A Tale from Opotiki

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 39, 26 September 1907, Page 22

A Tale from Opotiki

A reader calls, our attention to a rather slipshod description of Opotiki in the Christchurch ' Weekly Press '. There is nothing in the sketch that might not have been better written by a dozen men that are engaged in the useful calling of sweeping the streets of Christchurch and Dunedin. So much in passing. We readily recognise the difficulties which a great weekly newspaper experiences in getting suitable . letterpress supplied for the illustrations that it secures from places that are far afield. But we cannot refrain from ex-

pressing our surprise that a journal with; the literary standing and the respectable traditions >of the '-"Weekly Press ' shoulfi have admitted to its columns the elephantine attempts at ' wut ' that mark its anonymous contributor's story of how an Irish Catholic up Opotiki' way is alleged to have gone about committing a crime to which Irish Catholics are, happily, very little addicted—namely, suicide. To Catholics,, and especially to Irish Catholics, one of the most offensive features of that stupfd— and still more stupidly told— story is the reference to ' the .Howley Mary ' (a form of reference to the Blessed Virgin that is quite unknown to Irish Catholics), and the oath, ' Be the Howley Mary ! ' It is needless to $say that such an oath, in any shape, is not to be heard from the lips of Irish Catholics. And then we have talk— on Irish lips, too— about a ' widder ', and more of the clumsy jabberwocky that is Supposed to stand for ' Irish dialect '. Even good old Homer nods at times. And we suppose the lids of the watchful editorial eye of the ' Weekly Press ' were falling when it failed to note the coarse offensiveriess which its Catholic readers, and especially its Irish Catholic readers, would find in the' alleged story from Opotiki.