TOPICS OF THE DAY

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21196, 20 August 1940, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY

Toward Unity in Eire “Sunday, June 16, 1940, was a day that Ireland will have long cause to remember,” says the Irish Times. “A huge assembly hearef the leaders of political parties speak from a common platform; and, when one considers the waste of years during which those very leaders and their parties have been at arms’ length, the occasion of their reunion must be a source of patriotic pride. We could wish, indeed, that it had been effected under happier auspices; yet out of great evil a little good always proceeds, and the thunder of war on the Continent has done a service to Ireland. Where the leaders have consented to go, the people will follow. There is a cause which every man who calls himself Irish must be ready to maintain, and for which, it may be, he must be prepared to fight—the independence and integrity of his homeland. It is a sorrowful thing, as the Prime Minister says, that the whole nation is not ‘ours today.’ . . . ‘How much easier,’ he says, ‘it would be then for us to defend it, and how much more gladly would each one of us lay down our lives for it.’ Yet who knows what Heaven has in store for this country, and whether the clash of war upon the plains of France may not create here in Ireland something of that unity which has been our dream for so long?”