ANOTHER LEGISLATIVE FAILURE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume X, Issue 510, 19 January 1883, Page 23

ANOTHER LEGISLATIVE FAILURE.

The Arrears Act is the latest instance of the utter inability of the British Parliament to legislate properly for Ireland. Here was a measure of beneficent design — conceived, it can scarcely be doubted, with the intention of relieving a host of ruined tenant-farmers from an overwhelming load of debt put upon their shoulders by rackrents and bad seasons, and of giving them a fresh start in life under hopeful conditions. Yet so blunderingly has the statute been framed, and so unsuited are some of its provisions to the circumstances of tbii country, that at the present moment it bids fair to be even a more ghastly legislative failure than Acts of Parliament for Ireland usually are. Its authors coolly assumed that tbe harvest for 1882 would be a bountiful one, and jumped to the wholly unwarranted conclusion that the harvest for 1881 was sufficient to again set up men who had been struggling with three successive adverse years. Therefore, as a condition precedent for availing of the proffered advantages of the Act, it was provided that a year's rent should first be paid and set to the account of 1881, though, as is well known, thousands upon thousands of the Irish tenant-farmers could no more find the money for the purpose than discover Aladdin's lamp ; unless, indeed, they should fall into either of the straits from which the Act itself expressly and in terms professes to guard them— namely, " loss of their holdings, or deprivation of the means necessary for the cultivation thereof." As it this were not balk enough, the •• hanging-gale " provision was inserted, which, from the confusion as to its real meaning it has caused, multiplies indefinitely the difficulties about the payment of the year's rent. Then, in a spirit of maladroitness rarely equalled, the 30th of November was arbitrarily fixed as the very last day on which such absolutely necessary payment can be made and the 31st of December the last on which applications under the statute can be received. Thus it comes to pass that an Act which became law towards tbe end of last August virtually expires for numbers of tenants in arrears about the time they have begun to hear of its existence 1 In addition, what the needs of the case demanded should have been a statute as simple as a lesson in a child's reading-book is a complicated and mystifying piece of legal draughtsmanship. No wonder, then, that now, at the close of .November, applications concerning no more than about £100,000 of arrears have been made although the Prime Minister himself estimated the total of the arrears as between two and three millions ! Was ever measure proved to have missed its aim more widely than this ? The situation in regard to it is simply preposterous, and cannot be allowed to stand, unless the Gladstone Government and the British Parliament have made up their minds to bear such ridicule as attaches to that King of France who with forty thousand men marched up the hill and then marched down again. — Nation.