Prisoner Officials of Dublin Castle.

Hokitika Guardian, 9 August 1921, Page 3

Prisoner Officials of Dublin Castle.

their strange dilemma. (ID- stir William Beach Thomas.) 1 ’ ' DUBLIN. !„ a certain notorious court oi^quad Dublin you may see. if you cm penetrate there-and penetration <[ thorny performance-a number of planks newly nailed wav. On them is a. notice to I mfret ■ "Playing with a ball against It;' r ,auks‘is only allowed between the hours"of 2 and 8 p.m.” In the same court is a newly eitet I tennis net, with bits of wire encircling I the mud surface. These aids to exercise and bodh health have been raised for the of the prisoners, "prisoners in sense meaning certain officials I la> are numerous, for the place they inhabit is “The Castle” strange residence of the strangest succession of officials in our history. A number of those officials are today as truly prisoners as it they weie in Mountjoy Gaol. Thev live within a barbed wire entanglement. As you enter, past many police, many soldiers, yon see great coils of wire even over your head. 1„ his charming Irish idiom one of the guardians said to me: “If they live out it would be no more life; but we a,v fair strangled with regulations, that is true.” I entered the castle slowly and tortuously by narrow ways. 1 came out m an official ,-ar «nd felt exactly as if ■ were making a sally against hostile troops. The great doors opened suddenly and closed quickly, and the car shot' out with rapid impetus. As we turned out of the curious little bv way to the castle into the busier i street a lorry went, across us bristling with rifles and glinting with pistols One at anv rate of the rifles was held not merely at the ready but closely pressed against the shoulder with eye looking along the barrel and the finger on the trigger. Such a sight is, of course, usual in Ireland. No one pays much attention. So, too, the imprisonment of the bored and pallid officials in the castle is n commonplace, accepted as almost normal. Hut just as no one can even guess at ’ what Ireland is like till he goes there, so nobody in Ireland can feel quit* how fantastic and upside down the country is till he comes away. You do not realise the unreality of a nightmare till you wake up and inhabit a natural world. Dublin Castle is perhaps the most fantastic spot in Ireland; but fantasies walk the street of every village, h. behind the glinting mica of the granite stones of the Wicklow hills, i>op out suddenly along the hacked and haunted roads and anv wrapped in the l broken wires of telegraph and telephone ! that litter the countryside. I Intellectual patriot's rub' shoulders j with young brigands; and it needs a specialist to distinguish a William Tell from a Dick Turpin. TJie strangest messages are carried in the egg-baskets of market women and Englishwomen bring back notes written on a quarterinch cl paper and hidden in their hats. Everyone is furtive. You cannot write a letter with any confidence that it will not be opened and censored by unknown persons, whatever your political colour. "Passed by the ( Republican) Censor” is quite a common super-scrip-tion on the letters you receive, i All this nightmare tangle grows inure tangles, not less ; and the longer the process continues, the more it will need some fantastic agency from a Grim’s fair story to unravel it.