Galway In Days Gone By

1920

Bread and work

Over a score of the most successful modern factories in the three southern Irish provinces have been started in so many years not as commercial ventures merely, but for the express purpose of providing employment, stopping emigration and arresting decay.

Ireland’s industrial impoverishment and decline constitute the chief reason for the fact she finds herself unable to support, according to modern standards of life, her meagre population.

Hopeful facts, however, emerge from the efforts made not so much by business men, as by enthusiastic social reformers, not so much by keen-eyed commercialism perceiving a fruitful field for industrial expansion as by local patriotism seeking a way to provide “bread and work for all” at home.

Events in Ulster

The way to a settlement of the Irish question is not yet clear. Indeed events in Ulster during the week threaten to render any future solution appreciably more difficult.

Sir Edward Carson has met in solemn conclave not the plain men of every creed and class of “the six counties” which it is proposed to partition, but his fellow-Covenanters who comprise the landlords and capitalists, and their followers in the North-East.

This autocratic body has determined, in effect to scrap the Covenant, and to accept in principle Home Rule for the Ulster State.

Sir Edward rejoices that they have won all they determined to fight. In other words, he has revealed to the world that the so-called Home Rule Bill is a fraud and a sham, intended primarily to repeal the act on the Statute Book to perpetuate the Union, to set up the North-East as a mandatory state in Ireland, and to render a solution in the future all but impossible.

Carson accepts Home Rule not because it will confer freedom upon Ireland, but because it will set up a new Tudor Pale.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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