THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, MARCH 28, 1932. IRELAND AND THE EMPIRE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21142, 28 March 1932, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, MARCH 28, 1932. IRELAND AND THE EMPIRE.

By his sudden onslaught on the position created by the Irish agreement of 1021, Mr. dc Valera has raised an issue of vital interest and importance throughout the Empire. His declared goal is sovereign independence for the Irish Free State. He docs not propose to snatch this by armed revolution, although he goes dangerously near insolent defiance in his refusal to pay the covenanted' land annuities. Nor is he openly attacking, as yet, the agreement of 1921 itself. In his statement of a few days ago, he said he was not prepared to go as far as that for a while ; but everything else he then said, and all that his Government has done since, make perfectly clear a determination ,to see the Free State an independent republic as quickly as possible, and the fairly substantial part of the cleaving wedge he has inserted is evidence of the strength of that determination. The oath of allegiance embodied in the agreement, in the form prescribed for members of the Free State Parliament, is to be abolished, if he can have his will, without delay, and this has become the centre of revived controversy. Mr. dc Valera prefers to rest his case 011 the fa'ct that the oath is in the Free State Constitution and is therefore a matter of merely domestic importance. He adds that his party's accession to office gives a mandate to abolish the oath, as this step was announced in his manifesto to electors. All this, however, is beside the point. The oath does appear, naturally, in the Constitution, but the Constitution was enacted at Westminster, not Dublin ; the oath is, moreover, verbally identical with the ,form in the agreement, on which the Constitution was framed. In attacking the oath, Mr. de Valera is striking a lethal blow at the so-called "treaty" itself. In the protracted discussion of the settlement of 1921, Mr. de Valera headed the faction opposing the agreement, and in particular objected to the form of the oath. As adopted by both sides in the negotiation, in spite of the Sinn Fein objection, it explicitly committed all who took it—he has been one of them—to "true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the Irish Free State as by law established" and to fidelity "to His Majesty King George V., his heirs and successors by law, in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain and her adherence to and membership of the group of nations" forming the Empire. Those considered phrases in the oath are unequivocal. They stand in the way of any attempt to create an Irish Republic separate from the Britannic commonwealth. That this was seen at the time is beyond question. Mr. de Valera, as titular head of Sinn Fein, made no secret of his objection to it on that account. Another form of oath was urged by him. Its reference to the Crown was so couched that the unity of the Imperial group was less plainly and less strongly stated. Because of what has been done by the Imperial Conferences of 1926 and 1930, it has been argued that the Free State Government's actions since Mr. do Valera came into office are justifiable. The argument is specious. It makes much of the declaration about the "group of self-governing communities composed of Great Britain and the Dominions" and neglects to note that they are "united by a common allegiance to the Crown" : it emphasises "equality of status" and ignores the express qualification that "the principles of equality and similarity, appropriate to< status, do not universally extend to function." The draftsmen of the Statute of Westminster, which gave legal form to these findings of the conferences, recognised that it was not legally possible for tiie British Parliament to divest itself wholly of its inherent power to legislate for the worldwide British realm. They accordingly set out in the preamble to the statute the fact that the members of the British group "are united by a common allegiance to the Crown" and proceeded 16 indicate the legal impracticability of any tampering with that allegiance by one or other of the component units, independently of the rest. The statute gives, as a leading constitutional authority asserts, "the decisive answer to the separatist theory of multiple monarchy." It is that theory to which Mr. do Valera has turned for a refuge in his adroit attempt to elude the logical and legal overwhelming of his attackon the oath of allegiance. He Avill find it a vain shelter. In a form of "oath he once advocated there occurs, instead of the wording adopted, a recognition of "the King as head of the associated States," and in a recent cable message this phrase was quoted from the form dictated by him to the Irish delegates negotiating the 1921 agreement. It means something very different from the wording adopted, in spite of a surface similarity. It, both ignores the "common citizenship" and "adherence to and membership in the group" and leaves open a way to separation while retaining* recognition of the same monarchy. The possible position is that of distinct and independent kincrdon'is, as in the case of Norway and Sweden, while acknowledging one TJoyal House: the Crown is not an essential bond but a merely temporary convenience. That multiple, distributed monarchy is not the British idea, as observable in fact and expressed in the Statute of Westminster. Our King is ours by virtue of his being the whole Empire's ; he does not merely happen to be ours as well as Britain's and Canada's and the Free State's. Consequently, Mr. de Valera's attempt to abolish the oath of "common allegiance" is to be resented as a disruptive assault and is to be repelled accordingly, in the interests of British citizenship everywhere in .the realm.,