SOME HISTORICAL FACTS ABOUT IRELAND

New Zealand Tablet, 20 October 1921, Page 18

SOME HISTORICAL FACTS ABOUT IRELAND

A PROTESTANT ON THE POSITION.

An interesting address was delivered at the Paramount Theatre by Mr. A. Hall Skelton, the well-known Auckland solicitor (a delegate to the Dominion Convention), who dealt with the Irish question from a Protestant point, of view. Mr. Skelton held the close attention of the large audience, and at the close of the lecture, which was curtailed to enable surhnrban residents to catch their trains, the speaker ■was loudly cheered, *

Mr. Hall Skelton made his position quite clear. He spoke, ho. said, as an Anglican, an Irish colonial, whose parents hailed from Ulster and whose forbears had. resided in Ireland for the past 500 years. His mother was of the very Protestant French-Huguenot stock. The speaker dealt with Irish history from the legendary period—42oo years —down to the Act of Union in 1800.

The allegation that tho Irish question was a religions one was wholly false. Any student of Irish history knew that religion had been used purely as a tool of the British political party leaders. When tho Act of Renunciation was passed in 1782 giving Ireland her own Parliament,it was the Protestant Irishmen, with tho knowledge or George Washington’s fight to free America, who raised tho Irish army and won independence for tho Irish people. Tho IS years of Irish self-government doubled the population of Ireland, and in commerce and trade she became “the marvel of the earth,” according to a. leading English statesman. Her competition with .the English manufacturer and trader during this period, however, was her downfall. The great plot to bring about the Union m 1800, which Gladstone .called “the foulest crime that ever a, race perpetrated against another,” was generally unknown amongst laymen. One and a quarter million pounds was spent in bribery and corruption to purchase tho Irish vote. Forty-nine peers were made; diplomatic, social, and political preferments were handed out as bribes to assist in carrying out this design. Tho period following 1800 onwards was marked by complete destruction of Irish trade and the raising of tho rents till the people wore starved to ’death. In 1846, 750,000 men, women, and children died from starvation. The landlords, not satisfied even with this, tore tho roofs off the houses and evicted the poverty-

stricken tenants because they could not pay a rent which no land on God’s earth could pay. From 1817 to 1835 there were seven large famines.

Since the Union nearly all the leaders, whom Ulstermen of the Carsonian type called rebels, murderers, and assassins, had been Protestant Presbyterians and Anglicans Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Davis, Smith O’Brien, Isaac Butt, and Charles Stuart Parnell were

among these. Nearly all suffered imprisonment and death.' Every form of coercion was used to repress tho liberators of Ireland. Every time the Irish agitator met the Unionist on his own battlefieldtlie House of Commons — Irish rebel won. Mr. Hall Skelton went on to deal exhaustively with the trickery of the Unionists during the war to upset the Home Rule Bill. The Carson rebellion in 1913 he referred to as one of the most shocking instances of high treason remaining unpunished in British history. German arms were introduced and a major of the Carsonian army stated that they had the assistance of a Continental Power and would prefer to be under German Government if Home Rule was put into force. He narrated the chief incidents

leading up to the present impasse.

"Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you " applys forcefully when.;, you remove your abode. Shifting is work for experts and we can supply them.. The New Zealand Express Company, Ltd., Offices in all chief towns.