THE REIGN OF VIOLENCE IN IRELAND

New Zealand Tablet, 30 September 1920, Page 18

THE REIGN OF VIOLENCE IN IRELAND

One would suppose, to judge from the Irish news day by day in the papers, that the three most important authorities in Ireland were all agreed on one point —the desirability of civil war (says the Manchester Guardian of July 30, editorially). This would be the natural conclusion to draw from the murders of policemen, the sacking of towns by policemen, and the attacks on Nationalist workmen in the Belfast shipyards. The Sinn Fein leaders do not denounce the first, -the Government does not punish or stop the second,' and the third followed closely on Sir Edward Carson's invitations to his followers to take active measures for their defence. If anybody talks about the murders of the police, the Sinn Feiner will reply that there have been eight thousand political arrests in Ireland, that three out of four of the members of Parliament elected by Irish constituencies have been in prison or in hiding, that the police are not the servants of the Irish people but the armed servants of a foreign Government imposing its will, that many of them have been employed on espionage, and that to the Irish patriot they are traitors. If the spectacle of Irish towns looted by the police, of dreadful injuries not only to men but to women and children, of prominent Sinn Feiners murdered under circumstances that cast suspicion on the police, looks to most of us more like the prosecution of an irregular war than the orderly government of a white people, the Government apologists point to the maddening provocation offered in a series of cruel and cowardly murders. If it seems to the English observer deplorable that -the Belfast Orangemen should chase Nationalist workmen from the yards, fire Catholic chapels, and generally do honor to Sir Edward Carson in the way that a London mob once did honor to Lord George Gordon, Sir Edward Carson replies thai the Nationalists were, always rebels in fact as they are now in name, and that. Belfast is merely showing in its own way. what it thinks of Sinn Fein excesses elsewhere. So do the implacable furies of her history hunt Ireland to her ruin.

It is our first, duty in such a crisis to sort out the relevant and guiding facts. The fire-eaters who want to urge the Government to rigorous measures imagine this as a struggle between the forces of order and those of anarchy'. That reading of the facts will not bear examination. Sinn Fein does not stand for disorder, nor does it represent the resort to anarchy and confusion which has been at other times the weapon of a subject people. Over a great part of Ireland Sinn Fein represents in daily life the reign of order. Her courts and her Volunteers dispense justice and keep the peace with such success that Unionists not only make use of them but make acknowledgment of the confidence they repose in them. In many places they have put down agrarian outrage. As for the religious toleration practised in Sinn Fein districts, it is only necessary to recall the public declarations of Protestants that their religious rights have been scrupulously respected. This is not anarchy but order: the order, it is true, of a rival to the established Government, but still order, and order so well accepted by political opponents that an attempt on the part of Dublin Castle to break down this system would be deplored by Unionists in the South as disturbing their security. But this aspect of the Sinn Fein regime is overshadowed in

British eyes by the campaign of political murder. Some day we shall know the true history of that campaign—how far it u the deliberate policy of political extremists how far it. is criminal passion exploiting the political atmosphere. In every country the war has bred a crop of violent crime of one kind or another. m,fM°V m ™ n * ** is our business rather to point out that every day that this campaign continues compromises desperately both the claims of the Sinn Feiners to political leadership and the prospects of peace in on theti 1 S rf-° f mUrd6rS leaves a dai ' k stain on the history of what is, we may hope, the last stage 2-Sifaf for Irish freedo4 E ™y ** £

If Sinn Fein does not stand for anarchy neither does the British Government in Ireland, as at present conducted, stand for order, as order . g ' understood by serTes n ;nt We lleed 110 t r€Ca P itulat e the melancholy which i ageß n Peiial and political freed ™ by which the Government have driven moderate men to said W ll '"I I? lne V t 0 d 6S P air - Mr - B °™ Law murder' 7 at^ e began t 0 seml troo P s after*the mmdeis began. That statement needs, we fancy, Mr V en ° U ? qUali . fCation 5 but, however that may be', Mr Bonar Law will not say that it was only after the murders began that the Government took to governing Ireland by the methods by which Castlereagh governed England a century ago. The law, as an instrument « liffiLt m £ artial government, has been respected as little by the Government as by the rebels in Ireland It we knew nothing more about that administration than a simple fact admitted by Sir Hamar Greenwood on Monday night we should have the clue to its failures, ten- Hamar Greenwood told the House of Commons that the Divisional Commissioner for the Ulster area is General Hackett Pain. Now General Hackett Pain was Chief of Staff of the officers commanding the Ulster Volunteer Force in the days of Sir Edward Carson s Provisional Government. * He is thus an exorhcer of a Government that was as much a rebel Government as the Sinn Fein Government with this difference, that it represented a minority, whereas Sinn f em represents a majority, of the Irish people. We have only to read a letter like that of Lord Denbigh m the Times of Tuesday to see what conservative-min-ded Englishmen think of that episode in the light, of later history. But the Irish Secretary sees nothing improper or odd in the choice of an officer so closely associated with it for the most responsible and delicate duties in the maintenance of order in Ireland let anybody who wants to study a contrast note the care with which Lord John Russell chose his responsible officer at a time when Lancashire and Yorkshire were m danger of a civil rising. It was the choice of Napier, the most liberal-minded man to be found in the British army, for the chief command in the Northern district that prevented the Chartist movement from developing into a civil war in 1839. If the Government think that General Hackett Pain is a suitable guardian of law and order at this moment in Ireland, it is easy to understand their refusal to punish the looting of towns by policemen; if they think him unsuitable but find themseles driven to act against their better judgment by supporters whom they cannot disoblige, their failure in this elementary task is still easier to understand. In any case the fact stands out that the Government cannot discharge the first duty of a Government, which is to prevent its own officers from breaking the law. It is disgraceful to Sinn Fein that policemen are murdered : it is disgraceful to the Government that towns are looted. And thus, when we look more closely into the facts, we find that Ireland is in truth what she seems to be on the surface—in a state of civil war. What has to be done is to put an end to this war. That cannot be done by locking more people up on suspicion, by proscribing the institutions in which Irishmen believe, by emphasising the antagonism between the will of the Government and the will of the , Irish people. We have begun at the wrong end, and

we are in a false position. So long as we try to imcannot l h P lf a \° Irish Settlement on I.eCd we P a ,n X, * T the P ° lice and th arm y and Dubof T a poiicy which is not *• poncy ? the Irish people. Let the Irish people settle PartiesTacI 0 &******* SSLES th B -itTsh n Whl ° h knows the over's strength > and Ltion o-Iz2S S" E tl T e V° di — the reFox said to , 795 5 E We must either, as *ox said m 1795 and as Redmond said in 1914 make hat, to r P: ople En f land 'l garrisMl * Ire and or": that a S™ ° 'I? a the k " 1 ord « * ™ is no ofher 13 " d COn « Uered There