SINN FEIN: IRISH JOURNALIST'S VIEWS

New Zealand Tablet, 31 October 1918, Page 32

SINN FEIN: IRISH JOURNALIST'S VIEWS

.» An old and experienced Irish • journalist who is also the correspondent of one of the great London dailies writes as follows to a New Zealand friend : “The political opinions of the country may now be said to be solidly on one side, and the Party, as such, will be. a thing of the past after the November. (?) General Election. What appeared to be at first blush a . policy of semi-insanity. now assumes the garb of clean, self-respecting patriotism, and one’s faith in the heart of the country — despite a generation of sapping and mining linked with the process of continual Anglicisation — high hopes for the future. It required something in the nature of a great upheaval to combat the efforts of insidious English machinations. We have had that upheaval, and no matter what we may individually think of it, or what we may have at the moment thought of it, we must all acknowledge that the country emerges cleaner and purer from the fire. Our youth to-day are magnificent. They are educated, upright, healthy-minded. They are sober and energetic, and the country for that is all the richer. Another generation will see even more wonderful changes. We in our day did what we thought was not a bad little | part.. What we did had in it nothing of the 'thoroughness ’ of to-day.”