A CHAT WITH MICHAEL DAVITT.

Waikato Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2191, 24 July 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

A CHAT WITH MICHAEL DAVITT.

A represkntativk of the Pall Mall Gazette interviewed Mr Michael Davitt on the Orange preparations for war, and found him scornfully contemptuous of the idea that Ulster would offer any effec« tual resistance. "Leave the.n alone to us," he said, " and we will make short work of those gentry. They are not Irish, they are only English and Scotch who have settled among us, and it is preposterous that they should be allowed to dictate to Irishmen how Ireland should be governed. They have as little claim to ask that Ulster should be tieated otherwise than as an integral part of Ireland as that Irishmen in "Liverpool and Glasgow would have a right to ask that those cities should be annexed to li eland." Ulster, he main* tains very stiongly, is not a unit by any means in this question, that there dxc only three counties— Armagh, Down, and Antrim— in which the Protestants have a majority, and e\en there it would ba potpctly possible to hold demonstra* tions in favour of Home llule which would be largely attended. The National Party, he declared, would absolutely refuse to recognise in any shape or form the claim of Ulster to bo exempt troiu the rule of the Parliament at Dublin. Concession on this point waa absolutely impossible. They would wage war to the death against any Bill whatever that did not subject Ulster to the Statutory Parliament that is to meet at Dublin The Pall Mall Gazette adds:— "The determination ot the UUtermen to resist Home Rule, if uecessary, by force of arms, is said to bo deepeninn. One of the oldest Liberal journalists in the north of Ireland, who for nearly on entire iieueratioii lua fought the battle of Gladstonism in Belfast, called at this office to !*tate that although he strongly deprecated any thieats of appeals to force, he thought that he would fail iv his duty if he did not state that to the best of hit belief Home Rule could not be enforced m the North of Ireland without provoking armed resistance, and, he added significantly, many of the best people regard such a probability with more than approval. He produced a letter from oue of the resident magistrates in Ulster, in which the writer expressed a serious conviction that a religious war was imminent, the end of which no one could forsee. Already the premonitory symptom, in the shape of an aggravated feeling of bitterness between Protestants and Catholics, was only too observable, and in any case he feared that riots were mii evitable."