TOWARD UNITY IN EIRE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 3, Issue 213, 16 September 1940, Page 6

TOWARD UNITY IN EIRE

■■■ '■— ■ LEADERS SPEAK FROM A COMMON PLATFORM A MOMENTOUS SUNDAY "Sunday, June 16, 1940, was a day that Ireland will have long cause to remember," sa3's the Irish Times. "A huge assembly heard the leaders of political parties speak from a common platform; and, when one considers the waste of years during which those very leaders and their parties have been at arms' length, the occasion of their reunion must be a source of patriotic pride. We could wish, indeed* that it had been effected under happier auspices; yet out of great evil a little goocL always proceeds, and the thunder of war on the Continent has done a service to Ireland. Where the leaders have consented to go, the people will follow. There is a cause which every man who calls himself Irish must be ready to maintain, and for which, it may be, he must be prepared to fight—the independence and integrity of his homeland. It is a sorrowful thing, as the Prime Minister says, that the whole nation is not 'ours to-day.' . . . 'How much easier,' he says, 'it would be then for us to defend it, and how much more gladly would each one of us lay down our lives for it." Yet who knows what Heaven has in store for this country, and whether the clash of Avar upon 1 the plains of France may not create here in Ireland some thing of that unity which has been our dream for so long?"