IRISH AFFAIRS.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 276, 21 March 1889, Page 2

IRISH AFFAIRS.

London, March 19. Messrs W. O’Brien and E. Harrington, M.P.s, have refused to be released from gaol —in order to prepare defences on charges against them before the Times-Parnell Commission.

Mr John Dillon, prior to his departure for Australia and America, addressed a convention of delegates in Queen’s County on January 15. Mr Dillon, in the course of his address. said chat thia would be the last occasion on which he would have an opportunity of addressing his fellow-countrymen before he went to Australia and America. When be loooked at the figures of depopulation for Queen’s County, it appeared to him that there were few counties in Ireland that had more need of the principle and practices which they had been blamed for preaching. In the past 47 years they had had 83,000 people driven out of the county under a system of law and order and under the tender mercy of a landlord Government, and 12,000 houses levelled and destroyed. While this unparalleled system of ruin and devastation, worse than the record of the most hideous civil wars in Europe could point to, was going on, they saw across the Channel the population multiplying, houses springing up on every side, and ail the signs and marks of prosperity amongst the people; and yet they were expected—it was taught by their rulers as a virtue—that they should respect the system under which these things had been possible, and that they should obey and cherish what they choose to call law and order, but which he called the most infamous system of persecution and extermination that had ever been practised against a people. Referring to the case of the Luggacurran tenant — which he characterised as a case of paramount importance —Mr Dillon said they had this hated and powerful Government, which was formed by landlords and controlled by landlords, doing by the Act of 1887 what they swore they never would do, and granting a reduction on these judical rents, although they declared in the autumn of 1886 that the reduction would never be granted. He had calculated how much the action of the tenants of Ireland who had combined to get reductions in the judical rents saved the farmers of Ireland. The amount of rents dealt with under the courts amounted to three millions, and tbe reductions, striking an average on the schedule of last year, was about 12 per cent., which amounted to a quarter of a million sterling struck off the roll of judicial rents in Ireland last year, ahd this by action such as that of the men of Luggacurran. He told them to keep the field in this great movement, which had been carried out with such wonderful success on behalf of tbe tenant farmers of Ireland. All he would say was that as long as he lived, and as long as William O'Brien lived-, no body of tenants in Ireland should desire in vain to enter into a combination for the defence of their rights. Universal experience taught them that there was nothing to be gained from a Government situated in Dublin Castle, and nothing to be hoped for from officials appointed by it, but cruelty, injustice and oppression, unless the people were able to show them that they, the people, were too strong to be put down. He (Mr Dillon) went from Ireland firm in the belief that when he returned he would find that the men had stood fixedly and irresistibly and immovable on the lines they had laid down for them, like the phalanx of old; that the forces of the enemy had been broken, and that tbe cause in which they had fought, and in which generations before they were born had shed their blood, was still moving irresistibly on to that victory which must now be near at hand,