HC Deb 22 May 1882 vol 269 cc1381-96

Resolution [19th May] reported.

Resolution brought up, and read the first time.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the said Resolution be now read a second time."

MR. DILLON

regretted that he found it necessary to request the Government to postpone the consideration of the Report of Supply. There was raised a most important question which it was utterly impossible to adequately discuss at this hour of the morning; indeed, he hardly thought the House would be in the humor to enter upon the consideration of a question which must necessarily occupy a considerable time. It would be in the recollection of the House that when the Vote was in Committee he raised the question of the salary of Mr. Clifford Lloyd, which was included in the present Vote. The Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant was not present, and he (Mr. Dillon) and his hon. Colleagues stated that they were not satisfied with the explanation of the Attorney General for Ireland. After a somewhat prolonged debate, the Attorney General for Ireland undertook that there should be an inquiry into the matter; and he (Mr. Dillon) said then he would raise the question again. This morning he had received a letter from the Rev. J. Sullivan, the priest of Pallas Green, in which a miserable picture was given of the condition of things at present existing there. He felt bound to read a portion of the letter to the House. The letter was dated the 19th of May, and the writer says— I have been thinking for some days of writing to you about Lord Cloncurry's tenants, who have been lately evicted in Macroom. These poor people are now in such a condition that I cannot any longer resist bringing them under your notice, and asking you to try and have something done to relieve them. There are 50 families—about 300 people—evicted, and as the erection of the huts was prevented, they are in the most wretched state in the way of lodging and accommodation. In many cases, two and three large families are huddled together in one small house, and some of them are living in outhouses. The noble ladies of the Land League are generously standing to them with money, and but for that they would be badly off indeed. I am thoroughly convinced that there is no chance of a settlement between Cloncurry and the tenants. On the one side, the tenants could not, even if they were willing, accept the terms proposed by him—namely, that they should pay all rent and costs hitherto incurred—£3,500—and take leases for 61 years' old rent, which would bar them from the benefit of the Land Act. On the other side, Cloncurry will never yield, and give to the tenants the terms they are demanding. The yearly rental of the evicted tenants is only £1,200 a-year, and he can do without this for many years. The only solution of the difficulty is that the Government should buy the estate for the tenants. The only thing he (Mr. Dillon) could do was to urge the Chief Secretary to put a stop to the inhuman practice of preventing the erection of huts for the shelter of the wretched people turned out of their holdings. Were, he asked, these people to be housed like dogs because a magistrate was permitted to make a law for himself? He challenged the Chief Secretary, or the first Law Officer in Ireland, to state what law entitled a magistrate to go to a man in Ireland and say—"You shall not erect a house on your own land for the shelter of an Irish farmer." There was no law giving such a power. Mr. Clifford Lloyd had resorted to an obsolete Statute which had not been used for more than 300 years—it was passed some 500 years ago—he made laws of his own, and enforced them with an utter contempt of all ordinary magisterial practice and Courts of Justice. One of the laws Mr. Clifford Lloyd had created was that an evicted tenant should be left on the road-side. He said his reason was that he believed that the evicted tenants meant to occupy the houses with the object of intimidating the men who had taken the farms; but this gentleman seemed to forget that there were laws in force in Ireland—the White boy Act, for instance, which was a disgrace to the Statute Book—for punishing alleged acts of intimidation. Were those laws not sufficient to deal with the present case? The district was teeming with police. Were they not able to keep things straight? Mr. Clifford Lloyd, he supposed, had never been accused of remissness in his duty; and he had driven these unfortunate people into outhouses and into places not fit for dogs, because he alleged that they meant to use the huts for the purpose of intimidating others. Proceedings such as those of Mr. Clifford Lloyd utterly demoralized the people. He wished to urge on the attention of the House, now that it was going to enter upon a ruinous course of legislation, that the true causes of the outrages in Ireland were to be found in the acts of such men as Mr. Clifford Lloyd. Three hundred men, women, and children, whom he knew to have been in tolerably comfortable positions, and who had lived in fairly good houses, were now huddled together in outhouses in a way which would not have been tolerated in any civilized country save Ireland, and all because a special magistrate, who got £1,500 a-year for bring- ing the law into contempt, decreed that it should be so. That was his (Mr. Dillon's) case, and he hoped the Report of Supply would not be taken to-night unless they received some satisfactory assurance from the Government on the subject. What he would ask the Chief Secretary for Ireland to do was this—to postpone the Report of Supply until he was in a position to state to the House whether or not the Executive would allow evicted tenants to be housed or not. He should take every opportunity, in season and out of season, to bring before the notice of the House and of the people of this country the fact that evicted tenants in Ireland were to be hunted about the country like wild animals, and that the commonest charity which every Christian ought to extend to them was to be denied them on the mere word of an Irish magistrate that they intended to commit a crime, which, if they did commit, was punishable under laws which would not be even tolerated in this country. If the people committed the slightest act which could be construed into intimidation, the law could strike them instantly. He denied it was law at all to punish a man and prevent him putting a roof over the heads of his children, because it was alleged he intended to commit a crime.

MR. TREVELYAN

regretted the course the hon. Gentleman had taken, especially after the answer he gave him at the commencement of the Sitting. He could not believe the hon. Member seriously wished to stop a Vote of upwards of £2,000,000, because he took exception to the monthly salary of one official. The answer he gave at Question time was that the controversy which was now going on the estate of Lord Cloncurry was an exceptional one, and one on which he should be most unwilling to attempt to give an opinion secondhand. He would not like to form an opinion on the subject until he had had an opportunity, which he was now earnestly longing for, of going again to Ireland and consulting the highest Executive authorities. As a matter of fact, he wanted to know how the case really stood. He did not feel bound to promise that he could come to a conclusion within any given time; all he was willing to say was that he would form an opinion as soon as he could after obtaining the best information he could possibly secure. He earnestly hoped the ton. Member would withdraw his opposition to the Report of Supply.

MR. SEXTON

said, he was sorry the right hon. Gentleman had thought it consistent with his duty to give the assurance his hon. Friend (Mr. Dillon) desired. Since he had entered so recently on his duties, and had been occupied with so many affairs of great importance, it was but natural he should ask for further time for the consideration of the matter. Nothing, however, could exaggerate the urgency of the question which had been brought under the notice of the House by the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon); nothing could exaggerate the scandalous impropriety and the gross tyranny of the conduct pursued by Mr. Clifford Lloyd. He supposed Mr. Clifford Lloyd's experiences in British Burmah were at the bottom of his present tyrannical proceedings in Ireland; certainly, he could never have acted so outrageously nearer home. He had thrown ladies into gaol without giving them the slightest opportunity of defense; he had sent out telegrams to the constables of County Clare to send him in a list of the tenants who had paid their rents; and, lastly, he had, by a system of terrorism and unprecedented inhumanity, prevented the housing and sheltering of these poor people. One poor man, who had lived in tolerable comfort until these hard times, was evicted; he had been sheltered in one of these huts; but he was turned out, and had since died, a miserable victim to exposure. No one would deny the extreme urgency of the question. Mr. Clifford Lloyd was a gentleman who indulged in monstrous and scandalous perversions of the truth; and it was only the other day he put into the mouth of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bradford (Mr. W. E. Forster) two statements which were completely false; the one was that the tenants who had given the sites for the huts had done so through terrorism; the other was that tenants would have paid their rents had it not been for the terrorism which prevailed. The sites had been given freely, and the tenants who had not paid their rents had not done so through sheer inability. He hoped the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Trevelyan) would inaugurate his official career in Ireland by an honest and searching and courageous inquiry into this question. Whatever intentions of justice and pacification might be held by the House, they would be useless, and would be regarded by the most helpless and needy class in Ireland as worse than mockery, if tyrants like Mr. Clifford Lloyd were allowed to continue in positions of trust. He believed the good intentions of the Government would be gauged by their action in this matter. The plea of intimidation was an absurdity. In one case Mr. Clifford Lloyd had forbidden a man 78 years of age to occupy, with his family, a hut, although it was erected two miles from the farm from which he had been evicted, and on the farm of his own cousin. He (Mr. Sexton) was inclined to trust to the human instincts of the Chief Secretary. He hoped that not an hour would be wasted by the right hon. Gentleman in bringing considerations of humanity and justice to bear on the question.

MR. O'SULLIVAN

said, that, as the circumstances referred to occurred in the county which he had the honor to represent (Limerick), he wished to impress upon the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary the necessity of taking immediate action in the matter. These evictions altogether differed from others which had taken place in Ireland. They were not evictions for arrears of rent, but were cases in which the tenants had allowed the land they held to be sold to the Emergency men, for the landlord—Lord Cloncurry—although many of the unfortunate tenants were only half-a-year in arrear with their rent, the landlord took advantage of the fact that the Emergency men were allowed to purchase, and put them out on the title. He (Mr. O'Sullivan) thought the case was one which called loudly for the active interference of Her Majesty's Government in order to prevent this man from taking an unfair advantage of his tenants, simply because, in a time of great excitement, they had allowed their land to go to the Emergency men rather than purchase back their rights. Regarding Mr. Clifford Lloyd, it was a well-known fact that there was not a district in Ireland which he had gone into in which he had not occasioned a disturbance. For instance, look at the town of Bruff. He was well acquainted with this particular locality, and there was not a more peaceable place in the county of Limerick. But the first day that Mr. Clifford Lloyd set his foot in it there was a row, and 14 men were committed to prison. Having been detained in gaol for four months, they were tried and acquitted by the Judge, because there was not a shadow of a case against them. There were very few places in the county of Limerick in which Mr. Clifford Lloyd had not left his mark. He thought the Government were acting very foolishly in retaining a man who had produced such a bad impression, both in Limerick and Clare, as Mr. Clifford Lloyd; and more especially when the case in this particular instance was not one of eviction for the non-payment of rent, but simply because the tenants had, in a moment of difficulty and excitement, refused to purchase back their rights, and had allowed them to fall into the hands of the Emergency men.

MR. HEALY

trusted that the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary would see his way to some conclusion which would solve the difficulty and relieve these unfortunate tenants of the hardship from which they were at present suffering. He thought there was considerable force in the idea which the right hon. Gentleman seemed to have—that there would be advantage in his going over specially to Ireland in order to see for himself what were the state of the country and the condition of the people. He would hail with joy the intention of the right hon. Gentleman, if he found himself able to go to Ireland without being surrounded with police spies; and he had very little doubt that the right hon. Gentleman would return to this country entirely converted to the opinion which the Irish Members, who were acquainted with the district, entertained. In the meanwhile, the suggestion he would make to the right hon. Gentleman was this. Mr. Clifford Lloyd had taken a certain action. The right hon. Gentleman admitted that he had not yet been able to form an opinion as to the character of the action taken by Mr. Clifford Lloyd; but, notwithstanding that he was in a state of doubt, the right hon. Gentleman allowed the action taken by Mr. Clifford Lloyd to stand. He (Mr. Healy) thought it would be much better to give the unfortunate persons who were oppressed by Mr. Clifford Lloyd the benefit of the doubt, and allow them to put up these huts, pending a final decision on the part of the Government. If there was any doubt at all, why throw all the weight of the Government influence on the side of the strong and in the direction of coercion, instead of exercising it in favor of the poor peasants who had been turned out of their holdings, and were now huddled together in what were practically little better than pigsties? Until the right hon. Gentleman was able to arrive at a decision in regard to the legality of the measures taken by Mr. Clifford Lloyd, it would only be an act of humanity to allow these poor people to erect the sheds they desired to put up; and if ultimately his decision should be against them, they could easily be required to pull them down again. He might also release the unfortunate cottiers who had been trying to earn 1s. a-day by driving a few nails and putting up these huts. They were not likely to run away, and he sincerely hoped the right hon. Gentleman would give them a chance of doing something to earn subsistence. This was not an extreme position to take up. He failed to comprehend what law there could be which prevented any man from erecting a house; and that was the only position he took. Whether the huts thus erected were 100 yards, 200 yards, or a mile, or 2,000 miles away from the holdings of the evicted tenants had nothing whatever to do with the question. Knowing well the character of Mr. Clifford Lloyd, and the reputation he had acquired for harsh, severe, and oppressive measures, he appealed to the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, pending his final decision, to allow these poor people to enjoy the shelter of these wretched huts; and, in that case, he would ask his hon. Friend to withdraw any further opposition to the Vote.

MR. BIGGAR

said, he wished to make a suggestion to the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary in regard to Mr. Clifford Lloyd. The suggestion he would make was this. In Belfast there was at present no Resident Magistrate at all. It was the place from which Mr. Clifford Lloyd had been removed in order to be stationed in the South and West of Ireland; and he would suggest that that officer should be removed back again to Belfast, from whence he was originally taken, and where he might have given reasonable satisfaction. Certainly, Mr. Clifford Lloyd did not possess in Belfast such a field for misconduct as that which he enjoyed now. He believed that the removal of Mr. Clifford Lloyd back again to Belfast would be satisfactory to all persons concerned. More than that, he hoped that the right hon. Gentleman, in his contemplated visit to Ireland, would not allow himself to be influenced by the representations of Mr. Clifford Lloyd. He thought it would be perfectly impossible, and the right hon. Gentleman would readily understand why, to get an honest report upon these occurrences from that officer. Mr. Clifford Lloyd would certainly present his own conduct in the most favorable light, and was, therefore, likely to mislead the right hon. Gentleman very considerably. It was most desirable, if the right hon. Gentleman desired to have reliable information that he should obtain an entirely independent report from some person other than Mr. Clifford Lloyd, who would inevitably attempt willfully to mislead the right hon. Gentleman. If the right hon. Gentleman went to Ireland as Chief Secretary, and surrounded himself with officials connected with the Constabulary and the Irish Executive, he would never learn the truth; and the result would be disastrous to his future political career, and most injurious to the interests of all parties concerned.

DR. COMMINS

expressed surprise that the challenge which had been thrown out by the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) had not been answered. The hon. Member asserted that the conduct of Mr. Clifford Lloyd in regard to a good many of his acts was unsanctioned by any law or any statute; and the hon. Member for Sligo (Mr. Sexton) had given several instances in which the conduct of this harsh and overbearing officer was entirely unjustified and unjustifiable. Other cases might be added—such as the one in which he summoned before him a number of shopkeepers who declined to deal with Mrs. Moroney. The word "summon" was hardly correct. He did not summon them in accordance with any legal process; but, like some Turkish Pasha, he sent them a peremptory notice to appear before him, and informed them that if they declined to furnish goods to Mrs. Moroney they should all be sent to gaol together. Such conduct was utterly illegal; and if Mr. Clifford Lloyd had done one-fifth of the acts attributed to him, there was not a statute which he had not broken, and not a crime, except, perhaps, manslaughter and murder, which he had not committed. The Law Officers of the Crown had been distinctly challenged by his hon. Friend the Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) to give anything in the way of justification for the course pursued by Mr. Clifford Lloyd in preventing the erection of these huts in the county of Limerick, except his own autocratic will. But the Law Officers of the Crown sat still upon the Treasury Bench. They could not answer the question, for the simple reason that they had no law to give in justification of the arbitrary course of procedure adopted by Mr. Clifford Lloyd. It was a strange state of things in Ireland to know that they had a single individual exercising the power of an Eastern Pasha, laying down what the rights of the subject were, and showing that if he had ever read Magna Charta, which was supposed to be the fundamental law of liberty in England, he had only read it for the purpose of deliberately violating every provision contained in it. Mr. Clifford Lloyd produced disturbance and disorder wherever he went; and, knowing the character of the man, it was by no means wonderful that he did so. Recently he had fallen back, like some other magistrates in Ireland of a similar disposition, upon the obsolete Statute of Edward III. Hitherto that Statute had been quite obsolete in Ireland. He had heard of its being enforced in a few cases in England; but it had never been put in motion in Ireland. He might remind the House that when that Statute was first passed, a man named Hill was hanged under it, for what was termed "Approaching the Royal power." They were now going to have a new Court of High Commission in Ireland; and if Parliament conferred upon that Court of High Commission such powers as were conferred upon the Court of High Commission in the time of Edward III., enabling it to hang men who were guilty of "Approaching the Royal power," Mr. Clifford Lloyd would be very summarily disposed of, for not only had he approached Royal power, but he had been the Legislature and the Executive also. As they were going to do away with trial by jury in Ireland, he should not be sorry if, in the course of their revival of the old feudal laws, they would revive the ancient Court of High Commission, with power to deal effectually with all persons who were guilty of approaching the Royal power in Ireland. He was not surprised that a wide feeling of discontent should have been spread all over Ireland at the tyrannical and unconstitutional acts of Mr. Clifford Lloyd. If everything Mr. Clifford Lloyd insisted upon were carried out, the Irish peasant would have no place at all upon which to be his head. Nothing could be more sad and deplorable than the position in which the people of Ireland were placed by the arbitrary course pursued by this magistrate. A distinct legal challenge had been thrown down to the Law Officers of the Crown by his hon. Friend the Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon); but no one rose to justify the conduct of Mr. Clifford Lloyd. Neither Statute, nor decision of a Judge, nor principle of law had been or could be cited to justify his conduct; and he (Dr. Commins) sincerely hoped that in such a state of things some immediate steps would be taken to impose a cheek upon his proceedings. He would suggest that the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant should issue orders that in future nothing should be done in Ireland by any magistrate or person in authority except in accordance with due process of law. The great protection to the liberty of the people in England was that no one could act autocratically, but that the law must be put in force according to certain forms which were thoroughly well understood. If a person were accused of crime, or even only suspected of it, he was at once brought before a judicial tribunal, and some kind of legal procedure, in a prescribed form, was gone through. Every step that was taken had to be justified by Statute, and every charge of criminality had to be brought under judicial cognizance, and fairly tested. It was not so in Ireland. In that country all the formality of law was dispensed with, and they had in existence a course of procedure which was not justified by any Statute whatever. Under these circumstances, he thought it was the bounden duty of the Executive to prohibit such arbitrary acts as those which had been adopted by Mr. Clifford Lloyd until some clear legal decision was obtained upon the matter. He would strongly press upon the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland the necessity of issuing an interim order to Mr. Clifford Lloyd, directing him to confine himself to the ordinary and well-understood process of law, and not to convert himself into legislator, magistrate, policeman, bailiff, and Judge—the whole law, from the Legislature down to the lowest legal functionary, all rolled into one single individual, and producing great heart-burning and the widest discontent wherever he showed his face.

MR. T. A. DICKSON

said, he hoped the hon. Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) would withdraw his opposition to this Vote, and allow it to be taken that night. He thought, after what the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary had said, that he would inquire into the matter when he went to Ireland, it was unfair to attempt to put further pressure upon him. He (Mr. Dickson) had no doubt that the whole question would receive the personal attention of the right hon. Gentleman in his approaching visit to Ireland. He thought he was entitled to speak upon the subject, because he had been by no means favorably impressed with Mr. Clifford Lloyd's administration of the law in Ireland. He never had been an admirer of that gentleman. He had always looked upon him as an overbearing, tyrannical magistrate; but as the Chief Secretary had promised to inquire into matters personally when he went to Ireland, it would be wrong to carry the subject further to-night, especially when it was remembered that there would be a dozen other opportunities for raising the question again in the course of the Session. He therefore appealed to the hon. Member for Tipperary to withdraw his opposition to the Vote.

MR. REDMOND

said, the hon. Member who had just sat down (Mr. Dickson) had made an appeal to his hon. Friend the Member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) to withdraw his opposition to this Vote, on the ground that there would be other opportunities before the close of the Session for raising a discussion upon the matter. The hon. Member made the same mistake as that which had been made by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary. While both of them seemed to acknowledge the importance of the matter, neither of them seemed to be impressed with the intense urgency of it. This was not the case of a grievance which could be left over for weeks, until a more favorable opportunity arose for discussing it. They could not procrastinate it, because the lives of the unfortunate people concerned depended upon what was done by Her Majesty's Government in the course of the next few days. At the present moment there were from 30 to 40 families turned out upon the roadside, without shelter, on account of the action of this magistrate; and yet the Irish Members were told, in the face of facts like that, to postpone the consideration of the matter until a more convenient opportunity. Already one of these unfortunate persons had died in consequence of the action which had been taken. Were they to postpone the consideration of the matter until others should have died from exposure? It was simple mockery to ask for the postponement of the question until a more convenient opportunity. The reason given was that the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary was in an unfortunate position; that he was new to the Office; and that he did not know what was going on in Ireland. No doubt that was an unfortunate position; and if the right hon. Gentleman appealed to the Attorney General for Ireland, he was not likely to obtain much information, seeing that the right hon. and learned Gentleman on a recent occasion, to the intense surprise of the Irish Members, informed them that he knew absolutely nothing about the matter at all. He admitted that there was some allowance to be made for the want of information possessed by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary; but the matter was of such deep importance that he ought to give some assurance that it would be the first thing he would attend to when he went to Ireland; and he (Mr. Redmond) hoped that the right hon. Gentleman's visit would not be long delayed. It was not sufficient for the right hon. Gentleman to say that he would attend to it in a week or a month. It required immediate action by telegraph within the next 24 hours, and an assurance on the part of the right hon. Gentleman that the result of his telegraphing had been to curb the tyrannical and illegal proceedings of Mr. Clifford Lloyd, and to secure that these unfortunate people were provided with adequate shelter and saved from starvation. The vague and general statement made by the right hon. Gentleman was eminently unsatisfactory; and he sincerely hoped the right hon. Gentleman might be able to give the House an assurance such as that which had been indicated by the hon. Member for Wexford (Mr. Healy). In order that the right hon. Gentleman might have an opportunity of giving such an assurance, he would move that the debate be now adjourned?

MR. SPEAKER

asked if any hon. Member seconded the Motion?

MR. R. POWER

said, he would second it.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Debate be now adjourned."—(Mr. Redmond.)

MR. TREVELYAN

said, he had already promised that when he went to Ireland he would inquire into the matter; and he certainly considered it one of the most important matters he could inquire into. Short of that he should be satisfied with the decision of the highest authorities in Ireland, unless that decision was contradicted by evidence which he was able to obtain by personal investigation. So much had he been impressed with the importance of the subject that, after turning to it once or twice in a letter he had written that morning, he had come to the conclusion that the matter was one which deserved and demanded personal inquiry at his hands.

MR. REDMOND

said, he hoped the right hon. Gentleman would consider the question of time.

MR. TREVELYAN

replied that no time would be lost, because an inquiry had already been set in motion.

MR. REDMOND

appealed to the right hon. Gentleman to allow the huts to be erected at once, in order to afford shelter, and to save the lives of the poor people from exposure.

MR. LEAMY

asked if Mr. Clifford Lloyd had only acted on what he called his reasonable suspicion that the huts were erected for the purpose of intimidation? If that were so, then he appealed to the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant as to whether he would not at once telegraph to Mr. Clifford Lloyd to allow the evicted families to go into the huts, and in case he believed they were going to intimidate anybody, to have them brought before the magistrates. It was intolerable that evicted tenants were to be refused shelter merely because Mr. Clifford Lloyd thought they might intimidate someone. He asked, further, whether the carpenters had been imprisoned under the Coercion Act or under the ordinary law? If it was under the former, he thought they should, at least, try what the ordinary law would do with them. With regard to the Motion for the adjournment, he thought his hon. Friend would be quite right in persisting in dividing the Committee, in order to bring this matter to a speedy settlement; for it was very hard that they should be compelled over and over again to raise this question. It had been said that these evicted persons had some interest in outrages; but he ventured to say there was no man in Ireland more interested in the continuance of outrages than Mr. Clifford Lloyd, because if they ceased his occupation would be gone. Did hon. Members know that Mr. Lloyd was drawing some £1,600 or £1,700 a-year? He was nearly as expensive to the country as the Prime Minister. His interest was, therefore, that outrages should continue, and that he should lead the Government to believe that the country was in a disturbed state, and that these people were engaged in intimidation and breaking the law. It seemed to him almost needless to say that this man ought not to be allowed to prevent these evicted persons using the shelter provided for them; and that the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant should at once direct him to allow them to go to their homes, and that if he could get any evidence against them it should be produced in open Court.

MR. DILLON

said, he was perfectly willing to accept the assurance given by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. But, in saying that, he was bound to point out two things. First of all, the right hon. Gentleman appeared to have misunderstood him in thinking that he laid no stress on the question of raising these huts. The question was perfectly clear and simple. Was the Government prepared to state that they would, under no circumstances, prevent the housing of an evicted tenant wherever they could get permission from the occupier of the land? Secondly, he wished to point out that he should be obliged, however reluctantly, and, perhaps, at the expense of some irregularity, to force this question again on the attention of the House, unless, on Thursday next, he received a satisfactory answer to his question.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

Original Question put, and agreed to.

Resolution agreed to.