BOMB-PLOTTERS PAY PENALTY

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21034, 9 February 1940, Page 4

BOMB-PLOTTERS PAY PENALTY

Britain has been forced to make the tragic decision whether two men condemned for murderous outrages in the campaign of the Irish Republican Army should make the supreme expiation or whether for political reasons they should be reprieved. The decision has been that the penalty must be paid, and the men have been executed. As far as the two men are concerned, that was the law, and they knew the penalty. They deliberately set about preparing violence which they must have known would cause the destruction of innocent lives. For them the lav/ of the land has taken its ordinary course. But the whole problem is surrounded with circumstances of deeper significance. For many long years violence of one kind or another has continued in unhappy Ireland. Hundreds of thousands of men of goodwill on both sides of the Irish Sea have struggled to heal the breach between the two countries, and hope has always been strong in their minds. So it was natural when these condemned men faced death for their misdeeds there should be urgent appeals from both Ireland and England that their lives should be spared in the hope that clemency would do something to ease the acuteness of the wider trouble. Many prominent persons supported the appeal. In those circumstances the British Government’s task was exceedingly difficult and unenviable.

Even while the condemned men were receiving the last ministrations, however, other members of the illegal Republican Army organisation were preparing equally destructive bombing plots, and explosions were occurring in many parts of England, with serious injuries to several persons, but luckily, as yet, without fatal results. How can that violence be condoned ? It is abhorred by ail selfrespecting people in both countries, and is being carried on by an organisation which has been outlawed in Ireland as well as in England. What choice has Britain but to enforce the full rigour of the law in an attempt to save innocent lives from the menace of deliberately placed infernal machines ? For Irish aspirations there may be sympathy or understanding, but for cold-blooded murder there can be neither.