That 'Outrage'

New Zealand Tablet, 13 September 1906, Page 10

That ' Outrage'

Falsehood is sometimes a /good imitation of truth. But the ' Irish agrarian outrages '- that are from time to time described by the cableman are usually, clumsy counterfeits of fact. . Labouchere's sensational exposure of the methods by which these ' outrages' were manufactured and catalogued during the Coercion regime of the eighties, convulsed the House of Commons and surrounded even the .official returns ! with the halo of. suspicion that attaches to ' missionary tales' and '.snake-yarns.' That antecedent doubt naturally fell like a cloak over the following cable-message that appeared in the New Zealand daily papers on July 10 :— 1 A moonlighting outrage is reported from Dumramey, in Westmeath. A farmer's house was twice attacked, and many shots were fired, the farmer's two sons being nearly shot while in their bods".' The story (as we pointed out at the time)was almost a verbal transcript of the" bogus * agrarian- outrage ' that did NOT take place at Boyle-a few months earlier. There was the same double attack ; the same powder-blazing fusillade ; the same valiant defence ; the same escape from being ' nearly, shot.' Since the date of that cable-message (July 10) our eyes have Ueen wandering over the columns of our Irish exchanges and other Irish newspapers for an account of the • agrarian outrage' in Westmeath. But'we have not yet alighted upon it. And yet our exchanges date up to July 28 ;" and they devoted a vast'deal ..of space to the bogus ' agrarian outrage > at Boyle, even before iFs fraudulent character was established by police investigation. It really Jooikff as if this latest, • agrarian outrage ' is (like so many of its predecessors) what the ' Book of Common Prayer ' would term ' a fond thing vainly invented '. -