Evening Post. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1924. A PERILOUS DILEMMA

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 81, 2 October 1924, Page 4

Evening Post. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1924. A PERILOUS DILEMMA

The House of Commons •is reported to have been crowded and animated when it met on Tuesday for the special purpose of dealing with the Bill for amending the Irish Treaty, and in violation of the Standing Orders, but apparently without objection, the Prime Minister, who was in charge of the Bill, read the whole of his speech. A Bill to the importance of which all parties in the House thus agree to testify would have justified a larger report than we have received of the opening of the debate, The whole Empire is deeply concerned in the issue, and the whole Empire is deeply interested. In spite of a splendid lead from Mr. Redmond, Ireland became a weakness and a danger to the Empire during the Great War. As a Dominion Mr. Lloyd George hoped to make her a source of strength, but the outcome of nearly three years of the great experiment has been _ a series of disappointments. And it is to remedy one unpardonable and perilous botch in his most unsettling settlement that Parliament has been called together. Dominion rights have not brought peace or contentment to Ireland. On the contrary, the country is in effect divided into two Dominions fired by a fierce mutual hostility to which either the passing or the rejection or the amendment of the Bill now before the House may serve as a signal for open warfare. Seldom has Parliament been confronted with a more perilous dilemma.

The two outstanding points in the brief report of Mr. MacDonj aid's speech are his plea for the passage of the Bill as "a Bill of honour," and his suggestion that the effect of its passage may be to. render its operation unnecessary. If it were a mere question of honour versus expediency, the matter might be much less embarrassing, but the appeal to honour cuts both ways. The force of Mr. Mac Donald's contention is clear. Article XII. of the Irish Treaty provides that, in the event of Northern Ireland's election to detach itself from the Free State, a Commission should fix the boundary between the two territories "in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions." But by tho same Article it is also provided that one member of this Commission is to be appointed by the Government of Northern Ireland, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has decided that this Government's refusal to appoint a Commissioner will make tho whole procedure abortive. By simply doing nothing Ulster can escape the judicial determination of tho frontier in general accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants and re--«tain tho frontier in its present position. If thero had been three independent parties to the Treaty, this apparently unforeseen contingency would have involved Britain in no moral responsibility. A botch which has given her no advantage would have imposed no burden on her conscience. Tho rectification of tho bungled clause, as of tho frontier, would have been Ulster's concern and not hers.

Unfortunately, however, Ulster is no party to the Treaty. Britain put it through as her trustee—a most negligent, headlong, and unbusinesslike trustee, it may be, but still, so far as tho other party was concerned, a trustee armed with full legal authority to act and apparently with .full moral authority also. Without consulting her wards she made a bargain to whioh they would never have voluntarily consented, and from which they are only too thankful to take advantage of the flaw in the document to escape. In these circumstances it is inevitable that Britain should recognise an obligation to the other party to make the clause effective according to its original object and intent—whatever that may have been. It is equally inevitable that the people of Ulster, who are deeply mortified and alarmed by what they regard as the improvident and cruel bargain made on their behalf but behind their backs, should recognise no obligation to complete their own undoing by helping to remove the technical defect which has so far protected them. Though Britain may be taking the right course in amending the Treaty and in inflicting a grievous blow upon her best friends—one might almost say her only friends—in Ireland, it is grossly unjust to charge Ulster with a bigoted perversity for acting exactly as most of her critics would have acted in similar circumstances.

But even for British honour the issue is not quite so clear as Mr. Mac Donald's appeal suggests. The overlooking of the power given to Ulster to prevent the appointment of a Boundary Commission was not the only grievous blunder made by Mr. Lloyd George aud his colleagues who negotiated the Treaty. The position is, indeed, further complicated by the statement, which is circumstantially supported by Mr. .Strachey, the editor of the "Spectator," that the loophole in Article XII. which the Government's Bill proposes to .btesk .wa.B e*t ike yeau.lt 01. ,m ac«

cident but was deliberately left for the purpose of placatiug Ulster and facilitating the ratification of the Treaty by the British Parliament. Reserving this interesting point, we can only point out briefly now that the other cardinal blunder in this clause is the ambiguity regarding the scope of the Commission. Is it to be ' limited to slight rectifications of the frontier ? or will it be free to eviscerate Ulster by cutting off two counties or more and nearly half a million of people? If the former was all that the negotiators of the Treaty had in view, will the British Parliament be right, when amending one botch in the clause, to leave another unamended which may have perilous results not contemplated when the Treaty was signed? Both here and in the specific pledges given to Ulster in 1920 and 1921 are considerations which seriously complicate Mr. Mac Donald's appeal to honour in support .of his Bill.