In Monday's Daily Nail Mr. J. M. N. Jeffries gave
an interest- ing account of the guerrilla warfare now going on in the South- West of Ireland. "The stronghold of the insurgents is in Kerry, a land of wild minnitainons peninsulas and secret inlets of the sea, inhabited by a wild mountainous people, themselves human peninsulas too, BO to speak, almost cut off from the habits and more sober characteristics of the body of their countrymen." The Free State troops hold the towns and larger villages, subject to constant sniping, but cannot venture into the open country in smaller bodies than from fifty to a hundred men without being ambuseaded and cut off. "A serious difficulty for them is that they have to combine the offensive duties of their campaign proper with the defensive duties of trying to repair the machinery of civil life, which the Republicans as regularly destroy." Roads are blocked, railway lines torn up and bridges broken down. The national troops are dependent on the sea for supplies and reinforcements, whilst the Republicans receive petrol and ammunition by the same channeL Food can only be got into the inland towns, such as Killarney, by organized and well-guarded convoys. The population is mainly friendly to the Republicans, who number about two thousand armed men, as Mr. Jeffries estimates Meanwhile, as a correspondent recounts in Wed- nesday's Times, the suburbs of Dublin itself are infested by gangs of Republican hooligans who rob houses at the point of the pistol, and shooting or bomb-throwing occurs daily in the city streets, though "on the whole the damage is dispropor- tionate to the noise."
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