Galway In Days Gone By

1920

War deepens

A band hall at Maree, Oranmore, and a vacant house at Gurraun were burned down last Friday night. Details of a raid at the house of a farmer named Devaney, of Ballinacloughy, Maree, were given by his son Thomas, who with his brothers, Stephen and Pat, were admitted to the Galway County hospital on Monday suffering from gunshot wounds. Pat was discharged the same evening.

“It would be about 1.30 (old time) on Saturday morning last,” said Thomas, “when we heard knocking at the front and back doors, and a shout, ‘Get up’. My sisters, Norah and Anne, opened the door. They were going to get a light but the raiders stopped them. The raiders had a flash lamp. They went into the room to my father, and brought him down to the kitchen and made him put up his hands.

“They then came into the room where I and my three brothers, Stephen, Pat and Eddie, were in bed. They caught me by the shoulder and pulled me out first, and then they took Stephen and Pat out. They brought us out on the road and put the three of us down on our knees and told us to pray. They let us up and told us to pray again and they fired shots over our heads. Then we got the order to march and they made us walk about sixteen yards. They put the three of us in a line across the road. They then fired two gunshots at us from distance of sixteen yards. Stephen and I were hit in the legs.

“There were 84 pellets in one of my legs and 60 in the other. Pat got a pellet in the stomach, one in the chest, and one in the arm. After they had fired the two shots they told us to go into the house. We were hardly able to walk, and we told them we were shot. One of them said, ‘What about another round’? We went in the house and they went away.

Bidding for peace

We understand that Mr. Lloyd George was to have received the committee of the Irish Peace Conference in Downing Street yesterday (Thursday) and that certain proposals for the establishment of a truce and a subsequent settlement were to have been put to him.

The speeches of the Prime Minister in North Wales, which we report in this issue, do not seem to suggest that he is preparing the way for a settlement. Yet there can be no doubt that the vast majority of the English people desire peace with the sister isle, and Ireland for her part wants nothing so much to-day as tranquillity and ordered government.

In the face of these realities, the plain man can be forgiven if he fails to understand why a condition of things is permitted to continue in Ireland which is a disgrace to civilisation.

The explanation is to be found not in the conditions that exist so much as in the malignant policy that brought them about. Until that is reversed, we fear there is little hope of permanent peace or security.

Mr. Asquith has made a bold bid for tis reversal, but we cannot forget that when he was in power, he originated and gave official sanction to the mischievous policy of partisanship for North-East Ulster.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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