IRISH NEWS

New Zealand Tablet, 4 March 1920, Page 30

IRISH NEWS

THE VICTIM OP THE FRENCH OUTRAGE. Tho funeral of Martin Savage, who was killed during the alleged attack on Lord French, took place on December 23. The body wag handed over to the relatives on the previous evening, and lay in a luggage van overnight. Notwithstanding the inclemency of the weather, a body of 40 young men was present at Broadstone Station on the morning of the funeral when the train steamed out to the west. They stood at attention in military formation, and smartly dropped their caps as the train moved away. A strong body of police was also' present. The mourners and a large crowd of people met the train at Collooney, from which place the coffin, draped in a Sinn Fein flag, was borne on the shoulders of mourners to Ballisodare, two miles away. A company of soldiers, fully equipped and with fixed bayonets, together with a squad of policemen, occupied the graveside, but no unseemly incident occurrred. The Rev. Father M. Doyle read the prayers at the graveside, and after the interment two wreaths were placed on the grave. One was “From Dublin in loving memory” and the other from “The Sligo Republicans.” IRISH MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS. Although, owing to the system of proportional representation it was impossible for any party to sweep the polls at the Irish municipal elections held a few weeks ago, Sinn Fein gained a substantial victory at the expense of the Unionists and Nationalists. The Belfast results were a terrific shock to the Carsonites, who lost 16 seats. Labor also did well throughout Ireland. Sinn Fein and Labor now hold about 950 municipal seats out of a total of 1865. Sinn Fein gained majorities in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and other towns in the South and West. The Labor Party, which is favorable to Sinn Fein, gained the next largest representation. The Unionists, Reformers, Nationalists, and Independents combined have substantial representation, though they are in the minority. Sinn Fein has 41 out of 80 seats in the Dublin Corporation, as compared with seven scats which it had previously, while the Nationalists have nine, as compared with the previous total of 51. In Ulster the Unionist majorities have beeen substantially reduced. The Unionists have now 36 seats in Belfast out of a total of 60, as compared with 52 held by them previously. ADMISSIONS OF FAILURE. When Lord French told his English audience at Wallasey that “the Sinn Fein Government possesses a great secret army, called Irish Volunteers, with which systematic intimidation of the population is going on,” it probably did not occur to him that ho made two important admissions. What he said was tantamount to this (writes Mr. P. J. Boylan in the Brooklyn Tablet): —“There are two governments in Ireland — an Irish government and a British government. As tho head of the latter, despite the large army at my command, the military police, the magistrates, and the gaolers, I am a dismal failure. It is true, as Arthur Griffith .states in other words, that I have garrisoned Ireland from end to end with a large army; that I have filled the gaols with Irishmen and Irish women without trial, or after trial with court-martial on such charges as singing a patriotic song or declaring that Ireland should be free; that I have had the homes of the Irish people raided night after night; that I. have had men and women dragged out of bed to prison, many of them to die there; that I have had Irish children kidnapped, Irish public meetings suppressed, the Irish press gagged, and the duly elected representatives of the Irish people decreed ‘a dangerous association.’ .Yet, I assure you, I am powerless against Sinn Fein. Why is Sinn Fein so powerful? Because it is not a mere organisation, as you good English folk may think, but a nation, with its own government, its own army, its own political and commercial plans and its own notions of what is democracy and what autocracy. The Irish were always a strange people, but the Irish of to-day—the Irish I have striven in vain to subdue —are the strangest people that ever dwelt within the four seas of Ireland.” A FRENCH COMMENT. Under a three-column satirical cartoon, Le Charivari, the oldest and most famous weekly pictorial journal in France, published in a recent issue an article criticising England for her treatment of Ireland. “While with deep devotion,” says the writer, “we shed our tears for the small oppressed nationalities, while we create an imaginary Czecho-Slovakia, a. Jugo-Slavia which has never existed, a Hedjaz of phantasy, we receive almost with a smile of derision the cries of a. nation which even now counts

4,700,000 inhabitants on its own soil; and almost 20,000,000 or its children emigrated to America. The persecution which Ireland is passing through at the moment makes the question one for immediate consideration. . . . The English are our allies,” the article concludes. “They stood loyally by us up to the end, but since the 'peace their old egoism has again got the upper hand, and they wish to make the world believe that the victory is purely an Anglo-Saxon one.” Commenting on the above, the Irish Weekly (Belfast) says:—“The writer in Le Charivari confounded the Irish in America and their descendants with emigrants from Ireland. The actual number of the latter has never been ascertained, and never can be estimated now, as English ‘statistics’ are wholly unreliable; but they cannot have been less than 7,500,000 within 70 years. MALIGNING THE IRISH PEOPLE. Every week now for many weeks past fetches us conflicting accounts of outrage and tragedy in Ireland (says an exchange). Many of them are obviously staged for propaganda purposes, and with the foul object of blackening the character of the Irish people. It’s an infamous system to adopt. No Government professing itself Christian should countenance such despicable tactics. Lying and slander are bad weapons in war. No respectable opponent descends to the level of the very commonplace shopkeeper who endeavors to advance his interests by slandering and vilifying his competitor. And that’s what the British Publicity Department and its Louis Traceys are doing under tho seal of Government authority in Ireland to-day. “Fling mud enough, some of it is bound to stick, was the dictum of an old-time Anglican controversialist. It seems to be the policy of the British Publicity Department in relation to the Irish people. Its hacks are doing their worst to hold their jobs and to earn their tainted wages. It’s dirty business — even worse than a hangman’s job or the wretched occupation of a flagcllator. Poor paltry devils! They are the real fomenters of disorder in Ireland. So long as they ply their ignominious trade there will be trouble there.' The law of retaliation will be put into practice against them in another way. When Dublin Castle administration follows the lines of Trotsky and Lenin and their comrade Bolsheviks, what else may bo expected from a spirited people but retaliation ? The law of retaliation is no new law, as Lord French must know; it is much older than Dublin Castle and anterior to Magna Charta, which is now being choked to death in Ireland by the blundering minions of Winston Churchill and the irresponsibility of Irish government. Isn’t it a part of the cult of war; isn’t it human nature? Hit and you must expect to bo hit, unless your hit one is a poltroon—well, whoever else may be amongst the poltroons, the world knows the Irish are not. DE VALERA AND FRENCH. Asked (says an exchange) if ho would condemn the attempt to shoot Lord French, Mr. do Valera replied; “The rigid censorship placed on the news coming from Ireland relating to the incident, and the obvious contradictions in detail of such news as has come through, make me certain that whatever the incident was it was very different from what these reports make it out to be. Dispatches from London are necessarily second-hand, and simply reflect what the British Government wants the British people and the world to believe. For all we know this may have been an affair specially staged by the Government itself. Recently a little Irish Republican Boy Scout was brutally murdered in Clare, as a coroner’s jury found, by the British forces of occupation there, but the original dispatches of the news made it appear that he was shot, not by the British, but by the Irish.” As to tho report that Archbishop Walsh had denounced the attack and that Cardinal Logue had sent congratulations to Lord French, Mr. do Valera said; —“I do not know whether there really has been such a denunciation, nor whether such congratulations were sent, but this I know, that the Government can be trusted to see to it now, as always, that they are used to the full, not in the spirit of Archbishop Walsh and Cardinal Logue, but to the detriment of Ireland’s just cause. The British Government, with its so-called governors, that know no moral restraints themselves aside from baton and bayonet and bastile, that carelessly shoot down and brutally bomb unarmed crowds of men and women in Ireland, Egypt, and India, for the crime of meeting to demonstrate that they want to be free; these men never hesitate to 'shelter themselves behind the moral barriers. They never fail to use the Bible as a useful adjunct to the sword, when they believe it will help them to maintain their infamous tyranny.”