THE LLOYD GEORGE “GOVERNMENT” OF IRELAND

New Zealand Tablet, 23 December 1920, Page 33

THE LLOYD GEORGE “GOVERNMENT” OF IRELAND

The Irish correspondent of the New Witrtess writes in its issue for October 15: 1 The best reply to the hymns of hate which Mr. Lloyd George declaimed against the Irish people at Carnarvon is a brief resume of the true history of the, ; Government’s dealings with that people. Such an.account may even be of wider use, for even enlightened Englishmen appear to find the shooting of policemen in Ireland a stumbling block. They think of a policeman in terms of their own constables directing the traffic in the streets of London. Now a policeman in Ireland is not, in the first place, even remotely related to a policeman in England. In the next place,' probably no revolution in history has passed with less bloodshed than the Irish revolution. The Egyptians massacred English officials wholesale compared with the Irish; the Egyptians were rewarded with independence, the Irish with Black and Tans. Finally, before they took to shooting policemen the Irish people endured for two years an incessant provocation with what a certain distinguished foreign visitor to Ireland has described as “an almost criminal patience.” For the twelve months of 1917 there wore no police killed in Ireland. In that year the political suppression of the Irish people was carried out in every part of Ireland by English military and police. Three hundred and forty-nine Irish men and women were arrested for political offences. Twenty-four leaders of opinion were deported without trial. Public meetings and national newspapers were suppressed. Two .innocent civilians were murdered by military and police; five died of maltreatment in prison ; upwards of one hundred men wounded in bayonet and baton charges. In the twelve months of 1918 no police were killed in Ireland. But in that year military rule was continued on the same lines with increasing rigor, and with the addition of the suppression of fairs and markets and other economic duress the forerunner of the present s day .destruction of Irish factories, mills and creameries..

In the General Election of December. 1918, the patient expenditure of the energies of the Irish people on the building of an organisation through widely their national demand might be expressed constitutionally reached its consummation. This constitutional expression of the popular will was replied to with more intense aggression than ever. Then, after two years of suppression, raiding, arresting, deportation, armed assaults and murder, the Irish people at last began to prepare for the more intense measures they foresaw. They were not permitted to import arms or munitions for their defence. So they decided to take them from their oppressors. During’ the twelve months of 1919 sixteen policemen were killed in Ireland. The majority of these were killed in conflicts between armed bodies of men and police infinitely better armed. In these conflicts, which had as their sole object the securing of arms, the police casualties were advertised ns “cowardly murders.” There were, in fact, ns many - civilian casualties as police casualties. Action with the object of taking arms from the English forces has been carried out in two principal ways: (1) by attacking the strongly fortified blockhouses which the police occupied in every part of Ireland ; (2) by attacking military mid police patrols. I have before me an analysis made by the Irish Bulletin of the first of these activities up to September 30. The police suffered in these attacks: killed, .eight wounded, thirty-three; the attackers suffered; killed, seven; wounded, forty-seven. Fifty-eight blockhouses aa ere attacked. Twelve were captured, two AA-ere destroyed during the conflict, and forty-five resisted the efforts to take them. In the twelve barracks captured eighty-one police were taken prisoners. These were disarmed and released without injury. By contrast, seven men captured during the attacks' were tried by’ courtsmartial and sentenced to long terms of penal servitude. An analysis of* the attacks on patrols would show similar results, of course with much higher casualties on both sides. The true sequence of events is that only when it became clear that the British Government was determined to break by force of arms the Irish demand for’ independence did Irishmen, seeking to arm themselves, begin to attack policemen who were not policemen in any ordinary sense, but a part of the armed forces of the Crown. The pretence that Irish towns and villages are now sacked bv hot-blooded reprisals by police angered beyond endurance bv cowardly outrages is false in every- particular. The wholesale sacking of Irish towns in 1920 is a logical sequel to the increasingly terroristic reqime of the preceding years It has become more ruthless in proportion as the national £°l!u+n defi m sures f oll - Mr. Lloyd George has much to tell -the world of the hundred odd policemen killed since the Beginning of 1919 in the encounters above described He has nothing to. say about the number of Irishmen killed on

the other side in these encounters. Still less lias ,Be anything to say about the Irish civilians not killed in fair fight but foully murdered by police and soldiers, as over forty, have been in the last . fourteen weeks. ~ . i