POLITICAL HYSTERIA

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 648, 27 April 1929, Page 16

POLITICAL HYSTERIA

IRELAND'S WILD MEN ANTIDOTE TO BAD TEMPER “We are not sure that political hysteria is not an infectious disease like influenza or typhoid,” observes the "Irish Statesman,” -which is strongly opposed to those in the Irish Free State who advocate reprisals against Northern Ireland because of the recent arrest and imprisonment of Mr. de Valera. "How rapidly the infection spreads. These philosophical speculations were occasioned by our reactions to the arrest of Mr. de Valera. “From all accounts the political ascendancy in Northern Ireland had been weakening through internal dissensions and because nothing threatened it from the Free State. What could it do to bring about unity again? No domestic policy seemed capable of bringing aliout harmony. Mr. de Valera’s visit gave an opportunity which was at once seized on. He was arrested and sentenced to one month's imprisonment. Falling Into the Trap “Our wild men fell into the trap They organised monster meetings and the passionate utterances of orators gave Viscount Craigavon the political argument of which he was in urgent need. How he must have chuckled when he found Deputy MacEntee crying out: “ ‘Let the grass grow in the streets of Belfast! Let the mills of Belfast be silent! There will then be no partition problem. They could not rest content until they had the Republican flag floating not alone on Cave Hill, but on Stormont.’ “Mr. P. T. McGinley was not so poetical, but he called on us all: “ ‘Buy no goods coming from Belfast! Send in no goods and send in no money until they are willing to become part of the Irish nation.’ “Tall talk this. . . . There is, taking in both imports and exports, a trade of something like ten or eleven million pounds between the Free State and Northern Ireland. The orators call upon us to stop this trade at once to bring the North to its senses. What About Common Sense? “But what about our senses? It. seems we must suffer pound for pound for every pang we cause our northern countrymen. We are not to sell any more than we are to buy. The guns our intransigeants would turn on the North would have a recoil as disastrous to the gunners as those.they fire against. Now, there is not the slightest national or individual pleasure to be gained from a conflict where the laws of the game demand that we are t° be just as much hurt as the enemy. Let us suppose political leaders in Northern Ireland called on all citizens to boycott the Free State to neither buy from it nor to sell to it, what would our intransigeants have done? They would have thought in their souls that the political leaders of Northern Ireland were congenital idiots, and they would have been right. They know they would, and they would most probably have said what they thought. The curious thing is that they think it. wisdom for themselves to do what would be folly in another. Too Temperamental “They do not see it is just because they are like that and talk about crashing their way through Ulster. a,bout planting the Republican flag on Stormont, about neither buying nor selling with the North; in fact, threatening military violence and economic ruin, that the majority in Northern Ireland do not want to be in the same political household with people who are so temperamental. “If we cut off trade with Northern Ireland not only do we injure our own trade, but we injure in Northern Ireland those who trade with us and are most friendly to us and arc most in favour of unity. One consolation is that we imagine the majority in the Free State to be far less excitable than the orators to whom they listen, that in spite of the orations the people here will keep a good temper and will not allow themselves to be stampeded into boycotts and other forms of lunacy which will injure us just as much as they would injure (hose against whom they are directed. The best answer to bad political manners is good manners, and to bad humour the antidote is a resolute good temper.”