Irish Outrages': XV. 'Faking' and Exaggeration (4)

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 39, 26 September 1907, Page 10

Irish Outrages ': XV. 'Faking ' and Exaggeration (4)

Figures, like, loaded firearms, need careful handling or, like the^ muskets of ' McFingal ', they may, recoil upon the user. t ' As some muskets so contrive it As oft to miss it he mark they drive at, And, though well aimed at duck or plover, Bear wide, and kick their owners over. This was the fate that befell the statistical musketry of Mr. Balfour. The exposure was easy and obvious. It ' drove hiai back on his rearward lines of pretext for coercion.. The first of these was a political confidence trick— a series of ' narratives ' or ' anecdotes ' (so Mr. Balfour styled them) : anonymous and uncorroborated gossip which (said he) ' I have obtained on my responsibility from' what I consider an authentic source ' ! Says the historian quoted above (p. 292) :— ' -In other words, the gossip which Mr. Balfour heard and Mr. Balfour believed, the House of Commons was likewise to accept as gospel truth ! Were ever the liberties of a single and a common pickpocket taken away on evidence so flimsy as that which justified the* *

t Chief Secretary in taking away the liberties of a whole nation V ' • • * 1 But-.', - continues our author (pp. 292-3), 'though the Chief Secretary was vague; in> his ''anecdotes", and though the Bill was being hurried through as fast /as the Government could manage, there was plenty of time to test and destroy most of the cases brought forward by the Chief Secretary ' . We will here mention three of the ' anecdotes ' on which Mr. Balfour based his plea for coercion. (1) A man named Clarke was Qsiccorcling to Mr. Balfour) indicted for obtaining money by means of a forged document' ; ' the case was proved in the clearest manner ' ; ' the judge charged strongly for conviction, but the jury, which consisted principally of farmers in the same rank of life as the prisoner, disagreed '. . The real facts, as proved by Mr. Parriell (T. P. ( O'Connor, p. 293) were, briefly, as follow: Clarke was a Protestant malster, not a Catholic farmer (as Mr. Balfour had represented hirri to be) ; he was not a National Leaguer ; and '' he was acquitted owing to the complicated nature of the accounis in dispute ' (ib.) ('2) The second '.anecdote '„ as told by Mr. Balfour, related to ' a most horrible outrage upon a girl ' by one John Hogan. Says" the author last quoted (p. 293) :—: — ' The association between an outrage upon a wontian, and political or agrarian combination, is rather remote, especially in a country where such ofiences are rare and are bitterly resented ; but in any case the whole story < was an invention '. • Here again Mr. Balfour was rather unfortunate in his ' authentic ' source . (3) The third case that we mention here was brought forward by the AttorneyGeneral. It serves, perhaps even more than Mr. . Balfour's ' anecdotes ', to illustrate the desperate straits to which the Government was reduced in its efforts to •find, or make a plausible pretext for subjecting • Ireland to the tyranny of a regime of coercion administered by the anti-Irish Tammany entrenched in Dublin Castle. We let the gifted author of ' The Parnell Movement ' (p. 293) unfold in his own way an incident of which he was a witness :—: — ' '"At the County "Kerry Assizes", said' the 'Atjtor- ' ney-Geheral, " on March 11, 1887, Patrick Hickey was indicted for a moonlight offence at the house of Mr. Casey, a farmer. During the melee the disguise of one of the attacking parties fell off, and Casey recognised Hickey, his own cousin. No evidence was called for the defence, and a verdict was given, ' Not guilty '." Here certainly was a very bad case, if true ; but what happened? "I rise to order ", said Mr. T. Harrington. >' I defended .the prisoner, /and T pledge my word) to the House, and I am willing to abide by the decision of Mr. Justice O'Brien, if he did not directly charge -for the acquittal of the prisoner on the ground 1 , that the charge was a fabrication, and if it was not at the judge's instance that I declined to examine any witness for the defence ". And the only reply the Attor-ney-General had to this crushing refutation of his charge was . a joke, and the statement that he had founded his assertion on a report of the case in the " " Freeman's Journal ".' The *second plea advanced for coercion by Mr. Balfour- was that illegal pressure was exerted by some . branches of tHe United Irish League. Two cas6s were -specified, one in Mayo, and one in Sligo. It was promptly pointed out that, in the Mayo case, ' that branch was immediately dissolved ', and that, in the Sligo case, the secretary of the League (Mr. T. Harrington, M.P.) had ' called for the resignation of the committee ' ('Parnell Movement', pp. 293-4). One more pretext remained — the charges, at assizes, of some of the active and combative party politicians in the judicial ermine, to whom reference has already been made (p — ). ' Let one case be taken as typical of the rest — the case of Mr. Justice Lawson. He rose to parliamentary life, and afterwards to the judicial Bench, for the tken corrupt Borough of^ Portarlington in the days of askn voting (1865) and narrow franchise. With a total of only 46 votes, he defeated his opponent by eleven. And

he secured his majority in advance by the good old rule, the simple plan which raised to wealth and place Judge Keogh, Chief Justice Morris,, Lord 'Chancellor Sir ,E. Sullivan, and so many others '('Parnell Movement', od. 1887, p. 123). And when raised to the Bench, lhe never missed an opportunity of fiouling and trampling on the people through whose votes he reached dignity and wealth ' (ib.). In the course of a charge to the jury in Mayo, Mr. Justice Lawson delivered one of the political harangues that are so deplorable a feature of Irish judicial life— especially when Irish Chief Secretaries stand in neecl of • ' arguments and cases for coerpion '. It was Mr. Justice Laws.on's first visit to Mayp, and , speafcing of the condition of the county, he said ' in part :—: — ' The present slate of things was morally unsatisfactory, and, according to the reports made to him, approached as near to rebellion against the authority of the country as anything short of civil war could be. • * Here is how Mr. Justice Lawson's state of ' .rebellion ' is disposed of by Mr. T. P. O'Connor in his , ' Parnell Movement ' (ib.) •— ' This charge was delivered on March 10, and it, therefore, referred to the state of the county in the first quarter of 1887. There was accordingly no opportunity of testing it,s accuracy until the Government produced the returns of crime for this quarter. When these returns were published, an astonishing discovery was made. The county, as has been seen, was described as being "as near to rebellion, against- the authority of the country as anything short of civil war could be ". What were the facts ? The county has a population of 230,000 ; " in three months the total number of offences in tnis population was 12, and of these 7 were threatening letters ! When one looked into the .offences, the revelation was still more extraordinary. In a county "as near to rebellion against the authority of * the country as anything short of civil. war ", there was not one case' of murder, nor of manslaughter, nor firing at the person, nor of suspicion to murder ; not one assault on a bailiff, or a police-constatole, or a processserver !' ' ' < The Marquis of Salisbury and the Marq.uis of Hartington admitted the Jubilee Perpetual Coercion Bill was aimed at ' certain combinations ', and at political opponents (see p.—). Mr. Balfour's stories of rampant crime and widespread terrorism were merely a thin <lrapery of pretext to cloak the real objects of the Bill. It passed, as stated. And at the fiat pi Dublin Castle, it may be applied to any or every part of Ireland. The part which the ' Times ' and the Pigott forgeries played in the discreditable drama has already been sufficiently explained.