THE CONDITION OF IRELAND.
THE situation in 'Ireland is as bad as ever, and this is not through any lack of recognition by various groups of Irishmen that their country is being strangled and clubbed to death. 'Unfortunately, recognition of a terrible fact does not by any means promise a cure. There is a natural and traditional inability among the Celtic Irish to manage affairs coolly or reasonably or to conduct any kind of political dispute without violence, or indeed the meanest forms of savagery. If a halt is not called in the slide towards a general civil war we have not oven uow seen the worst in Ireland. The Peace Conference between representatives of the Provisional Government and of Mr. De Valera's faction has again broken down.
The Provisional Government afterviards issued a mani- festo demanding on behalf of the people freedom to express their will on the single issue of the Treaty and the Con- stitution at an election in June. To this demand Mr. De Valera opposes an audacious " No." He says, in effect, that there is no such thing as freedom unless it is freedom of the kind he sanctions ; he denies the right of the majority to prevail. " My opinions are truth," he seems to say ; " everybody is wrong who does not agree that I am right." The veriest autocrats and tyrants in history did not trample upon feeble principles of democracy struggling to assert themselves more heavily than does this Republican rebeL And it is all done• in the name of Freedom. Meanwhile, the lists of lawlessness become swelled every day with new acts of violence and brutality. Correspondents tell us that the newspapers do not record a hundredth part of them. The chiefs of the irregular I.R.A. have demanded payment for their men, and as this was not forthcoming they have raided many of the branches of the Bank of Ireland—the bank used by the Provisional Government —and have stolen large sums of money. In Dublin and elsewhere many public and private buildings have been occupied by force, for instance, in Dublin, Messrs. Lever's offices and the Kildare Street Club. The business of the Port of Dublin cannot be carried on except in a fumbling and inaccurate way because the books relating to the business of the Port are in the Four Courts, which is occupied by the irregular leader, General Roderick O'Connor. When the Lord Mayor of Dublin demanded the books, General O'Connor replied that they were being used as part of his defences, but that he would hand theni over if the Lord Mayor promised him an equivalent amount of sandbags ! Result—nothing done.
In various parts of the country the railways have been torn up. In Cork so many harmless Protestants have been murdered that there is a reign of terror, and a great Many people whose only offence has been their loyalty and their' religious faith are trying to escape -from the country, though in doing so they accept ruin. In Queen's County the persecution of Protestants and loyalist families has been carried to an almost incredible point. The families are simply being evicted at short notice. If they do not act upon the notice to leave their houses they are ejected violently. No help of any kind is forthcoming either from the Provisional Government or the British Government. If assistance and justice have to wait upon an agreement between Mr. Griffith and Mr. De Valera, Heaven help the poor loyalists ! -The ill-feeling between those two rival leaders is really more bitter than ever, as was shown by the debate in Dail Eireann on Thursday, April 27th. Mr. Griffith, in a furious encounter of words with Mr. De Valera, then said that he had kept silence long enough and would tell the truth. When he was starting for London as one of the Treaty delegates Mr. De Valera had remarked to him, " Neither you nor any other man can bring back a Republic. Get me out of this strait-jacket of the Republic." All we can say is that it seems more reasonable to believe this assertion by Mr. Griffith than to believe Mr. De Valera's flat denial of it. H it be true, Mr. De Valera is condemning Ireland to chaos and carnage, although he has believed from the beginning that - what' he asks for is unattainable. To. describe this as madness is only to use the word in its literal sense.
What we want to say in particular now is that the British Government cannot wash their hands of .Ireland so far as to disown responsibility for the safety of the long-suffering and most miserable loyalists: Throughout the long Irish controversy we have assumed that no Government could have such deadened senses and be so blind to their duty as to say that no responsibility rested upon them for the safety of those people in Ireland who have conducted themselves as good citizens and have stood by England through thick and thin. Yet the Government seem ready to accept even this disgrace. The callousness with which the disbanded members of the Royal Irish Constabulary have been left exposed to the revenge of their enemies is matched by the apparent unconcern with which the Government look on while Protestants are massacred in County Cork and turned out of their homes penniless in Queen's County. The truth is that no arrangement with Ireland, of whatever kind it may be and no matter how expedient it may be to leave the Irish factions to settle their disputes without interference, can exonerate the Government from neglect of elementary offices. Every British citizen in every part of the British Empire has a right to protection.
It will be said that if rescue, parties were to be sent to the aid of loyalists in Ireland the prospects of the Treaty would be utterly ruined, as the opponents of the Treaty would declare that the British Government had reoccupied the country. We know all this ; we see the inconvenience. But is everything being done that can be done in co- operation with the Provisional Government ? At all events, we see no results, and the general impression among the loyalists themselves is that, they have been abandoned. It is a very humiliating thought that to-day no one can say " Civis Britannicus sum " with any sense that the title is in itself a warrant of safety or justice. Palmerston was ready to go to war to right the wrongs of a single man—a Portuguese Jew whose claim to British nationality was distinctly vague. If Englishmen had been told then that the day would come when a British Government would sit still, hugging to themselves a political punctilio, while respectable citizens within the British Isles were assassinated or robbed of all their goods, they would not have believed it. Even two years ago most of us would not have believed it.
The Government ought to demand that protection should be provided for these suffering and mostly terror- stricken people within a very short tune, and if the Pro- visional Government of Ireland cannot convey those who want to go safely out of the country, and does not undertake to compensate them for proved losses, the British Govern- . meat should undertake the task themselves and send in the bill to the Provisional Government—or rather we should say to the Southern Irish Government, if or when that is safely established.
The only other matter to which we have space to refer is the exchange of opinions between the South and North about the reign of violence in Ulster, and particularly in Belfast. Mr. Collins has sent another message to Sir James Craig in which he demands that " the persecution of the Roman Catholics " should cease, and that Sir James Craig should call to order the people whom Mr. Collins describes as " the barbarians in your midst." No honest observer can deny that when there are such cruel outbreaks as there have been in Belfast two sidei become engaged ; it would be utterly impossible that when one side throws bombs in the streets, or fires into houses, the other side who sec their relations or their friends lying dead should not retaliate. The assertion that many Roman Catholics have been killed proves in itself nothing whatever. All the. evidence shows first that the original trouble came from the Sinn Fein gunmen who were imported into Belfast, and secondly that when it was recognized that murder as . a policy had spread from the South to the North the boycott of Roman Catholic workers in the shipyards was . put into practice, not because those workers wero Roman Catholics, but because they would not disavow the Sinn policy of murder. We must say plainly. that it seems to us intolerable that the Roman Catholic Hierarchy, who were dumb during the War while infamous outrages were committed by the Germans, who remained _dumb when . the Sian Fein policy of assassination was at its height, who remained dumb even when British officers were pulled out of their beds in Dublin and killed like dogs, and who allowed to appear in their official organ a defence of so-called political murders which amounted to an approval of the principle " Killing no murder," should now {because Roman Catholics have been killed in Ulster) base upon this fact the monstrous charge that Roman Catholics as such in Belfast have been " subjected to savage persecution." The heads of the Protestant Churches in Northern Ireland have issued a statement. We will quote from it :— " Speaking for the clergy and people of the Churches we represent, we can conscientiously affirm that we and our people are, and have been, doing everything in our power to prevent the political struggle from becoming a religious one. We deeply regret the fact that there have been reprisals. It is not Fin easy thing for a powerful majority to submit tamely to such treatment at the hands of an aggressive minority ; but we have done everything in our 'Power to prevent the dreadful competition in evil which is the inevitable consequence of reprisals. Special services and public meetings have been held for the express purposes of denouncing murder by whom- soever committed, and of warning against the rendering of evil for evil. As to the Northern Government, it has shown in many ways its earnest desire that Roman Catholics should have their full share in the public and private life of Northern Ireland. It has offered them many appointments. -It is ready to give them more than their share m Its police forces. It is eagerly anxious that they should claim and enjoy equal rights with all others in the citizenship of Northern Ireland. If, instead of making wild and baseless charges, the bishops would unite with us in the endeavour to discountenance violence, by whomsoever committed, and would urge their people to live a quiet and peaceful life, submitting to the authority of the community to which they belong, there would soon be an end of the present unhappy strife. '
Surely the sincerity of that protest and appeal is patent. The Protestant leaders of the North acknowledge what they think it honest to acknowledge - but had they not so scrupulously wished to be fair they might have said that evidence has been put forward, and has not so far as we know been rebutted, that some of the Roman Catholics who have been murdered—as, for instance, the McMahon family—were done to death by Sinn Fein gunmen The McMahon family, although Roman Catholic in faith, is said to have been loyal to Great Britain and to have refused to sign a Republican pledge.
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