BY SOME TWIST of fate, every time the Irish do
something praiseworthy they go and spoil it by doing something downright foolish. Recently at the UN the Republic of Ireland was the only Western country which had the courage to vote that the subject of the admission of the Chinese Peoples' Republic ought to be put on the agenda for debate. The Irish Minister for External Affairs, Mr. Frank Aiken, pointed out that the issue is not whether the UN Assembly should admit China, but whether it should be allowed to debate every important international question freely and openly. Obviously he is right: to pretend the China problem does not exist is to make a mockery of the UN. But shortly before Mr. Aiken spoke in New York, a judge in the West of Ireland applied the Probation Act to some local Catholics who had beaten up Protestant evangelists in Killaloe, near Limerick, knocking one of them unconscious; the judge ruling that 'religion is above courts, the main business of which is to preserve peace.' It may well be true (as the Catholic authorities in Ireland tend to argue) that non-Catholic evangel- ism arouses intense and dangerous hostility—for which primitive emotional reaction English attempts to suppress the Catholic faith in Ireland is largely to blame. But this is no excuse for con- doning violence in the name of Christianity.
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