DE VALERA'S RELEASE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19271, 8 September 1924, Page 8

DE VALERA'S RELEASE.

the FUTURE OF IRELAND. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON July 29. De Valara has been given his freedom and has returned home. A demonstration to welcome him appears to have been rather tame as to speeches, but in the matter of cheering and singing and marching and piping it was worthy of the liveliest period of Sinn Fein. The crowd which attempted to get into the Mansion House at Dublin crowded the thoroughfares in all directions, and for several hours the Free State was a thing that had no being; the Cl ty _ was back to the humour of 1917, abolishing the hated Saxon by imagining him conquered. According to a special correspondent of the Morning Post the malice of Free State Ministers is to be thanked for De Valera’s ovation. He was detained so long solely tc gratify a certain Minister’s enmity; and this temporary martyrdom has washed out his mistakes and unpopularity of a year ago, making him a hero all over again. De Valera’s speech (says the same writer) was a curious utterance, and disappointed many of his followers, who expected him to brandish the sword and tell his marching and counter-marching followers of deeds of daring-do tuat would yet be theirs to lessons in pike-fighting amid his speeches. In his last speech he was less bellicose. “ BEATEN MILITARILY.” He said that those who defended the republic had been “beaten militarily.” There was dissent, but he insisted that the truth must be faced. Perhaps the interrupters were right, for to run away is hardly to be “beaten militarily.” However, beaten in arms, they were winning politically. He himself Was a moderate man; but he was prepared to use any means if moderate means failed. What they had got to do was to bring the nation back back to “the grand moral standards of 1917” (the year in which Inspector Barton was killed with a blow of a hurley). Other points in the speech were the declaration that they of the republic wanted to make every Irishman’s home his castle—an aim realised all too well in these last few months, when every house was a threatened or besieged fortress, and every man’s < hand was against his neighbour’s—and that if Mr Lloyd George had been a bigger man he migftt have secured Irish friendship for England. They would nob sigh away a single foot of Irish soil; they would have all Ireland. Three months of “the spirit of 1917” would bring Ireland back to the “glorious position” before the signing of the Treaty. NOT GOING THE WHOLE HOG. It is not easy to disentangle from these wandering arguments what De Valera was trying to convey. He has lost grip, and speaks vaguely. He has no able men to clarify his thoughts and give him words, as in the day when Griffith made oratorical balls for him to fire. Between the lines we can discern an effort to keep the wild men on his side with promises of “ any means if moderate' means fail,” while in the talk of English friendship, moderation, and sweet reasonableness .' we may see an attempt to bring his party round to his “Document No. 2” theory, which I have heard expounded by one of his followers as Gatta,n’s nationalism in place of pure Republicanism. In the few .weeks before De Valera’s release the MacSwiney Press and speakers talked much of ’the “Sovereign Irish Republic” in the effort to commit the “President” in advance to the most reckless and extreme courses. Judging by his speech—what he did not say in it rather than by what he did—he is not going the whole hog this time. NO PRETENCE OF LOYALTY. De Valera will not humbug Englishmen with pretences of loyalty, like the party which promised to be good boys and then allowed its army to be honeycombed with sedition, erased the Royal symbols, boycotted Wembley, and left the, Queenstown murderers uncapturcd. De Valera will promise nothing that he cannot bring' his gunmen to accept. Therefore the issue will be straightened out, and instead of a slow degeneration of Southern Ireland into a seedy, mutinous foreign State. England will be faced with a demand that will bo on.disguised She will have two courses before her—final surrender of what she is at present surrending piecemeal, or a definite stand against the dissolution of the United Kingdom. What has to be realised is that De Valera is nearer to the real feelings of Southern Ireland than Mr Cosgrave’s party.