Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/160

 CH. XI.] that could impoverish and degrade them. But even poverty, bad as it was, never stood decidedly in the way; for the buildings were not expensive, and the poor people gladly contributed shillings coppers and labour for the luxury of a chapel. A more serious obstacle was the refusal of landlords in some districts to lease a plot of land for the building. In Donegal and elsewhere they had a movable little wooden shed that just sheltered the priest and the sacred appliances while he celebrated Mass, and which was wheeled about from place to place in the parish wherever required. A shed of this kind was called a scallan (Irish: a shield, a protecting shelter). Some of these scallans are preserved with reverence to this day, as for instance one in in Clare, where a large district was for many years without any Catholic place of worship, as the local landlord obstinately refused to let a bit of land. You may now see that very scallan—not much larger than a sentry-box—beside the new chapel in Carrigaholt.

And so those humble little buildings gradually rose up all over the country. Then many of the small towns and villages through the country presented this spectacle. In one place was the 'decent church' that had formerly belonged to the Catholics, now in possession of a Protestant congregation of perhaps half a dozen—church, minister, and clerk maintained by contributions of tithes forced from the Catholic people; and not far off a poor little thatched building with clay floor and rough walls for a Roman Catholic congregation of 500, 1000, or more, all except the few that found room within kneeling on