VIOLENT SPEECH

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 149, 20 March 1922, Page 6

VIOLENT SPEECH

BY A ROMAN CATHOLIC BISHOP “k STUDIED INSULT” MAYOR’S EMPHATIC PROTEST BY TELEGRAPH—PRESS ASSOCIATION. Auckland, March 19. in a speech at St. Patrick's concert on Friday evening Bishop Liston, Roman Catholic Bishop, said that his parents were driven from the country in which they were born and in which they would have been content to live, because their foreign masters did not want Irish men and women peopling their own land, but wished to use it as a cattle ranch for the snobs of the Empire. Bishop Liston said ho was a native of New Zealand, and loved his country. They could not say that Ireland had got all she asked for, and all that her sons had died for, but she had got a first instalment of her freedom, and was determined to have the whole or it. (Applause.) The omnipotent hand of God, he continued, had made Ireland a nation, and while grass grew and water flowed there would be majty to fight and even die in order that God’s desires might be realised. It seemed to him proverbial that a man who had faced difficulties and carried them so far was there to see that the rulers of Ireland were not duped by England. He referred to' the men and women who “in the glorious Easter of 1916 were proud to die for their country, murdered by foreign troops.” They could not forget these men and women, but in order that their dream about Ireland might come true they could forgive. The Mayor of Auckland (Mr. J. H. Gunson) publishes the following statement: —“The speech of Bishop Liston calls for. immediate action on my part as Mayor. On behalf of our citizenship, I wrote to the Bishop on Saturday morning, asking him to advise me whether he had been correctly reported, though my long experience of the Press in Auckland gives me no cause to doubt the accuracy of the report. The speech as reported is avowedly and openly disloyal to King and country, and is an affront to our citizenship. It is seditious, and designedly calculated to cause disintegration of all that Britishers hold dear. It is a studied insult to the citizenship of the Empire to which Now Zealand is proud to belong. Repudiation of England, a. sneering reference to her as ‘a foreign nation.’ and the entire dissociation, with disdain, of- the speaker and those for whom he said he spoke as ’a right’ from all that pertains to the Empire, challenges all loyal citizens to raise their voices in protest.

“The reference to British soldiers as foreign murderers is especially offensive and unwarrantable. I take this first public opportunity of saying with all the emphasis possible that the citizens of Auckland will nej- tolerate for one minute such a studied and deliberate act of disloyalty and of insult to British manhood and womanhood. “In making this intimation, I wish to say that such a seditious and ruinous speech will not be allowed in the Auckland Town Hall or in any place which the city’ administration controls or licenses. The Bishop and others holding views such as those reported are not fit longer to enjoy the privileges and rights of our British Commonwealth and the protection of the British flag. “This speech will be brought under the notice of the Attorney-General, and it will be my duty to advise tho City Council to take other appropriate action. In the meantime, on behalf of the citizens of Auckland, I enter an emphatic protest in the foregoing terms.”