The Irish Times was scornful: "The town of Westport has emerged for a moment from its usual obscurity. Some of the inhabitants have not the intelligence which would prevent them from behaving ridiculously."
The target of this scorn was the behaviour of a group of locals on February 4th, 1914, during a performance of General John Regan, a play by George A. Birmingham, pen-name of James Owen Hannay, Church of Ireland rector of Westport. The incident probably owes its low profile in the history of theatrical riots to the fact that it did not have the advantage of taking place at the Abbey.
The following week 20 people were charged that they, "together with other ill-disposed persons, unlawfully assembled to disturb the peace, and did attack, wound and otherwise ill-treat members of the Payne Seddon Theatrical Company, damaged their property and assaulted, wounded and ill-treated District Inspector Neylon and other members of the RIC."
Stones were thrown at the police, 23 windows in a hotel were broken and a baton charge was ordered.
Police were drafted into the town from neighbouring stations to escort the prisoners from the barracks to the courthouse, and a large crowd cheered the prisoners as they were marched through the streets.
The uproar appears to have been caused by a scene in the play in which the hotel owner invites the parish priest, Father McCormack, in for a drink of "good stuff - the best, mind you". The priest is reluctant at first but is then led towards the hotel.
Trouble began in earnest as soon as the Father McCormack character walked on stage for the first time. According to the Irish Times editorial, the demonstrators tore the collar from his neck and burnt it in the street. The newspaper adds a little colour of its own, saying that the burning was "probably done to the tune of A Nation Once Again".
The play had first been produced by the Payne Seddon Company at the Apollo Theatre, London, in January 1913. But Payne Seddon himself said that the scene between the hotel owner and the priest had been omitted from the touring production. So what caused the problem? There were two main reasons.
The first was given by a letter-writer to the Connaught Telegraph, who said the Catholics of Westport did not have to see the play because they had got a report of the London production and knew what was in it. He asks what would have happened in Belfast if a Catholic priest had depicted a Protestant clergyman like that. The second reason was Birmingham's previous problems with the Catholics of Westport over his novel The Seething Pot, published in 1905.
The local priest, with whom he had previously been friendly, got the idea that Birmingham had caricatured him in the novel. The book had been written a year before the priest came to Westport, before Birmingham even knew him.
The offence, according to Birmingham's memoir Pleasant Places, was that the priest had been represented "as less than a gentleman". After the priest then started writing critical articles about him in the local press, people gathered outside his house to boo him, there was an attempt to boycott him and his effigy was burnt in the street. Other priests would not sit on committees with him and as a result of all this he was forced to leave the Gaelic League.
With great understatement, Birmingham says it was "an amazingly silly business, though only mildly amusing at the time".
But by 1913 his life had become so uncomfortable that he decided to leave Westport and Ireland. To add to his problems with Catholics, local unionists were angry at his acceptance of the idea of Home Rule.
With this background perhaps it is no surprise that General John Regan ran into trouble in Westport, though it had been produced in Galway and Clonmel without any problems.
The Connaught Telegraph continued to comment for several weeks. A letter quoted a London critic who said that the play "hardly came pleasantly from a Protestant clergyman about his Catholic brother", and the letter-writer called the character of the serving girl "a travesty of our Irish waiting maids".
The Irish Times was not so sure, and in its editorial commented that, "slatternliness. . .is not unknown among servants in Irish country hotels".
Inevitably, the incident became political. There were complaints that English newspapers gave exaggerated accounts of the affair and that the Irish unionist press had seized it as a reason why Ireland should not get Home Rule. The Evening News remarked that "unionists who live in the West of Ireland know only too well the spirit of political intolerance that prevails". But the playwright St John Ervine was quoted as saying that, coming as he did from a Belfast Orange family, he would prefer "to live in the wildest spot on the Connaught coast. . .than spend minutes in the bestial air of bigotry which envelops Belfast".
Perhaps the last word should be left with another critical writer in the Connaught Telegraph, who bracketed Birmingham with Synge as being unable to treat the Irish people sympathetically, and summed up Birmingham by saying that, "beyond being intensely amusing and witty, he has no claim to greatness". A lot of writers might settle for that as an epitaph.