Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 23 June 1921, Page 14

Current Topics

The Ancient Spirit N ■■--.•' / Through centuries of sorrow and sunshine the • Dominican Order has been associated, ,with the fate of Ireland, sharing whatever glory, enduring whatever crosses came to the race, and always an inspiration and a source of strength to a people that trial and adversity had taught how to find support and consolation in religion. It is not therefore astonishing that we find St. Dominic's Schools 'in New Zealand eagerly taking their place in the League for Irish Self-Determination. It is only in keeping with ancient traditions and in continuity with the ancient spirit of the Order which has done so much for Faith and Fatherland during the long and glorious centuries of its existence. It is with great pleasure that we announce that we have received from St. Dominic's Schools a long roll of names for the League, and also a substantial war-chest of £SO towards the expenses of the campaign. * Limavaddy in the Limelight What ass is responsible for the money spent on ridiculous fablegrams that tell us tall yarns about the movements of Lord Limavaddy? One day Bill dines with a duchess; another he ornaments an art gallery; a third he sends a wire to his friend Craig (the accessory after the fact in the burnings and murders of •Belfast). But the greatest story of all is that which tells how. he was mistaken for Michael Collins on a motor escapade one night. The cables tell us, at any rate, that soldiers and police drew round London a huge cordon, casting nets far and wide for a big Irish fish. Arresting the most desperate and disreputable person that came their way they found it was not an Irish pike they had at all, but a New Zealand skate. The Forged Bulletins So clumsy were the Greenwood forgeries of Sinn Fein, Bulletins that the editor of the Nation and Athenaeum dismisses the possibility that they could deceive anybody: he even suspects that the "rodomontade, too silly and gross for credence" may not have had any intention of deceiving at all, and he calls attention to the fact that it is for stuff of this sort Greenwood is begging for more and more money. Is ' he not aware that it is exactly on such silly rodomontade that the editorials, in the New Zealand day-lies are based? And anything is in English eyes good enough, we presume, for a people that send over Lord Limavaddy to represent them at a Conference. Another Lloyd Georgian Lie Nailed Lloyd George told the House of Commons on April 7 that from investigations made personally he had come to the conclusion that the murdered Mayor and exMayor of Cork were killed because they were too moderate and had refused to carry out the orders of the Irish Republican Army. In a letter to the English press Mrs. O'Callaghan once more gives the lie to the deceitful British Premier: Right Hon. David Lloyd George, , Prime Minister, ♦ House of Commons, Westminster, v London. . Sir,- stated, in the English House of Commons, on Thursday, April 7, that it was your impression, from inquiries you yourself had made, that the Mayor of Limerick, George Clancy, and the ex-Mayor, Michael O'Callaghan, my husband, were murdered because they were regarded as too moderate, and because they had declined to carry out the orders of the Irish Republican Army. Your impression is based on lying statements. Whatever the heads of your military organisation in Limerick told you, they know as well as I do the men who murdered my husband. Your "impression" is a very convenient one for the people, openly or. covertly in your pay in Limerick and elsewhere, whose hands

are red with Irish blood. What "impression" have you formed as to the murder of Joseph O'Donoghue? He was an active member of the Irish Republican Army, was murdered on the same night as my husband, by the same gang, and now lies near my husband and George Clancy in the Republican Plot in the City Graveyard. You stated also that an impartial public military inquiry had been already held into the Limerick murders, and that these courts are carefully chosen. Limerick citizens know, and I have already told even the English people through trie press, how "public" and "impartial" it was. In answer to your offer to reassemble the military court of inquiry, I tell you once and for all, in my own name and in the name of others wronged as I am, that our claim for justice will never be satisfied by any court of inquiry where the guilty are on the bench instead cf in the dock. Irish people have learned a bitter lesson from the inquiries into the Charleville and Rathfarnham murders, and from the notorious, cases of the Mallow Inquiry and the Strickland Report. Characteristically you shirked answering the straight questions I put in my letter of March 30 I expected that, but I did not expect that you would continue to-defame the dead by "the- assertion that they ,were murdered by the Irish 'Republican Army. You go even farther: you insinuate that I, the widow of the first Republican Mayor of Limerick, live even now under the terror of the Irish Republican Army and so cannot speak the truth. My only difficulty in'makmg the facts known arises from your military censorship on the truth of what is happening in Ireland Yours truly, " 0 . , r , ' K. O'Callaghan. St. Margarets, Limerick, April 11, 1921. Lloyd George Lies Again The Welsher made a sorry effort to reply to the charge of the Anglican bishops that he was blackening England s name by the inhuman conduct of his servants m Ireland. Instead of facing the issue he reproved the bishops for raising it at all, and went on to say: "That there has been any authorisation or condonation of a policy of meeting murder by giving rein to unchecked violence on the other side is utterly untrue. J « S?i be 1T e P 1 y t 0 that ]i e is to quote the .heads of the Willard Report:— . 1. The Imperial Government has created and introduced into Ireland a force of at least 78,000 men many of them youthful and inexperienced, and some of them, convicts; and has incited- that force to unbridled violence. 2. The Imperial British forces in Ireland have .indiscriminately killed innocent men, women, and children . have tortured and shot prisoners while in custody, adopting the subterfuge of "refusing to halt or attempting to escape," "..a have 'attributed to alleged Sinn Fein extremists" the British'' assassination of prominent Irish Republicans. 3. House-burning and wanton destruction of villages .and cities bv Imperial forces have been countenanced, and ordered, by officials of the British Government and elaborate provision by gasoline sprays and bombs has been made in a number of instances for systematic incendiarism as part of a plan of terrorism. 4. A campaign for the destruction of the means of existence of the Irish people has been conducted by the burning of factories, creameries, and crops. 5. Acting under a series of proclamations issued by the competent military authorities of the Imperial British forces, hostages are carried by forces exposed to the fire of the Republican Army;'. .' . These" acts of the Imperial British forces are contrary to the laws of peace or war among modern civilised nations. , This American report flings the lie in the teeth of Lloyd' George. He has no defence. He is tripped up at every corner. He stands for naked and awful frightfulness, and in this he is aided and abetted not only by Greenwood but- by the unmanly horde of : hired day-liars in every city in New Zealand to-day.' He

knows he is guilty, and he knows another thing: he knows that he has failed to crush Ireland and it is gall to him that notwithstanding all his lies and all his crimes Ireland is winning and Ireland will win. It is the victory of the spirit over the brute. Ireland is stayed by her faith and her soul is invincible, unbreakable, for you cannot break a spiritual thing. As Old Ireland well puts it The gates of hell shall not prevail against her. Awkward for Brithuns Greenwood's brazen denials and Lloyd George's vapid rhetoric have at times gulled the British public. However, here is a case in which no denials and no rhetoric will save their faces. On April 26 Lord Parmoor astounded the House of Lords by reading to them a letter from his brother who was in Ireland and in a hotel there which was visited by the noble and gallant corps of "Black-and-Tans" concerning whose virtues the Welsher and the Canadian bounder have lied so long. The letter was in part as follows: "Our landlord, a perfectly innocent, honorable, and much beloved man, was killed almost before our eyes. My wife and I were held up by revolvers pointed at our breasts. Besides O'Donovan (the proprietor) two policemen were shot dead. The whple place was shot to pieces by a machine-gun brought inside the hotel. It was the most wicked attack you could imagine, and to my horror the perpetrators were ' Blackand Tan auxiliary forces, sixty in number. Over a thousand shots must have been fired and the auxiliaries behaved like demented Red Indians. Of course we thought it was an attack by Sinn Feiners." Of course! And had he not been there to give evidence it would have been cabled to the Otago day-lie and to every other day-lie in New Zealand that the police in the hotel at Castleconnell were killed by Sinn Feiners. Lord Parmoor added that he received another letter from his brother saying: "I forgot to mention that I have a bullet picked up by me on the 17th unexploded. The bullet has been 'reversed, thus converting it into an expanding bullet of the most deadly character. Such bullets inflict the most dangerous wounds and were prohibited during the late War." "Here," said Lord Parmoor, holding the object aloft, "is the dumdum bullet which anyone can see, and it is not suggested that anyone fired except the Government auxiliaries."' There was no getting round that. Canadian lies were of no avail. Even the bounder dared not tell Lord Parmoor that his brother was a liar. Even the Welsh mountebank could not bluff it out. The House of Lords was brought face to face with one of the many incidents of frightfulness which are of common occurrence in Ireland, and there was nothing left but to say that an inquiry would be made. Inquiry mar dheadhf. The Irish people know the value of a Government inquiry-which has for its object" the cloaking of the crimes done by the connivance, if not by the orders, of the authorities. "Everything done by the Crown is covered up, denied, and if the evidence is too strong, the whole thing is side-tracked somehow or other. When you have a whole Government combined to lie as well as to murder, you are. up against something that means • risking your life to defeat." These are the words in which Mrs. Bryce.describes the Government and its "inquiries." As a sample of the press' comments we quote the Manchester Guardian: "By what dispensation of the law are the auxiliary police allowed to take out an aged and inoffensive man and shoot him out of hand, as witnesses allege, on the plea of harboring rebels The Castleconnell affair is, we fear, no isolated example of the brutalitv and utter lack of disciplined methods to be found in the proceedings of the Auxiliary force." And neither Greenwood nor Lloyd George can lie this time —even their favorite amusement is taken from them. The only lying they can do is to lie down like whipped curs while humanity kicks them and spits on the foul things they'are.

The Poor Day-Lies r Once more our dear old day-lies have fallen in through their haste to minister to the mind diseased of the Canadian bounder and the Welsh upstart who are ruining the Empire. They have fallen in so often, been exposed so ridiculously, been convicted of stfch utter stupidity and of such cajossal clownishness that one hardly bothers about calling attention to their calumnies nowadays. Yet here is one more instance. Last week, under a big, black heading calling attention 1 to what one of them describes daily as IRISH TURMOIL we got a second big headline about INTRIGUE WITH RUSSIA v DRAFT AGREEMENT SEIZED DETAILS MADE PUBLIC.' and then followed a real old-fashioned Lloyd George % and Haughty Hamar sort of cable from London telling all about the business as follows: ¥ "London, June 9. "A draft agreement between the Irish Republic and the Russian Government was seized at Dublin, and has now been published by the British Government in a White Paper. It shows that each party agreed to promote world-wide recognition of each other's sovereignty, and to foster mutual trade, with a percentage of arms and munitions for use against the enemies of either. "The Irish Office adds that Mr. McCartan, Sinn Fein M.P., now in Russia, will act as the diplomatic representative of the Irish Republic—A. and N.Z. cable." Alas! Poor Yorick. Once more it was a fake and the dear day-lies had to tell us later on that the Russian Embassy had denied that any intrigue of the sort existed at allexcept in the minds of the asses who concoct such idiotic yarns for the consumption cf the Colonial editors who have sold their souls to the Brithuns. But there is another story. We have caught red-handed in the act of attributing to Sinn Fein the crimes of Orange ruffians the hired propagandist who frames the headlines for our morning paper. First take the following cable: ; "London, June, 12. "A party of men masquerading as soldiers, who said they were taking men to the barrack for identification, captured Kerr (a barber), Mcßride (a publican), and Halfpenny (a postman). They took them from their homes in North Belfast and shot them. The bodies were taken then in motor cars and flung into the fields at the roadside. and N.Z. cable." There was the cable. Any sensible person reading it would at once say that it was probable that the murderers were Orangemen: first, because it occurred in North Belfast,. and secondly, because Mcßride. is a Catholic name and there are numerous Catholics named Kerr in the district. But our morning head-line-man deliberately attributed the murders to Sinn Fein, with the evidence such as it was "all against him. He headed the item— SINN "FEIN BARBARITY TRIPLE MURDER IN NORTH BELFAST. That was about as blackguardly a piece of propaganda as one could well imagine. Here, without the slightest evidence, was a crime attributed to Sinn Fein: nay, whatever evidence there was lay altogether in the ' other direction. But that piece of blackguardism is extremely valuable- and ought to be remembered for ever. It shows us how the headline-men proceed, from what a/lepth of hatred and prejudice their actions are*directed, and what fitting tools they are to serve the Canadian scoundrel who is responsible for the murder of Mrs. Quinn and her unborn babe. We go further and say that this glaring case is an indication of the animosity and bias which distorts the editorial views of many of our day-lies. The editorial views on Ireland, are as a rule no sounder and no more savory than that dastardly, headline which we came upon the other morning. When we saw it we were tempted to

write and ask upon what evidence such a heading had been framed. We made up our mind rather to wait and see. And we had not long to wait for a complete exposure of the headline-man. A cable dated London, June 13, came along and told us that the three men hilled were-Catholics and that it was thought they were hilled for attacks on the police. Here it is; “London, June 13. t , - A mystery surrounds the execution of t ree „ civilians. Armed parties in motor cars dragged the men from their beds and shot them near their homes, and then carried the bodies to lonely fields outside the city. The victims were Catholics, and it is believed that their deaths were reprisals for recent attacks on the police.—A. and N.Z, cable.” To what an abyss of rottenness Colonial journalism has sunk when such blackguardism should be possible ! ’ls that worthy of the traditions of a press that has some conceit of itself, even if it is scoffed at as hypocritical from the Golden Horn to Cape Finisterre? Whatever it is, the fact remains that it is for us a valuable indication of the sort of dealing we may . expect at the hands of our daylies. Nothing more useful happened since Mr, Robinson caught the forger, “Givis” red-handed.