What is Ireland's Grievance ?

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 3, 15 January 1903, Page 2

What is Ireland's Grievance ?

We occasionally come across well-meaning, but not very well-read, persons who ask in a puzzled way, What really is the trouble in Ireland? Has she not the same laws as the rest of the British Empire, and what ground has she then to complain ? What exactly are the grievances of Ireland ? It wou'd take many volumes to give anything like a full account of the wrongs of Ireland, but an admirable nutshell stattment has juFt been given by the great American orator, Mr Bourke Cockran. In a brilliant speech at the opening of the Uiited rish League Convention in Boston, he summed up the Irish question and the case as between England and Ireland in the following pithy sentences : 'The Irish people are the only people in the world who enjoy neither the possession of the soil on which, nor he government under whic h, they li\e. There is no people in the world that docs not control one or the other. '1 hey own neither their soil nor their government. They have demand' d the control of both. They are demanding it now more ugorou^lv and more vehemently than ever be oe. The English government are duermintd that they shall control neithet th ir 1 iiid nor their govrri'rnent. Th it is the issue. On t he one hand the denund of the lii^-h people that they shall control both their government and their soil, and on the other hard the determination of the English Government that they shall control neither.' That is the quintessence of the Irish question, and it is put. in a waj that must appeal to every lover of democracy and ireedom.