IRISH NEWS

New Zealand Tablet, 4 November 1920, Page 31

IRISH NEWS

GENERAL. In Caltra, near Ballinasloe, policemen are alleged to have fired into the priest’s house and to have burned the Sinn Fein Hall to the ground. As a result of the military pogrom at Cork on July 20, 40 citizens were wounded. No soldier received any injury. Mr. Wm, Wilson (Connor, Co. Antrim) has been awarded a prize of £lO offered some time ago by a newspaper for the oldest inhabitant in the United Kingdom. Mr. Wilson was born in 1813, and is still hale and hearty. Mr. Lloyd George (says the Irish Independent) is emphatic in his declaration of his willingness “to discuss” the situation with any accredited representative Irishmen, always on the basis that “Ulster” was to have full self-determination and the rest of Ireland to have no independence. James Cullen, Derry, tried by court martial recently and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on a charge of having a revolver and ammunition, has gone on hunger-strike as a protest, it is stated, against the difference in the treatment meted out to him as compared with the armed Carsonit'es who were arrested during the riots in the city, and fined £5. Sir H. Plunkett, speaking at Pelton, near Newcastle, said he spoke with a knowledge of 60 years of lieland, and the situation was more gravely alarming now than it had been within that period. Tie told the public frankly that his hopes of a settlement of the Irish question lay far more in the organised workers of Britain than in any other agency that could be brought to bear on this terrible problem. On Saturday morning, July 23, the premises of Messrs. I. Conba and Sons, Kilmallock, Co. Limerick, weie discovered to be on fire. 3he entire frontage of 45 feet, including doors and window frames, had been saturatf|:l with petrol and paraffin, and bags soaked in petrol had been placed along the balcony. Considerable damage was done, but the townspeople, after four hours’ struggle, saved the building from being completely destroyed. When Mr. Conba and his friends were fighting the flames a patrol of military and police, it is alleged, fired at them from 30 yards, and demanded what they were doing. Mr. Conba had a narrow escape from being hit by one bullet.

HORRORS OF BRITISH RULE IN IRELAND. Everyman for August 28 writes thus of the appalling conditions existing in Ireland as a result of British mis-government : It is not easy to visualise the appalling wreckage that has taken place in Lisburn, where the damage of two days' rioting is estimated at half a million pounds, and scores of Catholic families, with their houses burned down and their furniture destroyed by bonfires in the street, are fleeing in despair from a desolation that recalls the worst horrors of Termonde and Dinant. Civil war in Ulster is already practically in full swing. At least 5000 Catholic workers from the Belfast shipyards are deprived of all means of earning their living, and they too will sooner or later be forced to join the pitiful regiment of refugees who are escaping from the eastern counties of Ulster. I said in these notes a few weeks ago that General Hackett Pain was personally responsible for their persecution m so far as he gave them no protection, and the Lisburn outrages have fully justified my statement. He is said to have arrived in person, bringing reinforcements of troops and police, within a few hours of the first outbreak, and remained a passive spectator for 12 hours while the mob set whole streets on fire and went mad with drink that they looted from Catholic public-houses. Provocation had undoubtedly been given by the murder of Inspector Swanzy by four- unknown young

men from Belfast. But popular opinion in the South had identified Inspector Swanzy with the plans for the murder of Alderman McCurtain, the late Lord Mayor of Cork, and while his successor was actually dying of starvation in a London prison, outbreaks by Sinn Fein were inevitable. Mr. Shortt must have known this quite well when he dictated his infamous ; letter to Alderman MoSweeney’s sister. The question 1 is, where are these-retaliations to end? The list of destroyed Irish towns grows almost day by day In Dublin,' Derry, Fennoy, Tuam, Cork, Limerick, Lisburn, and a score or so of little villages, streets of houses have been burned down and families driven out homeless and destitute. The problem of supporting them will before long call for relief measures • comparable with the demands of Belgium in 1914 What sort of a figure will this country cut then in the eves of America? Sinn Fein has a long record of callous murder to its disgrace, but every one of them has had a direct political motive. The looting and arson of towns is admittedly the work of the British forces of law and order.” And now the latest development is the wholesale war of destruction against the creameries. It is no use for General Macready to issue disci- , plinary orders when General Hackett Pain, by his personal inaction, gives every encouragement to barbarous “reprisals” upon the whole Catholic population of one of the chief towns in Ulster. In the last resort the supreme arbiter of military discipline is Sir Henry Wilson, and in any conflict between General Macready and the late chief of staff of the Ulster Volunteers, he would back up General Hackett Pain every time. Meanwhile, the Irish “Peace Conference” of moderate Nationalists and Unionists has met in Dublin under the inspiration of Captain Harrison, one of the most charming and whole-hearted workers that the cause of Irish reconciliation has ever enlisted. It is nearly twenty years since another Irish soldieridealist, Captain Shawe-Taylor, got together a similar conference to solve the Irish land question and virtually settled it by paving the way for Mr. Wyndham’s Land Act. But what time is this for discussing forms of self-government when the mass of the Irish people are thinking only of one question—how to protect their houses and their farms from savage destruction at the hands of the Army of Occupation? Mr. Lloyd George himself made use of the word “malignity” to describe the attitude of the War Office towards Ireland at the beginning of the war. But that same “malignity” has intervened during his own administration at every hopeful moment in recent Irish history to make a settlement impossible. Mr. Shortt’s sentence of death upon Lord Mayor McSweeney, who was convicted of no worse offence than that of having in his possession private copies of Sinn Fein documents that have been printed in full in every Irish newspaper, is unforgiveable. Mr. Shortt, of all men, ought to remember the passionate resentment that swept Ireland during his - own Chief Secretaryship, when Thomas Ashe died on hunger strike in prison. His death wrecked all hope for the Irish Convention, and the passage of a Conscription Bill which was never even enforced killed it outright. An exactly similar combination of the Coercion Act, which makes a crime of any sort of adherence to Irish Nationalism, with the treatment of Alderman McSweeney, disposes effectually of all hope from Captain Harrison’s Peace Conference. I note that it has been attended by several of ■ the Ulster Unionists. But they attended the Convention also, only to confess at the very end of its proceedings that .they had no authority to speak fox the Orange Lodges.