IRELAND’S PLACE IN THE SUN

New Zealand Tablet, 6 March 1919, Page 39

IRELAND’S PLACE IN THE SUN

No more illuminating writer on the strategy and aims of the great war has appeared than Mr. Frank Simonds, whose syndicated weekly resumes have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. He has recently lent his powerful pen to the cause of the liberation of small nations under the yoke of the Central Powers. When requested by Rev. Francis McCarthy, of San Leandro, to say something in behalf of justice to a subject nation of the Allies, namely Ireland, in regard to her right to a place in a League of Nations, Mr. Simonds replied: “I have the interest in Ireland that you would expect from one whose grandfather and grandmother were born there ; and I shall hope in time to do what I can for the cause of Ireland.” The whole world is now interested in Ireland’s case, which will be a test proof of the sincerity of the Allies when they claim the war was fought for the right of self-determination by small nations and government by the consent of the governed. It is all right to stand for the liberation of little peoples under the yoke of enemy powers, but it’s a different story when one’s own ox is gored. With the rights of free speech and a free press gradually being restored in tin United States, mass meetings will soon lie held in every place where lovers of liberty dwell to bring the right of Ireland to selfgovernment and her release from Prussian domination by the stranger before the attention of the Peace Conference. British propaganda has been busy lately trying to make of Ireland an outlaw nation because she rebelled against Prussianism at home. Captain Maloney, of the British Army, throws the- searchlight of truth on these blackmailing schemes in the last two issues of A erica. He shows how America owes a debt of gratitude to Ireland because she helped the colonies to gain their independence, even as the French Catholics helped us. National gratitude demands that the United States in turn should assist Ireland to obtain her freedom. In the last issue of America Captain Maloney gives the English aspect of the Irish issue and shows how England denies Ireland’s rights to liberty on the ground that the Emerald Isle is too poor, backward, and divided for self-government. English government in Ireland means force and coercion of unwilling subjects. It is parallelled by German usurpation in Poland. “Nations in being vanquished are made poor and weak and kept so to keep them subject,” says Captain Maloney. As a further military precaution, conquered peoples are degraded, divided, and colonised by the victor.” While Britain abroad champions the cause of Greece. Hungary, Poland, Czecho-Slovak, Jugo-Slav, and others, she now holds Ireland from freedom. “It is not necessary further to multiply instances to prove that the English aspect of the Irish issue has ever been what it now is, the conventional aspect of a conqueror to a conquered people; and if to-day be any guide to the morrow, England intends to continue to apply to Ireland, so far as America will permit, those standards which another arbitrary power was also wont to follow in dealing with subject peoples now happily free.

"America, the belligerent, might permit an associate much that is fortunately not American cither in principle or in purpose, even the English aspect of the Irish issue, because of the necessity to substitute the America,!! for the German aspect of certain other national issues deemed more urgent. The armistice is now signed; these issues are in process of satisfactory ratification; the substitution of the American for the English aspect of the Irish issue, the institution in Ireland of government only by the consent of the people, is now in order.”