THE IRISH DELEGATES. MR DILLON ON THE WEST COAST. Westport, Nov. 20.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 422, 23 November 1889, Page 5

THE IRISH DELEGATES. MR DILLON ON THE WEST COAST. Westport, Nov. 20.

Mr Dillon arrived by the Mawhera ab 5 o'clock this morning, and was received by a large assemblage of Home Rule sympathisers. At noon he was presented with an address on behalf of the general sympathisers with the Irish National League and by colonial-born sympathisers. Mr Dillon made a suitable reply. He addresses a public meeting to-night and proceeds to Reefton from here.

A Loyalist meeting was hold at Wellington on Nov. IG, the building being crowded. Mr Coleman Phillips was in the chair. The meeting was addressed by ministers of \anous dissenting denominations, and a number of resolutions of an anti-Home Rule character were declared carried. They will be transmitted to Lords Salisbury and Hai bington, and Messrs Balfour and Gladstone. Mr Cohen, of Napier, who presided at Mr Dillon'b meeting on the Home llule question on November 11th. said that he wished it to be distinctly understood — a statement having been circulated to the contrary — that any money collected in New Zealand or Australia was nob touched at all by Mr Dillon or the other delegates. The money was collected by the local executive and sent Home by them. The travelling expenses of the delegates were not paid out of it. Mr Dillon, speaking at Napier on the 11th inst., said : "In some parts of Ireland there at one time stood extensive villages, the land dotted here and there with pretty, comfortable homesteads, and occupied by a happy and seemingly prosperous people ; but the luthless hand of the destroyer swept away a great many of these places and left nothing bub desolation and ruin. He knew ot one place in particular, the town of Eyrecourt, which once containod 1,200 families, but which existed no more. It was a flouiishing town, but one man bought the estate from the people and, | cleaied every solitary being off. He had actually boasted chat where the hearthstone was warm in the morning the plough turned up the soil in the evening. (Cries of " Shame, shame "'). That once prosperous, smiling village was now as deserted as a fcheep run in Australia. That happened only forty years ago, and he hoped his friend ' Loyalist ' would not say he was going back as far as the Spanish Armada. (Laughter.) Yes, thero were people living now '.vho recollected the occurrence as if it happened yesterday, and no doubt they had good cause to. He had stood on the I spot which marked the centre of Eyrecourt, I which was now nothing but desolation."