Reconciliation in Ireland

Extract

The cartoon with which Punch expressed its bewildered opinion of the Irish settlement deserves to be remembered in history. After more than two centuries of deliberate exploitation of anti-Irish sentiment in the north-east of Ireland, the leader of the Ulster Unionists is represented in the most characteristic organ of British middle-class opinion, as uniting with the President of the Free State to pick the pocket of John Bull. In actual fact, the Ulster Government’s financial ‘benefits through the settlement would appear to consist in a grant for the Ulster Parliament buildings and the separate Ulster Law Courts—neither of which were ever asked for by the Ulster Unionists, but were, on the contrary, accepted by them in response to an urgent appeal by the Imperial Parliament. There is a further financial concession also in the continuation for one year of the annual grant in aid of the Ulster Special Constabulary, but on the clear understanding (never before insisted upon) that this latest grant of roughly a million pounds must be the last. No Irish Catholic is likely to sympathise with Sir James Craig’s lamentations at the fact that the ‘Specials’ must therefore be disbanded; but even the Ulster ‘Specials’ would never have come into existence except to defend the jurisdiction of the Ulster Parliament in the area for which the Orange Lodges agreed, under urgent appeals, to accept responsibility.