THE HOME RULE QUESTION.

Taranaki Daily News, 24 August 1916, Page 4

THE HOME RULE QUESTION.

. ' To the Editor. Sir,—l doubt if your readers have erer bad presented to them a more inconsequential effusion than that which appears to day over the name of W. A. Quinn. A third standard boy would be severely birched for such a stupid interpretation of the simple English sentence: "Poverty will disappear from Ireland only when she has succeeded, like New Zealand, in shaking off British rule." Dean Power, all Irishmen and sons of Irishmen the world over, wliti are not renegades, nearly ill Australasians, and a majority of democratic Irishmen both in md out o£ the British Parliament, hope that Ireland may soon shake off British rule to the extent that New Zealand has shaken it. off, \hat is, that Ireland may secure' Home Rule, as,.the ex-Premier, exMinisters and public men of Western, .Australia put it to Mr. Asquibh yesterday. But to the inconsequential wisdom of W. A. Quinn these statesmen are Anglophobia. When W. A. Quinn, with an Irish name, tells us that the stomachs of the Irish rebels wore filled with stout, he (ontradicts Mr. Asquith, Earl Kitchener, Mr. Bin-ell, and a large and influential siection of the English press, not to mention the press of Ireland, which was nware that practically all, if not all, of the rebels were total abstainers. Imagine any person with only a cursory knowledge of current Irish affairs imputing drunkenness to men like Padraic Pearse, the leader of the revolt, of whom Colonel Moore, in his report to the Royal Commission on the Sinn Fein rebellion, iiaid: "He was a man of such tender sympathies that ho would not shoot or lisli because he could not "bear to give pain"; to men like Eoin MacNeill, scholar and professor; like Thomas MM-' Donagh, writer of exquisite poetry, both Gaelic and English; like James Connolly, stalwart of the Labor movement in Ire« hnd —misguided idealists, if you will, but still idealists who had the courage to flglit and die for their ideals. "All were men who would have been the finest and choicest blossoms of any nation in the world, whose one absorbing passion was to lay down their lives in order that Ireland might bo advanced even one step in prosperity and enlightenment. It they had been born in Canada or Aus-i tralia they would have been great citi:ens; it is certain they would have been iovemost in some wjld Anzac charge, mid might have died by same Turkish bullet instead of against a barrack wall in Dublin." I quote again ColoneJ Moore's report. It ill beseems W. A, Quinn or anyone else of a like mental make-up to throw mud at their graves. The Irishmen of Hawera are proud of the exalted patriotism of the Dean, winch seeks the higher levels, and, eschewing jingoism and abuse becomes a reproach to that baser school of spurious patriotism to which many of his would-be critics are probably disciples,—l am, etc.j «P. O'DEA. Hawera, 23/8/16.