AN ENGLISH JOURNAL ON IRISH “CRIME”

New Zealand Tablet, 5 August 1920, Page 18

AN ENGLISH JOURNAL ON IRISH “CRIME”

The following editorials from the latest copies of the New Witness to hand will show how ill-informed our P.P.A. and Orange friends are about events in Ireland::

The pretext for military reconquest of the necessity of restoring law and order is becoming more and more untenable. The truth is more and more clearly the other way about. I have before me a table prepared by Sinn Fein Headquarters, drawing a contrast between recent incidents in Ireland. It demonstrates already that if the British Government really desires the preservation of law and order in Ireland, the withdrawal of its own forces from the country is ■ the first essential. The incidents it cites are taken from the reports published in the Irish daily press. During the past two weeks in one of the parallel columns is a list of acts of aggression by police and military. Included in the column is the report of the receipt by many members of Dail Eireann of letters threatening them with death ; these letters are written upon the official note-paper of the Dail, and the notepaper is identified with that carried off in the raid on its headquarters last November. The other column consists principally of reports of arrests of common law offenders by Republican police and trials by Republican courts. In numerous cases, apart from those undertaken on the initiative of the Republican police, they have been, engaged to investigate the robbery of money, from private houses and post offices. In some cases also they have been called upon by local public bodies to take over the peace duties neglected by the Government police. The table includes the issue by members of the Dail in whose constituencies land agitation exists of proclamations denouncing violent, measures and ordering the landless men to submit their claims to the local arbitration courts for consideration. These courts, by whose findings litigants agree to abide, are enforcing their decrees against those who refuse to carry out their undertakings by arrest. Some of them have also instructed the Republican Police to protect disputed land against violence. These effects of the Republican Government to control the land agitation are meeting with strenuous opposition from the 5 armed forces of the very British Government which parades agrarian outrages as originating from Sinn Fein. In Ireland, law and order are represented by the Republican movement, and lawlessness and disorder by those agents of the British Government who in the name of law and order are endeavoring to destroy the Republican movement. I do not know that at this moment one can do better service than by continuing, oven at the risk of being wearisome, to set forth the facts .about “outrages in Ireland. The Government revived on Mav 1 this old form of anti-Irish propaganda, the publica'tion of a daily list of “outrages." The lists from May 1 to May 26 have now been analysed by the Irish Bulletin, issued from Sinn Fein headquarters, with the rollowing results: The total of 761 “outrages" placed to the discredit of the Irish people during those 26 days is made up thus. Three hundred and fourteen, or 41 per cent., are acts of the Irish people taken to prevent an intensification of military rule (the burning of empty police barracks and other strategic posts m ended for . the use of the army of occupation the searching 0 f mail-bags for police and military corresLnfeTb’ and . s ? on )> which-acts were not accompanied by any injury to the person, any loss of life or foHv* oi ls n ° f f riVate pr ° perty " A hundred and loity or 18 per cent., are acts (threatening letters and proved police outrages) of which the police are them selves beheved by the nation to be guilty. A hundred and thirty-nine (of which only 16 were serious cases) are acts of agrarian agitation arising directly out of British land legislation which is especially designed to reduce the population of Ireland by creating I la J less agricultural class who must emigrate if g they are

to live. A hundred and thirty or 17 per cent., are ordinary criminal cases without any political significance whatever—mostly trivial cases of small thefts, petty larcenies, and the like. These give a total of 725, or 84 per cent., which are either acts of defence by an oppressed people, or acts of agrarian agitation, the outcome of evil alien land laws, or acts of ordinary criminals left free by the employment of the police upon political aggression. The remaining 36, or 6 per cent., are made up of 18 cases of action by the Irish Republican Police to suppress the activity of criminals (these cases are returned as “outrages”), and of 18 cases of. the wounding and killing of members of a police force which is driving the people to desperation by incessant aggression of the most violent kind. ,

Judicial Statistics, Ireland, 1918, an official Government publication Just issued, contains the following information which has not been published broadcast to the world by Dublin Castle. In that year 50 per cent, of the murders in Ireland were committed in Ulster; 40 per __ cent. of the Ulster murders were committed in Belfast. There were as many murders in Belfast as in the whole province of Leinster or the province of Munster, and twice.as many as in the province of Connaught. Ulster’s share of all the crime in Ireland was o 4 per cent. In 1918, when Ulster predominated so distinctly in the output of crime, that crime was no hindrance to the support by the British Government of the Ulster minority’s cause against the national movement in the three provinces which had by far a cleaner criminal record than Ulster. In that year of 1918 the Government arrested every prominent Republican in the South of "Ireland and deported them without trial. It arrested over a thousand men on political charges. It used its military and police to suppress Nationalist public opinion in Ireland. It broke up the Irish Convention when the Ulster minority’s predominance in Ireland was threatened by its findings. To-day, when merciless repression has created violent acts in the previously peaceful parts of Ireland, these acts are advertised as the proof that nothing adequate can be done for the vast majority of the Irish people. Crime when committed in Ulster is no hindrance to British support of the Ulster minority’s undemocratic claim. But crime, when committed under intense provocation in any other part of Ireland, becomes the reason for righteous British opposition to the democratic claim of the mass of the Irish people.