Mr. T. W. Russell has replied to Mr. Parnell's statement
as to the .Arklow pier, and his second reply is almost more damaging to Mr. Parnell, at least on one point, than his first, —the storm which Mr. Parnell led his Liverpool hearers to believe had destroyed the pier constructed by the Board of Works when it was complete. Mr. Parnell's words were :— " As the consequence of the first storm, the pier which they [the Board of Works] had built tumbled down into the sea, and the unfortunate, people of Arklow,< after having: been taxed for part of the cost of this harbour, are now mournfully contemplating its ruins, which have been washed across the entrance by the sea, and which absolutely preclude either ingress or egress." This was said at the end of December, when one of Mr. Parnell's own vessels, drawing, says Mr. Russell, 9 ft. 6 in. of water, though Mr. Parnell admits only 6 ft., had just passed out of the harbour, carrying stone for the building of a northern groin to what the people of Arklow themselves, in a memorial addressed to the Board of Works, call "that splendid piece of work" the southern pier con- structed by the Board of Works. The storm really happened, and really injured the pier during ita building, nearly three years before its completion,—in 1885. It was not handed over in its completeness to the Arklow Harbour Commissioners till February 1888, and no storm had since injured it in the least. Mr. Parnell's stone is not, says Mr. Russell, being sent for its repair, but for the building of a new northern branch of the pier. Mr. Parnell had used a rival engineer's report on the effects of a storm on work that was in progress and far from completion, as proving the craziness of the completed structure which has stood every subsequent trial in the most satisfactory manner. Certainly Mr. Parnell is not a trustworthy authority on Irish facts even in his own neighbourhood.
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