“OPEN SEDITION”

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XII, Issue 85, 20 March 1922, Page 5

“OPEN SEDITION”

A Bishop’s Speech

MAYOR OF AUCKLAND PROTESTS

INSULT TO BRITISH EMPIRE.

CHALLENGED BY ME GUNSON

Auckland, March 19.

In a speech at St. Patrick’s concert on Friday evening Dr. Liston, Coadjutor Roman Catholic Bishop, said his parents were driven from the country Ln which they were born and in which they could have been content to live, because their foreign masters did not want Irishmen and woman peopling their own land, but wished to use it as a cattle ranch for the snobs of the Empire. He 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 the first instalment of her freedom and was deter mined to have the whole of it. (Applause.) The omnipotent hand of God had made Ireland a nation and while the grass grew and water flowed there would be many to fight and even die in order that God's desires might be realised. It seemed to him Providential 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. I MR GUNSON’S STATEMENT. The Mayor, Mr Gunson, publishes the following:— "The speech of Bishop Liston i 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 the King and the country and is an affront to our citizenship. It is seditious and designedly calculated to cause the disintegration of all that Britishers hold dear. It is a studied insult to the citizenship of the Empire to which New Zealand is proud to belong, a repudiation of England, a sneering reference to her as ‘a foreign nation’ and an entire dissociation—with the disdain of the speaker and those for whom he said he spoke as ‘ a right ’ —from all that pertains to the Empire. "I challenge 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 nil emphasis possible that the citizens of Auckland will not tolerate for one minute such a studied and deliberate act of disloyalty and of insult to British manhood • and womanhood, and 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 adminiitration controls or licenses. The Bishop and others holding views such as reported are not fit to longer, enjoy the privileges, and rights of our British Commonwealth and the protection .of the British flag.

"The speech will, be brought under the notice of 'the Attorney-General and it will be my duty to advise the 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.”