HC Deb 29 April 1881 vol 260 c1421
MR. LONG

asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, If his attention has been called to the following observations made by Mr. Dillon at the Land League meeting on Tuesday last:— He (Mr. Dillon) would mention a case which occurred in his own county, Tipperary, the other day, but which has not appeared in the newspapers. It was a case in which forty police were brought to assist in putting a man out. They found the front door barricaded. The priest stood by and said he would not interfere, but thought it right to inform the police that the first blow they struck the door would result in five or six of them being shot by the men who were inside with loaded rifles. The police held a consultation, and then decided to return to Thurles; and, further, he (Mr. Dillon) said that— If thus sought on any large scale to carry out evictions, the people were prepared to offer resistance, and would do so, and he certainly should say that the next time a man was shot in Ireland for refusing to leave his house, possibly the verdict would be, if he was not very much mistaken, one of wilful murder, not against the policeman who may have shot him, but against Gladstone and Forster, under whose orders the police fired; and, whether he intends taking any steps thereon?

MR. SEXTON

said, that before that Question was answered, he wished to know, having presided at the meeting in question, and having heard the speech, whether the Chief Secretary had read a full report of the speech; and whether, if he had done so, it did not appear from it that the hon. Member for Tipperary was only fulfilling a public duty in stating by way of warning facts which had come to his knowledge; and whether it did not further appear from it that he was urging upon the Government the duty of maintaining order, and of preserving peace in Ireland during the period that must elapse before the passage of measures of reform by preventing the intolerable hardships which must arise from such a cruel exercise of the powers of the agrarian law as it stood?

MR. W. E. FORSTER

The Question of the hon. Member was only put on the Paper last night, and, as I have not had an opportunity for communicating with the Executive in Ireland on the subject, I will ask him to repeat his Question on Monday.