PROCLAIMED MEETINGS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 34, 21 December 1883, Page 7

PROCLAIMED MEETINGS.

(Dublin Freeman,, Oct. 27.) Two questions are to-day on many a tongue in Ireland. The first is wby are National meetings in the South prevented and proclaimed, and Orange meetings in the North permitted and protected? The second is why, if a meeting ought in the judgment of the authorities to be proclaimed, is the proclamation kept like a stone in the sleeve till the very last moment 1 There is no fusilaiing from revolvers at any of the National meetings; there are threats to gobble up the CJueen s soldiers, or insults conveying that they aie only permitted to exist by sufferance of the meeting; the leaders of the National masses do not attempt to over-rule or ride over" the arrangements of the iixecutive authorities. Orange mobs habitually commit all those offences, and have recently shown that they mean and actually work the mischief they spent. Yet the Orangmen are allowed- carte blanche, and are not interfered with, while the people who conduct their meetings in a constitutional way are stopped and gagged and turned back This is bad enough, but it is worse to endang r a breach of the peace, and the serious results which might follow by not givingthe people timely notice of the decision of the autorities. The MiltownMaloay meeting a few Sundays ago and tbe Cork meetings yesterday were not proclaimed till an hour, when it was absolutely impossible for the prevention to be made known to the p sople in the remote districts whose populations would pour in to those gatherings. If a life were lost by a collision between the armed upholders of such a secret proclamation and an uninformed crowd intending to exercise what they believed to be their right, nothing could wash the stain off those -who might have obviated all danger of misunderstanding by giving due warning of the proclamation of that, of the intention to hold which they themselves had long notice. We ask again are their two sets of laws — one for the handful of Orangemen in the North, the other for the four-fifth of the whole people of Ireland ? And is it to deter peaceable persons from exercising the Constitutional right of public meeting, save in fear and trembling, and with tbe shadow of a possible proclamation over their heads, that the elevnth honr on the eve of the meeting is the one customarily selected for the issue of the edict against it ?