James Warren Doyle

Doyle was born close to New Ross, County Wexford in 1786, the posthumous son of a respectable Catholic farmer; his mother (Anne Warren, of Quaker extraction) was living in poverty at the time of his birth.

At the age of eleven he witnessed the horrors of the Battle of New Ross between the United Irishmen and British Crown forces supplemented by the militia and yeomanry.

His books on pastoral, political, educational and inter-denominational matters provide a rich source of material for social and religious historians (see below).

[3] In 1827, Doyle engaged the liberal lawyer (and secularist) George Ensor to investigate reports of hundreds of conversions to Protestantism on the estate in Cavan of proselytising Orangeman, Lord Farnham.

This was a broadside against the new evangelicalism and its requirement that "the Bible without note or comment to be a schoolbook,"[5] a demand by Protestant church leaders that upended the government plans, Doyle broadly supported,[6] for non-denominational primary education.

[7] In 1830, the new tithe-proctor of Graigue (a parish of 4,779 Catholics and 63 Protestants) decided to break with the tradition of his predecessor and to enforce seizure orders for the collection of arrears of Tithes.

"[citation needed] The ministers of the Church of Ireland, Doyle concluded, are taking the blanket from the bed of sickness, the ragged apparel from the limbs of the pauper, and selling it by auction for the payment of tithe.

In these countries, if you only obey the law and reverence the constitution, they both will furnish you with ample means whereby to overthrow all oppression, and will secure to you the full enjoyment of every social right.On another occasion he said: The advocacy of truth will always excite hostility, and he who enforces justice will ever have to combat against the powers of this world.

Let us receive but not return its shocks; for if we abide by the law and pursue truth and justice we may suffer loss for a moment, but as certainly as Providence presides over human affairs every arm lifted against us shall not prosper, and against every tongue that contendeth with us we will obtain our cause.

Asked at one such inquiry to explain his urging his countrymen to resist the tithes, and why he should not feel himself responsible for the violence that accompanied the Tithe War, he replied: [N]o man ought to be condemned for exhorting people to pursue justice in a certain line, though he may foresee that in the pursuit of that justice the opposition given to those who are proceeding in a just course may produce collision, and that collision lead to the commission of crime; but our duty, as I conceive, is to seek for the injustice, and there to impute the crime… It is to that injustice, and not to those who pursue a just course for the attainment of a right end, that the guilt is to be ascribed.Seeing his readiness and resource, the Duke of Wellington remarked that Doyle examined the committee rather than was examined by them.

He told his priests: …all the teachers henceforth to be employed be provided from some Model School, with a certificate of their competency, that will aid us in a work of great difficulty, to wit, that of suppressing hedge schools, and placing youths under the direction of competent teachers, and of those only.Doyle spoke before a Parliamentary Committee as follows: I do not see how any man wishing well to the public peace, and who looks to Ireland as his country, can think that peace can be permanently established, or the prosperity of the country ever well secured, if children are separated at the commencement of life on account of their religious opinions.

I do not know of any measures that would prepare the way for better feeling in Ireland than uniting children at an early age, and bringing them up in the same school, leading them to commune with one another and to form those little intimacies and friendships which subsist through life.