Biography of a Lie

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 38, 21 September 1905, Page 2

Biography of a Lie

On the twelfth of July— auspicious dale '—the cabledemon sped to New Zealand and the other ends of the earth a circumstantial account of an Irish agrarian ' outrage.' The story— which smelled of the Walls of Deny— toW o f a ffallaait defence made by one Mr Edward Magwmis, near Boyle, against a large body ol men who surrounded and besieged his house, volleying

shots into it for three hours, until the noble little garrison <baat tWem off. Last monlth,/ in the House of Commons, Chief Secretary Long admitted that the whole story was a cowardly calumny and an invention from start tot finish. Mr. Magennis and others had testified before a special police investigation committee that no such attack had taken place, and that, in effect, the romantic story of the defence of the Roscommon Plevna had no more of sober truth in it than the eastern talo of Ali Bafra and the Forty Thiaves. It was merely part and parcel of the campaign of falsehood instituted, for an obvious political purpose, by the Coercionist Irish press. But, true to his coward traditions, the cable-fiend never withdrew or corrected the envenomed romance. The calumny was spread on the wings of the lightning ; far in its wake the refutation jogged 'alonig in a leisurely way in the hold of an ocean liner. Which gives a point to the mixed but well-meant metaphors of the Philosopher of the Sandwich Islands : ' Slander is played on a tin horn, whfile truth steals forth like the dying song of a lute.' The ruffian who concocted, or first spread, this slander i 9 well known to the police in Boyle. But the rawhide of the law has never crossed the caitiff's back ; for was not the calumny bred and spread in the sacred cause of Coercion ?