The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

New Zealand Tablet, 24 April 1924, Page 9

The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

(By William O’Brien.)

CHAPTER I.—(Continued). HOW THE ALL-FOR-IRELAND LEAGUE BECAME A NECESSITY. (1910) Their notion of tact was to press on the people of Cork, the candidate of all others who was most offensive to the majority of them, and because he was the most offensive — Mr. George Crosbie, the owner of the Cork Examiner, who had gone over with his paper to the Hibernians and turned its guns with all the renegade’s zeal against the policy and the men he believed in, so far as genuine patriotic belief he had any.* It was too severe a trial for poor

> *The true character of Mr. Crosbie’s change of faith may be, judged by the not very delicate cynicism of a remark of his to myself while the Examiner was still unperverted. “The only possible objection I can see to your policy,” he said, “is that it is so obviously common sense and common sense never has a chance in Ireland.” ,-The punishment which eventually overtook Mr. C'rosbiO Was

the renegade-and elected markable for his* sobriety of telle ct ua 1> rank,- who had not l V s -** r .vV : .^'b . : public controversy, and had ; no pledge, to act faithfully with the Part tolly for which even the Baton ion^HBHHHH pared the public, the Party Managers refused the Party the elected representative of the people 7 of 'Cork/ and from that day forth addressed themselves with all their might to undermine* in ' their ; constituencies the members of the Conciliationist Minority, who still remained in - the Party, to organise . their expulsion from public life at the approaching General Election, arid in the meantime-Ao starve - them out ; by cutting off their Parliamentary indemnity from the National Fundsan indemnity to which the humblest member of the Party had, according to the terms on which the Funds had been. collected, as just a title as Mr. Redmond or Mr. Devlin. It was not pretended that any one of these men contemplated revolt against the sternest discipline of the Party. They voted steadily with the Hibernian majority for the Birreli Bill, well though they knew the result must be the destruction of Land Purchase, but knew also that it was not they, but the Hibernian majority, who were the violators of the Treaty of Reunion which pledged the entire Party to an opposite epurse. The Board of Erin used their power without pity, and their victims, as it seemed, had no friends. It was not merely against my more intimate friends their thumbs were turned down; every member of the minority who had. voted for the observance of the Treaty of Reunion, even Mr. Tim Harrington, the,Lord Mayor of Dublin— of the foremost of nation-builders all his lifetime, now a stricken veteran in ruined health—was threatened in his own constituency in Dublin, solely because he had declined, as one of the members of the Land Conference, to” recant principles to which he had, most inoffensively-but steadfastly, hold true. The constituencies of all the rest of the minority were flooded with Hibernian organisers, the people plied with calumnious whispers, and with readymade resolutions of censure, and every appetite of corruption was set on edge for the innumerable jobs and dignities, the disposal of which was the only advantage the Party had been able to gain for Ireland during the first Parliament of the Liberal Ministry. v

an unwarrantable and tyrannous one in itself, but was only a rougher form of the foul play and tyranny he had himself practised against the friends he deserted. During the Civil War of 1922 he was obliged to kneel daily at the feet of Miss Mary MacSwiney, T.D., to receive her orders as Military Censor in his editorial chair. hie meekly announced : “The Republican authorities wish us to state their censorship is merely for the purpose of securing impartial reports.” After his own performances for years in publishing grossly garbled reports of All-for-Ireland speeches or boycotting them entirely, it was indeed edifying that he should be brought to realise the virtues of “impartial reports.” However, the “impartial reports” he was under the penitential necessity of publishing during the Republican supremacy took the shape of four or five columns every day of Republican leading articles levelling charges of traitorism and murder against Mr. Arthur Griffith and General Michael Collins and trouncing the bishops and priests in terms that might well have made the respectable founder of the Cork Examiner shudder in his grave. Doubtless in his new apostacy the worthy gentleman found some consolation in another of his favorite apothegms: “The most interesting thing I can find to read in the Examiner is the agents’ books.” The circulation must have been brisk during the Republican interregnum, - for the good reason, if there was no other, that it was the only newspaper left in existence. The only other local daily, the Constitution, like the fine old Tory that it was, preferred to die rather than follow the example of its contemporary. Needless to add, no sooner was Miss Mary MacSwiney replaced by the Military Censor of the Free State, than the Examiner, true to its patriotic repute as le domestique tons les pouvoirs the humble servant of everybody who comes. out on top—rushed to . the rescue of the conquerors and proceeded to pour out no less vigorous abuse upon its late editorial contributors, in their retreat, .

■ • 1- -..S’ • v'*. " .■' .•> • • s.--V As the . General Election ai)proached, v ;it{ was the an- ■ ;1- guish of. hearing such news poured into f my ears by faithful ; and; self-sacrificing Irishmen, now defenceless, without or- **’ ganisation or ? funds against their r cruel enemies, ; which ,; - - forced me and alone could have forced me to turn my i. eyes. again to Irish affairs. ; I pointed out in vain to my corresApondents :in . Ireland that any permanent cure must be a more radical One. The . gradual discovery how the' people < 'f had been tricked into, the destruction, of Land Purchase — : ,-: -the ■ one sinister legislative achievement of “The Party” — ' was changing the public feeling ..from'-' trustfulness to indig- -. >' nation, while the dozens of ‘ squalid family quarrels over • the seats, of the doomed members were spreading de- - {r moralisation and decay by a process-which .had only to be •{V allowed to proceed-to bring the whole sordid ■ tyranny ‘to ■ f -4f. its appointed end. My return to the scene would, As had happened before', only give the Board of Erin a further respite by enabling them to turn away the attention of the ■ country from their own dissensions by . raising anew their odious sham battle-cries of “Unity !”-and “Majority Rule!” The answer was that I alone stood between my friends and •{ annihilation at the polls. To that appeal there could be but one answer. ‘ Just as I was struggling to my feet after Y a wearing illness of many-months, my wife, and myself left v Florence ’ in a train in which, we were the only passengers, on a forlorn night in December, with the still more forlorn' feelings of - a ; pair of escaped slaves recaptured and going back .ip chains to the Plantation. , ■ , ' { What happened after our arrival in Ireland has already been related {An Olive Branch in Ireland, Chapter xxii.), and need not detain us here. Enough that the fourteen men marked down for vengeance were one and all returned :.v, to Parliament and the cabal overthrown and disgraced. And to the comic surprise of the statesmen of the Board of Erin, the spirit they had summoned from the dead remained to flaunt their banquet-tables and to pursue them to their Dunsinane. All we claimed now, or had claimed all along, was liberty of the platform and of, the press to i :- submit to our countrymen opinions to which the only mar- ; vel of Irishmen' of intelligence nowadays is how their { wisdom could ever have been doubted. But the lesson of . the General . Election was the'utter defencelessnss of public liberty without some form of organisation for mutual protection. The Hibernian Party thought to avenge 'their x humiliations at the polls by excluding from their ranks A; the representatives of every constituency which had declined to obey their mandat cVelire and refusing them the .Parliamentary indemnity for the payment of which the national funds in their custody had been subscribed, Even unfortunate Mr. Ginnell, who had never failed to follow ; the Party Whip into the Division, lobbies, was by physical violence ejected from their meeting-place for suggesting a -{ 'public audit of their funds,., and a band of stalwarts was organised to give the same shrift to the rest of us, should {{we;present- ourselves for admission. But they need not have {been perturbed. They : had, made their company im- ' . possible foremen of honor. .It was resolved ,to form, under the . name of the All-for-Ireland League,, a National or■rwpganisation, broad-based enough to embrace men of every i denomination and school of Self-Government from the Jfnost moderate ;to the most advanced, ,for .the cultivation of a National Unity higher sacred than the .trade ; ' unity of any Party. The new movement was based upon those principles of “Conference,, Conciliation, and Conh,.,; sent,’ which the Irish Party and the country had; made / their own in. 1903 by every vow that could bind them ■ which had been re-affirmed by the' violated Treaty of Re- ; ® union in 1908 — and. which ; the reaction against a narrow Party tyranny,{already beginning to stir the country was bound to restore ultimately as the programme of a united V nation. The resolution by which the All-for-Ireland League • ... was established propounded as its primary aim “the union -and active, co-operation in .every department of our na- '- : tional life of .all Irishmen and women Avho believe in the v; principle ;;ofv domestic self-government for Ireland,” and for th<f accomplishment of its object declared; “W© believe a - the • surest Tme ns to *be a Combination of all the elements of ■ v- { the , Irish population in a spirit of mutual tolerance and patriotic good-will such as shall guarantee to the Protes- 7 : tant minority '' of our { fellow-countrymen inviolable security ;

■■ > >•••-,. ■- v. ;• ::o' for all their rights aiid.liberties, the people.of Great Britain,' without : : (To be continued.) - * .