IRELAND'S CASE

New Zealand Tablet, 23 January 1919, Page 23

IRELAND'S CASE

“Ireland is our one failure,” has become a kind of • commonplace in British political discourses, said the Most Rev. Daniel Cohalan, D.D., Bishop of . Cork, recently. What is the cause of British misgovernment of Ireland. In Austria the trouble is racial, as the rival parties, Germans and Slavs or Magyars and Slavs, are mostly Catholics; but in Ireland the cause of British, misgovernment is largely religious. At the Reformation a number, of British families were enriched by the plunder of the Church. The Church of England separated from the Centre of Unity and became Protestant. The lords of the plundered Church property could defend their occupation of their lands only by defending the schism of the Church and the Protestantised Church, cut off from the Centre of Unity and with no life except as the life in a lopped-off branch, had to depend for existence on the temporal power, and principally on those who were enriched by the plunder of the Church and on their successors. The counterpart of the Lords and of the Anglican Church in Ireland are the Irish landlords and the Irish Episcopalian Protestant Church. And British misrule of Ireland has been, in the main, misrule by the House of Lords and the Tory Party in favor of the Irish landlords and the Irish Protestant Church. To this must be added, in regard to recent years, the fostering , by the Tory Party of religious feuds in Ireland in order to stave off the day of reckoning for themselves in England. This brings me to the Carson campaign in Ulster. Irish Nationalists are convinced that Sir Edward Carson and his British Tory supporters did not give a jot for Protestant Ulster or for the Battle of the Boyne. But the supremacy, if not the very existence, of the House of Lords was threatened by the Veto Bill. How was the danger to be averted By starting a religious war in Ireland. Let there be no doubt about it: the Ulster campaign, in principle, was made an anti-Papal, an anti-Catholic, campaign. For the main argument was: Your Catholic neighbors may be excellent people individually; but how can you trust the liberties bought at the Battle of the Boyne to a people owning allegiance to a foreign domineering Power reigning in the Vatican ? Enmity was intensified between two nations, enmity that has cost England a good price during the war, to secure the interests of a political party. Every effort made by the Liberal Party and by the enfranchised British workers to redress the grievances of Ireland has been thwarted by the Tories in their own interest and in the interest of the Protestant landlord class in Ireland. They sometimes say: “If you in Ireland agree among yourselves we shall ratify your agreement” ; and then they say to Ulster: “Take care, you, not to agree, and there will be no change.” ( Ireland and the War. I have often been approached on the subject of recruiting; by Englishmen, by Americans, by Frenchmen ; but I could never fox-get the state of coercion in which we are living in Ireland when the question of

military service was raised. Irishmen living in England, I said, should offer their services. It is a moral duty; they share in the good government of England Irishmen in the United States, I said, should Iccept their share of the war burdens: it is a moral duty towards them country. So also Irishmen in Canada and in Australia should take their part in the war according to the system of military enrolmentvoluntary or conscriptive— by their country. But consider the peculiar circumstances of Ireland Since the Parliamentary union of 1800 coercive law one might say, has been the rule in Ireland; and there never were worse periods of coercion than under Mr. Arthur Balfour and under Lord French at the present moment. The Home Rule Act was hung up at the dictation of the Tory leaders. Irishmen are called on to offer themselves for the supreme sacrifice in an absolute unconditioned manner and they get in return the hypothetical, conditioned promise: “It is probable that possibly at some future day, when the war is over and circumstances are changed and prejudices have abated, your country will get some watered-down form of Homo Rule.” Bantry Incidents. I was in Bantry one night in June when the local Sinn Feiners had a procession, with a band, to celebrate the return of Mr. Griffith, M.P. for Cavan. Soon a young lieutenant with a body of soldiers entered the town from a camp on Bantry House grounds. He said that shots had been heard ; and no shots had been fired by the people. He said the soliders’ rifles were loaded, and that if the men were molested, even by stonethrowing, they would fire on the people. There was imminent danger of bloodshed. Next day the lieutenant s superior officer came into town and apologised, saying the young lieutenant had got a wound on the head at foreign service, and was not fully responsible! Within the past fortnight a dramatic performance was announced to take place in the parish hall in Bantry. It was announced by posters through the town. No notice of prohibition was given. At the time announced —7 p.ra. —the people of the town and the American sailors on Whiddy Island were assembling at the hall. Then a party of soldiers with bayonets took up position, and it was announced that the performance was prohibited. There was danger of a row between the American sailors and the soldiers. And who, think you, was summoned to keep the peace? The parish priest, who speedily appeared on the scene and calmed the excited sailors and populace. Then West Cork has been put under military law for no* sufficient reason. Military authorities, knowing nothing of the country, if they fall under the influence of a bad type of anti-Irish constabulary inspector are sure to commit excesses.,