15 JUNE 1918, Page 2

A meeting of the General Council of the Irish Unionist

Alliance was held on Friday week, when a new Executive Committee was elected. This was the -first opportunity the Counoil had had of expressing its opinion on the work of the Irish Convention. The Southern Unionist Committee, which had emphatically dissented from the accommodation arrived at between the Southern Unionist delegates to the Convention and the Nationalists and from the signing by Unionists of the Majority Report, had put forward sixteen candidates for election at the General Council of the( Irish Unionist Alliance. These sixteen candidates were returned by an overwhelming majority. The result of the election is a Strang repudiation by the General Council of any compromise on the subject of Home Rule. This is a very significant expression of opinion, as it will be remembered that without the support of the Southern Unionist delegates the Majority Report of the Convention would have been a Minority Report. But the result of the election is not, of course, at all surprising. We imagine that those Unionists who sincerely attempted concffiation would not dream now of repeating the experiment. They did not foresee then how help- lessly the Nationalists would throw themselves into the arms of the Sinn Feiner&