses declared that his death was accompanied by a wailing sound which disturbed the dying man. That he knew to be a fact, and at least it was a very remarkable coincidence.

Some of the superstitions of the Irish peasantry were ridiculous, such as the idea that there was no good making a journey or an expedition if one met a red-haired woman at the outset, but the mass of them were elevating and refined. They formed a vein of poetry in the nature of the Irish peasantry just as similar ideas did in the nature of the ancient Greeks. He did not know whether such noble feelings could endure against the rough feelings of the prosaid, but he did declare that if civilization was going to banish the fairies from the raths and valleys, to get rid of the banshee, and to suppress all the other forms that belonged to what was called superstition, he for himself would rather that the Irish peasantry did not get too wise all at once.
[...]

In Freeman's Journal, 14th December 1893.