IRELAND A BEGGAR.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20312, 21 January 1928, Page 17

IRELAND A BEGGAR.

SHAW ATTACKS HIS NATIVE LAND. A BITTER ARTICLE. - (From Odr Own Correspondent.) LONDON, December 14Mr George Bernard Shaw has appeared in the role of a severe critic of his owu country. Ho describes Southern and Catholic .Ireland as “an incorrigible beggar,” und he refuses to second r. scheme for helping the poor children ot Dublin. In an article in the Yorkshire Evening News he writes:— “ Judge Henry Neal ,has visited rr.* native town of Dublin. -He is very properly ashamed of the condition of the children there, and he asks me to second his appeal to America to send I forgot how many thousand pairs of shoes am stockings to clothe them. It is certainly more sensible than sending them handkerchiefs to cope with bare feet and wet flags. “ Ireland is perfectly well able to feed and clothe her children if she chooses. It is a mistake to suppose she is poor. She is only an incorrigible beggar—which is not the same thing. She persuades you that except for a corner in Ulster, where a handful of bigoted enemies of hers build ships and make linens, she is penniless. Do not believe her. The trade of the Irish Roman Catholic South in butter and cattle and agriculture generally represents far more money than Uie shipyards and mills of Belfast. Cooperation can develop this agricultural industry by leaps and bounds. It has already done so. A BAD MOTHER. " Ireland can afford a pair of goon shoes and a couple oT changes of warm, woollen stockings every week for every one of her children, and if she is a oad mother and prefers to leave the children barefooted and hungry while she is enjoying herself at hunt meetings, regattas, horse shows, and the routine of sport and fashion generally, I do not see why America should encourage her. If you give a country girl in Ireland a pair or good boots she will carry them in her hand for miles to the fair of the market town, and there put them on to make a fine show. “ What got at me when 1 walked abouthe slums of Dublin lately were the young women with waxen faces, the scarlet patches on the cheeks, the pink eyes the shuffling, weary steps, representing Dublin’s appalling burden of consumption They are not the product of bare feet but of wet feet in broken boots—of insanitary poverty generally. “ When the police were driven ITo.n the streets by the week-long struggle tor an Irish Republic in Easter, 1910, these people came out and began to pillage the shops as naturally as their neighbours a mile or so away pick up cockles on Sandymount Strand. CIVILISATION NOTHING TO THEM, “ Civilisation is nothing to them. They never had any. The priest came and drove them away as if they were Hies. But the moment he passed on they came again like flies. Civilisation means 1 respect my life and property and I will respect yours.’ Slumdom means, ‘Disregard my life and property and 1 will disregard yours.’ “ Giving money is no use. It is likj people at a railway accident offering surgical instruments, splints, and banuages to one another when there is nobody who knows how to use them. If you give shoes to a hungry child it will eat Giem (through the medium of the pawnbroker) and be just ns hungry next week—and the person who gives the money or the shoes, instead of feeling like a scoundrel because the children were in misery, feels sai.itb because he has played the generous saviour of melodramas.” “Ireland during the past 10 years,” says the Daily Express, in commenting on Mr Shaw’s statement, “ has been racked by civil war and profound cot; stitutional changes to an accompaniment of general trade depression. She has endured all this, and made a most valiant effort to throw off the effects of it, without any help hy voice or pen from Mr George Bernard Shaw. Now he rounds on her people, once his own people.'as though they were lost to self-respect. But the excuses of a man of letters for doing nothing are proverbially ingenious.”