The amendment to the Address moved by Mr. Harrington, impugning
the verdicts in the trial for the Maamtrasna murders, has occupied three nights in the week, the mover attacking Lord Spencer and the Irish Administration generally with an acrimony which alienated several among the few English Radicals who had been more or less disposed to support his demand for a new inquiry. The essence of his case, such as it was, lay in one or two new statements made since the trial by one of the in- formers, and in an assertion, denied by the officers on the spot, that the informer's story was dictated by the pressure of Mr. Bolton, whose name in itself, with justice, excites distrust in every Irishman. Also it is said that the depositions taken from the two boys, when both of them were supposed to be dying, were not communicated to the counsel for the defence,. though in the reports of the inquest all the declarations of the boys were reported. This was the substance of the case ; but it was urged by the extreme Irish party with a virulence, of which the more moderate Irishmen—Mr. Parnell, Mr. McCarthy, and Mr. Charles Russell—strove in vain to avert the bad effect. It was clear, in reality, that the animating motive was not so much zeal for injured innocence—for the informer on whom the Irish Party relied has certainly given a false story once, besides betraying his accomplices,—but fury against the Irish Courts of Justice and Government altogether.
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