Galway In Days Gone By

1920

Waking up at last

British Liberalism is at last beginning to wake up to the ghastly failure of English Government in Ireland. Some of its newspapers, notably “The Manchester Guardian”, “The Daily News”, and “The Westminster Gazette” are expressing horror at the deeds that are being done in Ireland in the name of the English People.

We fear that the awakening has come six years late. During the intervening period these organs of opinion have been free to tell the story of a little nation’s travail, to indicate the inevitable tragedy towards which we were drifting, to sound without ceasing the voice of warning.

Mr. George Bernard Shaw has said that you must scream into the ears of an Englishman before he will listen even to the things that concern himself.

In the British Parliament or out of it there were no outstanding figures to reveal the naked truth, and where the truth was told in part, there were few hearts prepared to listen. Moderate Irishmen who wished to secure peace found themselves driven from despair to despair.

Their voice, and the voice of Irish journalists who sought to assist them to find a way to peace, was ignored by a degenerate Ministry, and lost amidst the rumbling militarism in Ireland.

War rumbles on

“Every day brings news of fresh outbreaks, with incendiarism, shootings, and all manner of violence, by the troops in Ireland,” says the “Manchester Guardian” news bulletin.

“It is flat mutiny, whatever the provocation, and so far it has nether been restrained, nor, as far as is known, punished. It is a complete defiance alike of civil and military authority, and amounts in effect to the waging of war on the Irish people. If neither the army chief nor the civil administration can restrain it they proclaim themselves impotent in the face of their own forces, and have virtually abnegated the authority entrusted to them.

“To talk of ‘restoring law and order’ in the presence of facts like these is to trifle with words. There is no effective law and there can be no pretence of order if British troops are permitted to run amok in this way among the inhabitants of a whole town as happened on Wednesday in Galway, or of a village, as happened lately in Tullow.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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