People in England have not the remotest conception of the terrible Frankenstein monster which De Valera & Co. have reared up and armed in Ireland, a hideous monster of murderous and armed gunmen, fearing neither God nor man, which in the summer of 1921 was on the point of being exterminated by British bayonets to make this beautiful island of Ireland once more a clean and wholesome land, where men might dwell in peace.
That chance has gone. Will it ever occur again? And if it does will the British Government seize their opportunity like men and rid Ireland of this terrible menace? Or will they again be found wanting, groping after some wretched formula?
Do people realise why De Valera acts the part of the coy fly in hesitating to enter Mr Lloyd George’s talking parlour? The sinister reason is that if he once gives up his claim to an Irish Republic he seals his own doom. The day he enters into a conference with the British Government on these conditions, the Irish Republican Brotherhood signs his death warrant, and well he knows it.
But if, for argument’s sake, a so-called settlement is arrived at, what becomes of De Valera’s Frankenstein monster?
Will it beat its automatics into reaping-hooks and convert its machine-guns into potato-sprayers? Possibly in the minds of English Radicals, but nowhere else.
And when the Welshman and the Mexican have fooled the English and the southern Irish with a formula, do they think that any formula ever phrased would fool Ulster?
On the day that an Irish Republic is set up (Dominion Home Rule is only another name for it), Sinn Fein, its raison d’être accomplished, dies; but out of its corpse will arise two parties, or rather armies (for all men in Ireland are armed to-day except the Loyalists), one consisting of the farmer shopkeeper class, while the other will be the Citizen Army of the Bolshevist Labour Party.
The rank and file of the I.R.A. consists of farmers’ sons, young townsmen, shop assistants, and the like; they expect either a fat pension for life or twenty acres of land. Both have been freely promised to them, and both are equally impossible.
And these disgruntled gunmen, all armed, will take sides according to their sympathies, and before many months are past these forces will be at each other’s throats. And the national air of Ireland will be the “Red Flag.”
Like Kerensky in Russia, De Valera will disappear in the welter of revolution.