SUPPLY—CIVIL SERVICE ESTIMATES.

HC Deb 29 August 1887 vol 320 cc280-414

SUPPLY—considered in Committee.

(In the Committee.)

CLASS III.—LAW AND JUSTICE.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That a sum, not exceeding £762,315, be granted to Her Majesty to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment—touring the year ending on the 31st day of March 1888, for the Expenses of the Constabulary Force, Ireland.

MR. DILLON (Mayo, E.)

Mr. Courtney, we are now asked to complete the sum of £1,412,000 to pay for the Irish Constabulary. Now, Sir, on the 26th of August, 1880, when the Irish Constabulary Vote came before Parliament, I and several other Members of the then National Party of Ireland protested against the habitual increase and the enormous character of this Vote. On that occasion the right hon. Gentleman the senior Member for Birmingham (Mr. John Bright), who was then more in sympathy with Ireland than, I regret to say, he has since shown himself to be, made use of these words. Speaking just after I had sat down, he said— I think the speeches generally of the Irish Members have been of a character to produce an influence upon the Members of this House, and I hope they may have some effect upon the opinion of the Members of another House also. I should be glad to think that a report of them will be extensively read throughout the country, for the purpose of giving information upon many points to the people of England, which probably the great bulk of them do not possess. The question under discussion was the enormous size and the growth of the Irish Constabulary Vote, and the right hon. Gentleman went on to say— The protest which they have made is a reasonable one, and the time may come—I hope it may come soon—when the police system of Ireland may be placed on a footing as judicious and conformable to our notions of freedom as the police systems of England and Scotland."—(3 Hansard, [256] 181–2.) Now, Sir, those words were used in 1880, and therefore since they wore uttered seven years have elapsed. And what do we find? The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham felt that the time would soon come when the police system of Ireland would be based upon a system more conformable to English ideas. Now, Sir, what has occurred in the interval? In the year 1880 the sum voted for the Irish Police was £1,134,000, and in the interval you have increased it by an amount of nearly £280,000 a-year. More than £250,000 has been added to the expenses of the Irish Police, and this in face of a decrease of nearly 200,000 in the population of Ireland. I would like to know, with the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham, when the time is to come when the Irish Constabulary will be conformable either to English ideas of freedom or to any rational man's idea of common sense? It cannot be too often repeated that the Irish Constabulary is a military force; it constitutes an evasion of the Mutiny Act; it is armed, disciplined, and officered, not as a police force, but as a military force. The consequence of the system is that both officers and men are too great swells to concern themselves with the punishment or repression of crime. They conceive that their duties belong to the far higher sphere of politics, and to that they devote themselves instead of crime. I would ask the Committee to consider what has been the history of this fright- ful growth of the Irish Constabulary. The condition of things is one absolutely and utterly without precedent in the civilized world. In 1859–60 the Irish Constabulary cost this country £700,000, and at that time the population of Ireland amounted to 6,000,000. In 1860–1 the cost was £707,000; in 1869–70 it was £911,000; in 1870–1 it was £913,000; in 1880–1 it was £1,134,000; in 1886–7 it was £1,396,000; and in 1887–8 it is £1,412,000. In order to estimate and to appreciate the full meaning of these figures, we must remember that whereas in the year 1859–60, when, it cost £700,000 to police the Irish people, you had to deal with a population of over: 6,000,000, in the present year, when you are called upon to provide £1,412,000 for the purpose, you have to deal with a population of only 4,750,000. In order to get at the full meaning of the figures, we must deduct one-fourth from the £700,000, so as to obtain the proper; proportion of cost in comparing the statistics of the two years. If we do this we find that the proportionate cost amounted to £525,000 in 1859–60, as, compared with £1,412,000 in the present year—that is to say, that, making allowance for the decrease in population, the cost of the Irish Constabulary has all but trebled in the 28 years. That is the condition of things which we are called upon to face in regard to this Vote; and what makes it all the more serious is that, in spite of the repeated criticisms which have been levelled against the system for the last seven years, and in spite of the promises of Ministers, the Vote has grown steadily year by year, and there is not the slightest prospect that it will cease to grow. If we look at the figures from another point of view, we shall find that, whereas in 1859–60 the Irish Constabulary cost 2s. 4d. per head of the population, this year it costs 7s. per head. I want to ask when this is going to stop? Before I sit down I shall show that this ruinous and atrocious waste of the public money is not due to crime, because the general criminal statistics of Ireland prove that the people of that country are less criminal than the people of England and Scotland. And this is not alone the case, for in those districts in Ireland in which there is most crime the police expenses are lighter than in districts where there is the least crime. This is a state of things which, no Government in the world except an Irish Government would tolerate. It is because they are supported by Englishmen and Scotchmen, who have not time to look into these matters, that the Government are practically irresponsible, and can indulge in corruption and waste without being called upon to account for it. Let me just compare the condition of things in England with that in Scotland under this head. In England the police are divided into three classes—namely, the Borough Police, the County Police, and the Metropolitan Police. The Borough Police cost £910,000, the County Police £1,207,000, and the Metropolitan Police £1,424,000. Here you have the great City of London, actually the largest and richest city in the whole world, with a population coming within 500,000 of the population of all Ireland, and, although Ireland has an almost purely rural population, you find that the police of Ireland, including those of the City of Dublin, cost more than the police of the City of London. It is really the most absurd thing that ever was heard of. The cost of policing the whole of England, excluding London, is £2,117,000, whilst the cost of policing Ireland, excluding Dublin, is about £1,500,000—that is to say, that the policing of Ireland, with an almost purely rural population, excluding the City of Dublin, of about £4,500,000, costs within £500,000 of the policing of England, excluding London, but including all the other great cities and towns. Of the sum of £2,117,000 the Government contribute only £840,000. In Ireland, however, the Central Authority pays the whole cost of the police. They would not dare to put the expense on the rates in Ireland, because the police are so unpopular, are so much out of sympathy with the people, and do their work so badly, that it would bring about a revolution in Ireland, and the consequence is that they have to thrust their hands into the pockets of the English taxpayer. It is well for hon. Members to fix this fact in their minds—that whilst in England the general taxpayer has only to contribute £840,000 a-year for the policing of the whole of this great country, in Ireland he pays nearly double that amount. If we examine these figures, to find what it would take to police England at the same rate as Ireland, we shall discover that whereas the English Police at present cost £2,117,000, they would, on the Irish scale, cost exactly £8,000,000. You must remember that even this is a greatly understated case, because, undoubtedly, if you had in Ireland a Government which had the moral support of the people, it would not be necessary to have much more than one-half the number of police per head of the population that you have in England, for in England fully half the population is of an urban character. Everyone who has looked into the question knows perfectly well that it costs nearly double as much to police an urban population as it does to police a rural population. Our population in Ireland is rural; and, consequently, in a normal state of things—that is to say, with a Government which was in sympathy with the people—the police in Ireland would not cost more in proportion than one-half the expense of the English Police. And yet the fact is that, whereas in England the cost of the Police Force is just over £2,000,000, if it were conducted on the same costly system as the Irish Constabulary it would cost exactly £8,000,000. I ask any Member of the Government to go through these figures, and correct me, if he is able. It is impossible to do so. The facts are so extraordinary, so unknown, and so incredible almost to the people of England, that one needs to repeat illustrations in order to carry conviction to the mind of the Committee. Let me, then, direct the attention of Members of the Committee to this fact. I have worked out the numerical proportion of the police to the population under various circumstances, and I find that in the English boroughs that come under the Boroughs Act the proportion of the police to population is 1 to 750; that in the counties of England it is one to 1,200, and in the Metropolitan district 1 to 396. I should think it would be fair to say that in a normal state of things you would require three times as many policemen to keep order in the City of London as you would in the rural districts of Ireland. In the English counties one man is required to 1,200 of the population, whilst in the Metropolitan district you need one for every 396 of the population, so that the proportion there is less than one in three. We might, therefore, anticipate that the policing of Ireland could be done at pro- portionately exactly one-third of that of the Metropolitan district. And yet in the rural districts of Ireland you have actually a force of police coming within 50 or 60 men of the number employed in London. That is to say, that you have fully three times the number of men you ought to have in Ireland. In the county of Westmeath—and I invite anyone in this Committee to examine the Returns of agrarian disorder there— there is one policeman to every 233 of the inhabitants, or nearly five times the number justified by the English proportion. In Limerick, Meath, and Tipperary there is one policeman to every 260 of the inhabitants, which is much above the proportion in the Metropolis. If you turn to these counties in the criminal statistics, you will find that they are nearly free from crime. In the City of Dublin there is one policeman to every 312 of the inhabitants, which is very considerably in excess of the proportion in the City of London. I think that these figures ought to convince every Englishman that this is a question which will not brook delay. When we ask how this waste of public money can be justified, we are always met with the same old, old story. We are told that the system must be continued until the Irish people become peaceful, and until law and order is restored. But what I want to know is when, in the opinion of the Government, will that time come? These are the very statements and arguments which you will find to have been used in this House in 1835, in 1836, and in 1839. We have continually been told that as soon as the people of Ireland become peaceable and attached to the Government of Dublin Castle, as soon as they avoided evil and did good, the Irish Police Establishment would be reduced—that it would cease to be an armed force, officered by military men, and would become an entirely civil force. And yet we find that, instead of doing anything in this direction, the Irish Government have gone from bad to worse, and that they are continuing in the old, evil course to-day at the same rate as before. What I want to know is this. By what test are you going to discover when you shall really put your hands to the work of reducing the Irish Police Force to such a compass as any practical man will be able to approve of, both, as regards cost and as regards dis- cipline, arms, and officers? Is the test to be the comparison of crime in this country with that in Ireland? If so, I am prepared to stand that test to-day with regard to any period during the last 12 years. Is not that the only test which you are justified in using? And is not the test you act upon this—that until the people consent to become loyal to Castle government in Ireland you will not decrease the Irish Police? I say that this is a monstrous test to apply. The fact is that you are saddling the taxpayers with the cost of a monstrous, corrupt, and inefficient Police Force, for the purpose of evading the Mutiny Act, and retaining in the country a large force of military men without allowing them to appear on the Estimates as a military force. If you want a Police Force which will find out criminals and do its duty, you had better do away with the Irish Constabulary at once. No Government in its senses would expect that the ordinary duties of the police would be performed as long as the present Irish Constabulary officers remain in existence. What is the business of an Irish Constabulary officer? It consists of three things—namely, dining out with the country gentlemen whenever they get an invitation, flirting with all the girls of the neighbourhood, and going out shooting with all the landowners. These gentlemen are most tremendous swells. They receive salaries of about £150 a-year, so that they are always impecunious; and I can remember the time when it was their practice to levy blackmail. I do not say that they went round collecting it; but there was not a tradesman in the neighbourhood in which they were stationed who did not make presents to them two or three times a-year. It is not difficult for the Committee to understand how 16 or 17 armed constables, in a country place where there was hardly room for one civilian constable, could persecute and torture the traders if they did not do as the police wished. I can remember the time when every tradesman sent in his annual or triennial tribute to the Constabulary officer. Of course, the Police Inspector would not even deign to thank them. He would not like to be seen speaking to them. He is a swell; he associates only with gentlemen. He condescends to eke out his small income by presents from the tradesmen; but his associates are the country gentlemen. And he does the work of the country gentlemen. He is their obedient servant whenever they have any deed of oppression to carry out. Now, I say that this is not as it ought to be. What business has any policeman going about sporting? When he is doing so he is no longer a policeman, and it is no wonder that people have no confidence in the police when they see these men going about like military officers, assuming these preposterous airs, shooting with the country gentlemen, and doing, to a great extent, everything that the country gentlemen ask them to do. I say that this system is enough to paralyze and destroy the force as a police force. You might every bit as well scatter any of the regiments now in Egypt over Ireland or England and call their officers Constabulary officers. I am not sure that they would not do their duty better than the present officers of the Irish Constabulary. They, with their wider liberality and knowledge of the world, would be better than the wretched creatures who have seen nothing but the life of a country place in Ireland. These little local magnates, who have never got out of the small circles in which they have the power to tyrannize over the people, are the greatest tyrants in Ireland, particularly when they have encouragement and instruction from Dublin Castle to sneer at the people. This alone, I say, would destroy the efficiency of the Police Force of Ireland. But I will now turn for a few moments to the question of the basis on which the Government seek to defend the present establishment of the Irish Constabulary. I do not propose to go into the question in detail, but merely to refer to it as an illustration of my own contention. If it be true, as I have shown, that you spend a sum four times greater than is justifiable upon the Irish Police, you are bound to give some reason for it. What is your reason? Is it that the Irish people are a criminal people, and that you have more difficulty in Ireland than elsewhere in arresting criminals and preventing the commission of crimes? I say that there is not a shadow of ground for any such contention. Take the last criminal statistics of Ireland, and compare them with those of England. In England, according to the latest Returns, there were 43,000 indictable offences, and only 19,000 arrests; whilst in Ireland the indictable offences numbered 6,961, and the arrests 3,961. Therefore, in Ireland the arrests amounted to 52 per cent of the offences, whereas in England they were little more than 45 per cent. In England the population is about 23,000,000 or 24,000,000, and in Ireland it is 4,750,000, or a little more. Suppose, therefore, we say that the population of England is five times that of Ireland. That being so, we find that the proportion of indictable offences to population in England is in excess of that in Ireland. The case is a great deal stronger when we look at the details of the crimes. In England there were 136 murders, and in Ireland 18; in England there were 49 attempts to murder, and in Ireland 5; in England there were 269 manslaughters, and in Ireland 199. That is the only class of offence in which Ireland is slightly above the percentage as compared with England. In England there were 150 unnatural offences, and in Ireland 19; and in England there were 290 rapes, and in Ireland 41. There is, therefore, not the slightest possibility of denying that Ireland comes off much better in these matters than England. I do not know on what ground the Irish should require more police in proportion than England, unless it is on this one ground; and I have the greatest curiosity to hear what the Government defence is, because I think the time is coming when, if they do not put forward a sufficient defence in this House, we shall compel them to defend themselves in the country. I believe there is no subject in which English audiences are so much interested as in this subject of the Irish Police. If we prove to them that you are spending an unnecessary £1,000,000 sterling a-year, not because the Irish people are criminal, but because you wish to maintain bad government in that country and to protect the Irish landlords, it will interest the English people in an extraordinary way. We shall put an English Government which attempts to defend such a system on its defence before the country, and they will have to put forward a bettor excuse than the levying of landlords' rents, or the maintenance of Castle government in Ireland, or it will, I think, go hard with them. When I turn to the particulars of this Vote, I find that there is a very considerable increase in the item of travelling expenses, and also in the item of setting up special corps of police. I think we are entitled, in default of information to the contrary, to put down these increases to the evicting expeditions in Ireland. Certaialy, unless the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary (Mr. A. J. Balfour) gives us some other satisfactory explanation, we are entitled to assume that that is how the increases are to be accounted for. Now, Sir, we have got some particulars of the expenditure occasioned by these evicting expeditions during the past year. I can remember, without referring to the figures, some of the facts; and I think it is a point on which we ought to press the Government for a statement as to whether they are or are not prepared to put some check or limit on the waste of public money in this respect. There is the well-known case of the evictions on Lord Clanricarde's estate this time last year. On that occasion four families were evicted at a cost of £3,000 to the country, and the sum recovered was £90. Of course, you will say that you must maintain the law, and must have regard to ulterior consequences. Well, what have been the ulterior consequences in that case? You spent all that money to carry out the whims and the unreasonable demands of a man who lives in this country, and who has no regard to the interests of his tenants. Well, Lord Clanricarde has never got a single shilling from that day to this out of a rental of £20,000, because, by your action, you so exasperated the people. You have paralyzed the payment of rent throughout the whole of those estates in South Galway. You may go on talking about maintaining order and enforcing the law. Do you maintain order? You maintain disorder. You disturb the country, you stop the collection of rents, and that is all you can show for the expenditure of £3,000. And yet you come down here every year with the same demands. Is it not time to inquire into the capability of Governments who do nothing but spend money, and then come down and sing parrot songs about the law being enforced, when it is shown that the very opposite is the case, and that they are promoting widespread discontent? Then there is the case of Glenbeigh—£490 was spent in evicting a lot of people there. Well, what has happened? The people of this country and the people of Ireland, out of their generosity, have subscribed £900 towards the relief of the Glenbeigh evicted tenants, and we have been supporting these tenants on charity ever since. Not one shilling of rent did you over get at Glenbeigh; and, therefore, you might just as well have thrown your money into the sea. It is quite true that you enforced the law, for you burnt down the houses and encamped your police amongst the ruins. But when you speak of enforcing the law, do you mean getting a man his rent? If so, you have certainly not done that, and the landlord of Glenbeigh is infinitely further off getting his rent now than he was before the evictions took place. That I can answer for from my own personal experience. At the same time, the people are better off because your action attracted the attention of generous men in this country, and a considerable sum of money was sent over to them. The other day, in Derry, you sent a body of police to protect an evicting party. Well, the people were evicted, but they cannot and will not pay; and, at the same time, there is not the least chance of anybody being got to occupy the land until the evicted tenants are reinstated. The point which I would ask the Committee to consider is this—that, by these proceedings, you not only waste a great deal of money and exasperate the people, but you obtain nothing whatever for your money. I will offer this challenge to the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary (Mr. A. J. Balfour). Let him produce to me a single case in which, by employing a force of police to protect an eviction party, he has succeeded in levying a rent. He can do nothing of the sort. The expenditure upon these expeditions has been a total waste. I can mention case after case in which the police, after going to a district in this way, have marched away again, leaving the district much worse than they found it, and the landlord much further off getting his rent than he was before. In Mr. Brooke's case you spent, I suppose, some £500 or £600 of the English taxpayers' money, and the result is that the landlord is much further off getting his rent than he ever was. He could have got his rents before the police went there, if he had given such a reduction as any land- lord in England would be proud and glad to give; but now he will not get them at all, for the people have been hunted from their homes, and the whole place has been turned into a desert. I have been obliged to build houses for the tenants, and to establish them elsewhere. Therefore, I say that the result of this system is simply to injure all parties, and I want to know whether it is to be continued? I would ask the Committee whether the case I am going to put does not open up a perfectly bottomless pit of expenditure in the direction of this Vote. Let any hon. Member turn to the account given by Mr. Constadine of what has been taking place in the County of Cavan. He furnishes as an instance of what has been going on, the case of a farm from which a tenant was evicted in that county. The rent of that farm was about £30 a-year, and the tenant was evicted and a caretaker put in possession. Mr. Constadine estimates that within three years the cost of looking after that farm was upwards of £1,000 to the Government, and that the landlord lost about £213 by the circumstance. If that is the way in which the police are to be employed in county Cavan, I should like to know what would be the cost if they have to multiply their efforts and apply the same sort of protection to 10,000 farms in Ireland? I would ask the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, whether he will let us know in next year's Estimate where all the money is going to, how much they intend to expend in evictions, and what will be the bum they propose to allow for the protection of caretakers on farms from which the tenants have been evicted? We need this information to guide us in obtaining some clue to the cause of the enormous increase that has taken place in this Constabulary Vote. At present, I confess I am utterly at a loss to account for the fact, although I have looked over the matter very carefully, that in the course of the last seven years the Constabulary Vote has increased by the enormous sum of £300,000 a-year. Where can all this increase have arisen? If a police system like that I have been endeavouring to describe is kept up, there are many farms in Ireland that will have to be kept up at a cost of some £300 a-year the rent of which, like that of the farm I have just spoken of, is only £30 a-year. I, for my part, will do everything I can to bring this matter before this House and the country so as to let them know exactly what is the result of the system of throwing away £1,000,000 of the public money every year, simply because the Irish landlords are not amenable to sense or reason. I have thought it necessary to take up the time of the Committee at some length on this Vote, and I would add that Her Majesty's Government may rely upon it that unless we have some assurance given to us that a real and honest effort will be made on their part to turn over a new leaf on the question of Irish police expenditure, they will have to face a long and protracted and exhaustive discussion on the question of the Irish Constabulary Vote.

THE CHIEF SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Mr. A. J. BALFOUR) (Manchester, E.)

I will endeavour to deal with some of the principal points that have been raised by the hon. Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon). The first point dwelt upon by the hon. Gentlemen was the increase that has taken place in the Constabulary Vote, and, undoubtedly, if we take a long series of years, that increase has been considerable, and deserves consideration and explanation. With regard to the comparison of the present year with the last four or five years, I do not know that we can fairly say the increase has been considerable. My right hon. Friend behind me says the expenditure is less than last year, and, as a matter of fact, the cost during the years 1882, 1883, 1884 and 1885, has really sometimes gone up and sometimes down, although I admit that on the average it has been during those years largely in excess of what was found to be necessary in Ireland in 1867, 1870, and prior to that period. Then the hon. Gentleman wont on to point out, not merely the increase of the Constabulary Vote, but its absolute magnitude as compared with the expenditure that is found necessary in England for police purposes. The hon. Gentleman has given us a long series of figures on this point, which I have had no opportunity of checking or examining; but I am not at all concerned in contesting the general accuracy of the facts and conclusions that have been laid before the Committee by the hon. Member, and which I am not prepared to deny. Indeed I doubt whether it could be denied that the cost of the Constabulary in Ireland is largely in excess of that which is incurred fur police purposes in England, nor that this has been so, as far as I know, for a long time past—not merely for the last five or six years—but even if we were to go back for the last 20 or 30 years. The hon. Gentleman has asked us how we account for this, and how we are able to justify it. Sir, we justify it by saying that great as the cost of the police force is in Ireland at the present moment it is not greater than the absolute necessities of the case require. Unhappily the case of Ireland does require that the sum of £1,300,000 should be expended on the police force by the Exchequer. This may be a matter for our regret, and undoubtedly it is a matter for regret, but our regret ought also to be for the causes which have produced such a state of things, and we ought not simply to turn our attention to the state of things that has been produced. If the hon. Gentleman asks me what are the causes which have brought about this state of things, our answer-must, of course, in the first place be, the historical circumstances that have made the Irish problem the most painful problem in the whole range of British politics, which have made the Irish Question a question which has been the despair of successive generations of politicians—[An hon. MEMBER: Tyranny, simply.]—and which I am bound to say does not appear to be near its immediate, complete, final, and satisfactory solution. But if the hon. Gentleman without going into these historical disquisitions asks me what is the cause existing at the present moment as to why so large an expenditure is required for police purposes in Ireland, I say it is a state of things with which he, more than any other man, ought to be acquainted; because he, as much as any other man, has been in certain cases responsible for the state of feeling in the public mind, which has made it absolutely necessary in order to carry on the operation of the law that a very large force of police should be employed. The hon. Gentleman has compared the police in Ireland, which is a rural country, with the number of police required in the rural parts of England, and has drawn a further comparison between the cost of the rural police of England and the Constabulary of Ireland, very much to the disadvantage of Ireland. But who is there who denies that the condition of the rural parts of Ireland is unhappily of a kind which absolutely requires a far larger proportion of police to carry out the law than is required in the rural districts of England? Who denies this and who, I ask, is responsible for it? [Mr. DILLON here made an observation which the right hon. Gentleman did not fully hear.] I do not distinctly hear what the hon. Gentleman says; but the point I was concerned to prove when the hon. Member interrupted me in a manner I failed to understand, was this—I was pointing out that the condition of the rural districts in Ireland was such that they required a larger force of police than the rural parts of England; and, of course, that arises from the state of agrarian discontent which has produced a crop of agrarian crime of a kind which is absolutely foreign and unknown to any of the rural districts of England. But, although I undoubtedly confess that the fact that there is such a condition of things in Ireland may be, and is a matter for regret, and a subject that ought to engage the attention of Parliament, still that is not a reason why we should refuse to grant that support to the authorities, and the Courts of Law which is absolutely necessary in order to enable them to carry out the law. The hon. Gentleman in going into the subject compares the amount of money expended on the police force in the carrying out of evictions with the amount of money obtained from the evicted tenants—

MR. DILLON

No money is obtained from the evicted tenants.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

Very well, then; with the amount that ought to be obtained. He has compared the amount of money that is spent on the employment of the police at these evictions with the amounts, be it little or nothing, that is obtained from the evicted tenants, and then wont onto show that these expenses ought not to be inflicted on the community at large. This argument I entirely deny; I entirely traverse the contention of the hon. Gentleman who takes the expenditure for the police under the head of evictions, as if it were a commercial speculation to be estimated by the percentage of return. The only question Her Majesty's Government can ask themselves in such, a matter is this—what is the strength of the force that is required in order to support the officers of the law, and whatever that force may be, be it small or large, it must be provided. If the force be large the responsibility rests in the first instance on those who have done their best to foment the discontent which unhappily prevails in so many of the rural districts of Ireland at the present moment. The hon. Gentleman has said— Can you deny that the Irish population, and especially the population of the rural districts, is a population singularly free from crime? If you admit this what reason can you possibly assign for keeping up these large bodies of police in Ireland, unless it be to protect the Irish landlords?

MR. DILLON

The right hon. Gentleman has not correctly stated what I said. I did not say the Irish landlords.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

The hon. Member did use the phrase "The Irish landlords" for I took it down at the time; but I have not the least desire to insist on the point if the hon. Gentleman withdraws the statement or denies that he used it. But I would ask is it not clear that debts, whether they be of rent or any other kind, must be collected if civilization is to exist? Is the hon. Gentleman disposed to respect contract or is he not? Is the question of contract proposed to be made one of the subjects in regard to which the popular mind is to be inflamed, and in regard to which the popular mind is to be opposed to the Government; is it to be one of the questions on which the hon. Gentleman proposes to go down to the country and excite a popular agitation, and supposing the hon. Member to be one who looks forward to the time when he may be one of the principal persons concerned in the government of Ireland, will he, I ask, when he is Home Secretary for Ireland, propose to enforce contracts or will he not? My belief is that whatever the hon. Member may choose to say in this House, he is far too much of a statesman to stand face to face with such a state of things without feeling that his first and paramount duty would be to enforce the law—to see that the officers of the law were protected, and to see that contracts, whether with regard to land or anything else, were carried out. That is what I believe the hon. Gentle- man opposite would feel to be his duty should he ever become responsible for the government of Ireland. At any rate, we, who are responsible for the government of Ireland, deem that to be our duty; and it is because we feel it to be our duty, and because we know that we cannot carry out that duty without cost that we think it absolutely necessary to ask the Committee to agree to the Vote before them. There is one other point on which it is necessary that I should trouble the Committee with a few words. The hon. Member has accused the officers of the Irish Constabulary of levying blackmail in various districts and villages of Ireland. A more baseless accusation was never levelled against a most honourable, useful, and efficient body of public officers. I very much regret that the hon. Gentleman should have thought it necessary to supplement his argument by making so groundless an accusation against the Irish Constabulary. Whether the hon. Gentleman approves of the existence of that force or not I think that he, as an Irishman, ought to be proud of a body of men so distinguished for their sense of public duty, and for the energy and zeal with which they carry out the commands of their superiors. The hon. Gentleman may object to those commands, and may think that the Government of this country ought not to insist upon their being executed. But that is a part of the subject into which it is unnecessary for me to enter; all I now say is, that it was absolutely unnecessary as well as unjust for the hon. Member to attack the Royal Irish Constabulary who, after all, are only acting in the discharge of their undoubted duty. I do not know that there was anything else which full from the hon. Gentleman which I need reply to. The hon. Member has raised questions with regard to various evictions; but those questions have been discussed before by the House, and the hon. Gentleman did not, as far as I could see, raise any new argumentative points with regard to those evictions. If such points should be raised by any hon. Members taking part in the discussion, I will give them such an answer as they may seem to require.

MR. T. M. HEALY (Longford, N.)

I very much regret that the noble Lord the Member for South Paddington (Lord Randolph Churchill), who is so anxious to promote economy in this House, especially in connection with the Army and Navy, has never thought of directing attention to the enormous charge of £1,500,000 sterling which is made for the maintenance of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Englishmen have good reason to be proud of their Army and Navy; they can have no reason for attacking them; nobody complains of them, and if the unfortunate soldier or sailor should get 1½d. a-day too much we do not grudge the payment; but in the case of the Royal Irish Constabulary we have a service that is absolutely useless, which nobody wants, which nobody has desired, and which exists admittedly for the purpose of propping up a system that is absolutely hateful to nine-tenths of the population of Ireland. What we complain of is, that you are keeping up this hateful system at an enormously high charge upon the Public Exchequer. If you must keep up this system in Ireland you ought to keep it up at a far cheaper rate. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary has said we are bound to pay the rents demanded by the landlords or we shall relapse into barbarism. With regard to the statement made by my hon. Friend as to the levying of blackmail, there can be no doubt that the system exists to some extent, and that it will continue to prevail as long as you have 200 or 300 persons in a village amenable to the control of a single individual who has the command of so many bayonets. I do not believe that even in Egypt, although there are Constitutional safeguards which we have not got in Ireland, there are, with the exception of the Kourbash, more petty annoyances than are inflicted on the Irish people by the Sub-Inspectors and petty officers of the police under the orders of the agents and magistrates of the country. Let me take the case of an evicted tenant which has been brought under my notice. He was arrested on the complaint of a land-grabber on some charge of assault. Well, what was done in that case? Instead of taking him at once before the nearest magistrates by whom the case could at once have been dealt with, he was kept all night in a lock-up and subjected to the greatest inconvenience for which no redress is obtainable. These are the things that are done by the police for the purpose of inflicting inconveni- ence on the people, and there is no remedy. My hon. Friend has not as he might have done complained of the course taken by the Government in appointing the police officers. How are these Sub-Inspectors appointed? It is generally supposed they are appointed by competition, and it is the fact that many of them are, and the result is that a number of English gentlemen, with a very bad knowledge of Ireland, a country of which some of them hardly knew the existence before, come over and take the command of our Constabulary; but by far the larger portion of these cadets, as was stated by Mr. Forster five or six years ago, are nominated by the Inspector General, and in this way we have the sons of landlords and of landlords agents and of other persons in the country who are for the most part opposed to the people, placed in charge of the police. The Committee should understand that we have no grievance against the police themselves, because they are drawn from the ranks of the people; but the Irish, police are under the command of these Royal Irish Constabulary officers who are appointed by nomination and a system of selection, the nominations being given exclusively to Freemasons and members of the Orange class, 30 that practically the police are obliged to carry out the commands of the enemies of the people. This completes the circuit. You have a magistrate sitting on the Bench as landlords' agent, you have the Sub-Inspector who brings complaints before him appointed because he is the son of a landlord, or of an agent; and you have no protection for the tenant, who is in no way represented in this arrangement. The landlord is a magistrate; the agent is a magistrate; and the Sub-Inspector in command of the police is the son of a magistrate or an agent, or, if not the son of one of these, he is under numberless favours to the landlord class, in consequence of the curious ideas of social distinction which prevail among these people. It seems to be a rule in our Irish country towns that by rubbing shoulders with a miserable landlord, or agent, who could not pay 5s. in the pound, but who can give the right of shooting rabbits, or of fishing on their estates, these police officers acquire some sort of distinction; and it is complained that they are for ever endeavouring to curry favour with the landlords, in order to got the privilege of shooting and fishing on their property. This is a vicious system; and the rule which is carried out in India ought to prevail in Ireland. We ought to prevent our civil servants in Ireland from accepting any emoluments or favours from the residents of the localities in which they are stationed, as is the case with our civil servants in India. This rule had to be adopted in the case of our Land Commissioners. They wore, when they were first appointed, in the habit of dining and wining with the landlords and agents, and of using the carriages of which they had the command; and the Government were obliged to step in and stop all this by making a rule which prevented the Commissioners from mixing in such a way with the landlords. The same rule ought to prevail with regard to the Sub-Inspectors of the Constabulary and the magistrates, who ought to be prevented from mixing with the landlords and their wives and daughters, and not allowed to accept the favours of the gentry resident in their several districts. As the people will not mix with them, they ought not to be allowed to mix with the enemies of the people. Let them associate with their own comrades in the police force, and, in garrison towns, with the officers of the garrison, and they will then have the sort of society they are entitled to expect; and, having that, if the Government provide them with their other requirements and necessities, they ought to be content with their position. I will just give the Committee an instance of the way in which the present system works. In County Clare, last year, a Sub-Inspector of police was out shooting with some of the local personages; and what happened? Why, he shot an unfortunate gamekeeper, or bailiff, who was killed. I suppose he was not a good shot; but, at any rate, he killed the unfortunate man. Well, when the man was killed, what happened? The person who shot him was a Sub-Inspector, and, consequently, all inquiry or inquest was avoided. No inquest, need I say, was held; and Mr. Seddon—I think that was the name of this Sub-Inspector—rode off, having killed a man, without the slightest inquiry being made into the transaction. Now, there cannot be too much for these gentlemen to do; and if there were fewer of them they would not be missed. One of the most notorious of these Irish officials is now in Egypt, where, for the last two or three years, he has been re-organizing the Egyptian Service, and no one in Ireland misses him. I do not know whether the Egyptians want him to remain there; but I am quite sure the Irish people do not miss him; and when, in addition to the sending out of certain persons to Egypt, there is found to be so large an amount of spare time for the diversions of the police officers in Ireland, in fishing, shooting, and hunting, I think the Government might seriously consider whether they cannot afford to make a reduction in the number they employ. There is another question to which I should like to call the attention of the Committee. All the police—Sub-Inspectors and men—are drilled and housed in an enormous barrack in Phœnix Park, Dublin. Here in England it is not thought necessary to house the police recruits in an enormous palace in one of the public parks; but we have got to that length in Ireland that we cannot put the awkward squads through their preliminary drill without having a sort of Royal Palace to keep them in, and a Royal Park in which they are put through their evolutions. Why cannot the Irish police be drilled, like any other body of men, in their own barracks, and in their own localities? Why are we to keep up an enormous and costly establishment in the Phœnix Park, and maintain that place as a national recruiting ground? The whole system seems to exist for the benefit of the serving maids and nursery girls. Why cannot those who want to join the Police Force join it at the different local barracks, and be drilled there? And if it is not desirable to retain them for duty in their own localities, let them be drafted off to the places where they are required. I protest against this huge job, which is being continued year after year, of keeping up in Dublin an enormous system for the drilling of these Constabulary recruits, and for maintaining a large staff of officers to superintend their drill. I protest also against the additional encroachments on the Phœnix Park by the building of married men's quarters for the police. You have gone to an enormous expense in regard to this; but I will raise the matter specifi- cally on the Park Vote when we come to it, although, as it is a branch of the subject we are now discussing, I may briefly allude to it hero. I do not suppose there were more policemen married in 1887 than in 1886 or 1885. If this be so, why has the Treasury sanctioned the erection of married men's quarters in one year more than another? I presume the marriage rate remains the same as before, and in that case why did the Government for the first time in the course of half a century find it necessary to build married men's quarters, and why also, if they deemed it necessary, did they stick the building in the Phœnix Park as an eyesore to the public, when something of a more beautiful character might have been erected? I wish, also, to raise a question with regard to the evictions that have been going on in Ireland; and it is simply this—Strong complaints have been made with regard to the system of evictions that existed at the time of the passing of the Land Act, under which the police rushed into the houses before the bailiffs and so superseded the bailiffs in their duty. This was the practice carried out at Bodyke, Coolgreaney, and Glenbeigh, where the police rushed in through the holes made by their bayonets. I hope the Chief Secretary will consider this matter. The question of carrying out evictions is a serious one. It ought to be clearly established that eviction is a civil duty, that it is the enforcement of civil rights, and, in my judgment and belief, you are only bound to protect him on whom the law casts the duty and no more. You must afford him protection according to the law; but you have no right to do more than that. You are not bound to keep soldiers and police under the charge of the sheriff when his men are engaged in burning down the houses of the evicted tenants, nor are the police bound to go in and do bailiff's duty. This, however, is what was done at the places I have named. The young members of the Force who hope to get an additional stripe and additional pay, try to make themselves agreeable to their officers, and it ought to be insisted on that the officers shall see that the men do their duty and no more, and that any excess of zeal will go unrewarded. There is another matter I desire to mention with reference to the charge for making up the criminal statistics. In this Vote I find there is an item of some £40, which includes a payment of £20 to a junior clerk for the preparation of criminal statistics. Is it the case that the preparation of criminal statistics is placed in the hands of a junior clerk? We have raised questions with regard to these criminal statistics, and seeing that it is upon the criminal statistics with which you are furnished, that the Government system of legislation in dealing with Ireland depends, you ought to have something better than a junior clerk at a salary of £20 a-year to make them out. In fact, the Chief Secretary has admitted that these statistics are unsatisfactory; and yet we find that one junior clerk in receipt of £20 a-year is entrusted with their preparation. This is a matter of national importance and demands inquiry, and I ask on what basis are the criminal statistics of Ireland to be placed in future? What is to be the now system for the classification of statistics which is to redress the balance declared by the Government to have been shaken by the old plan of preparation. The Chief Secretary has issued a most unfair and partizan like foot note to the statistics, and has raised the entire question, and I say that we are entitled to ask what is the new method which is to act in a double way, so as on the one hand to prevent exaggeration, and on the other hand to prevent anything like understatement of the agrarian crime in Ireland? This matter of criminal statistics is one which, when debates on the state of Ireland arise in this House, is made one of the means to final ends in the shape of legislation. Take the question of the Returns issued by the Government as to the alleged 5,000 cases of Boycotting. Who is responsible for that statement? The rural Irish Constabulary say that A or B is Boycotted, and no individual has an opportunity of checking that statement so as to see whether it is true or not; and if instead of 5,000 or 4,000 persons being Boycotted, the police had said there were 40,000 or 400,000, what check should we have upon them? In point of fact, we are entirely at the mercy of the police, whose interest it is to keep up the fictitious amount of crime in order to keep up a fictitious force and salaries. Therefore I say we ought to know on what plan the Government are proceeding—on what new basis the statistics furnished by the Royal Irish Constabulary is to proceed? I should like to know what is regarded as Boycotting, and whether my name figures in the list of 4,000 or 5,000 persons said to be Boycotted; and if not, why not? Am I to be considered Boycotted because the most offensive substances have been thrown at the door of my house in Dublin and my windows broken? I want to know what is Boycotting? Is it being ex-communicated, so to speak, by the local public and prevented from obtaining rations or other requisites in one's own district? I ask the Government to give us some definition of the word Boycotting, and also some statement as to the plan the Government propose to pursue in dealing with the persons charged with Boycotting. I would warn the Chief Secretary—the Under Secretary knows this well—that nothing is more common at the present time than to be Boycotted. A Boycotted man, moreover, is one of the happiest men in Ireland. When a man is Boycotted, they will not allow labourer's cottages to be erected on his land; the police will buy all their milk and butter of him. A Boycotted man in Ireland is like an uncrowned king. He is placed on what is altogether a superior level to that of the rest of the population. He has the police and the military dealing with him for everything his farm produces, and the other day I saw an account of a man who stated that he was Boycotted, and his rent was reduced 50 per cent in consequence. If the people once get at what the privileges of Boycotting really are instead of there only being 4,000 Boycotted persons there are more likely to be 400,000. There is another matter in connection with this Vote to which I will just refer. It is an item relating to what is a very useful thing, and I do not object to it; but, at the same time, I wish to know why the Government have placed under this Vote £306 as the amount of the guarantee of the expense of a telegraph to Belmullet, County Mayo. I remember when the telegraph was first laid down to Belmullet. Earl Spencer showed how communication was cut off from that part of the country until the telegraph was made; but surely the British taxpayer has a right to know why the cost of that work should be charged upon this Vote, and why it is not put under the Postal Vote to which it ought properly to be debited. But the British taxpayer will be surprised to find that John Bull is taking £306 out of his breeches pocket, and putting it into the hands of the Irish taxpayers. If the Post Office has to make a charge of £306 for a telegraph to Belmullet, why is it not charged to the Post Office Vote? There is another question which was raised in this House four or five weeks ago with regard to the practice which exists among the Irish police of carrying their side arms while attending Divine Worship. This is a matter which has caused great annoyance, and I saw that some time ago in this House the Secretary of State for War stated with regard to the English soldiers, or marines, I forget which, that those men would not be allowed to carry their bayonets when going to church, except on occasions of parade. Of course, it is quite right that when our soldiers or any of the armed servants of the Queen go to church for purposes of parade, they should carry their weapons with them. Nobody objects to that. I think I have seen soldiers carry their guns and bayonets with them on such occasions. The people do not object to that because soldiers are not supposed to go without their arms. But it is a most objectionable thing to see the police going to Mass with their bayonets. They are a civil force, and surely their batons ought to be sufficient to protect them during Divine service. It is not pretended that they are ever attacked during Divine service, or that they can possibly have any use for their bayonets on such occasions. I remember raising this question during the time the late Mr. Forster was Chief Secretary, and I think that this practice of carrying side arms by the police when they go to church is one to which a stop ought to be put. Finally, I should like to say one word with regard to the loss of life during the Belfast riots. I refer to the case of the unfortunate head-constable Gardner. The widow of that unfortunate man comes from the district I have the honour to represent, and I want to know what compensation is to be given to that poor woman for the loss she sustained by the death of her husband? I presume that all persons wounded or maimed during those riots have got compensation, and there are complaints that the police have got more compensation than the military; but I have nothing whatever to do with that. If the Constabulary get extra money, it is only what they are entitled to. What I desire to know is what is to be done in the case of head-constable Gardner's widow? That woman has not been able to obtain for the loss of her husband the compensation she would otherwise be entitled to, and I should like to hear from the Government what remuneration they propose to allow in her case? Then I desire to say a word upon the question of the Police Fund which is exciting at the present moment in Ireland the very keenest and closest attention. The Constabulary pensioners are up in arms, and they say, according to the allegations made to me, that the administration of this fund is entirely unsatisfactory. I think it is very desirable to allay a feeling of dissatisfaction amongst a body of men whom the country may require again. The Government would do well to grant an audit for a period further back than seven years. I have heard very extraordinary allegations made with regard to the disposition of this fund. The fund is in the charge of the Inspector General of Constabulary. It would not be proper for me to repeat some of the allegations giving the names of the men, but undoubtedly it has been charged that former Inspector Generals of Constabulary and other officials have received gratuities of an enormous amount out of this fund. I presume these stories are exaggerated. I do not think any Government would distribute largess of this kind, or allow gentlemen to dip their hands into this fund to the tune of thousands of pounds. There is an easy way to get out of the difficulty, and that is to extend the audit further back than seven years, say for 14 years. An audit of this kind will allay the very intense indignant feelings that exists amongst the Constabulary pensioners at the present time. I must say it is an unfortunate thing that for so many years past a fund like the Royal Irish Constabulary Fund, which is owned by the men, which has been created by fines and deductions from the men's pay, which fines deductions, if lumped together, would amount to an enormous sum of money, should have remained so long practically under the charge, I will not say of irresponsible individuals, but individuals upon whom a proper check has not been placed. I think that the analogy afforded by the case of the Patriotic Fund in England should be adopted in regard to this fund. The English Patriotic Fund is protected by Act of Parliament; it is protected by there being a committee whose accounts are audited, and which consists of gentlemen of position, and which is absolutely unassailable. I think the Irish Constabulary Fund ought to be placed on a similar unassailable basis, so that these pensioners should know that their money is not being dribbled away and wasted in an improper manner. I do not make any complaint, but the men do. Whether the complaints are ill-founded or not, an audit ought to be granted. If the complaints are well founded, and the Government will not grant the audit sought, we shall be able to draw our own inferences. No political considerations are involved in this matter, and I sincerely trust the Government will see their way to grant the audit I have mentioned.

MR. SEXTON (Belfast, W.)

The extraordinary costliness of the Irish Constabulary Force is a fact very familiar to all who are in the habit of discussing Irish Estimates in this House. It is the most hideous pecularity of English rule in Ireland that Ireland is the only country in the world where with a steady decreasing population there is a steadily increasing Constabulary Force. It does not matter a pin whether crimes increase or decrease, the money cost of the Constabulary Force in Ireland remains about the same. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland thinks he makes a good reply if he speaks about contract. He says we must maintain contract in Ireland. If you persist in maintaining contracts which are repugnant to everybody in the country, a very large force, whether civil or military, will be required. The right hon. Gentleman, replying to my hon. Friend the Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon), said—"If you were Home Secretary, you would have to maintain contract, and the police force would have to be kept up." Yes; but if my hon. Friend were Home Secretary, the contracts maintained would not be repugnant to everybody. They would be contracts that people would be able to fulfil and satisfy; and whilst the police force in Ireland is now the dearest by far in the world, under the administration of my hon. Friend (Mr. Dillon) the administration of the police would be the cheapest in the world. I notice that the hon. Gentleman the Civil Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett) went down to Huntingdon the other day and endeavoured to mislead the electoral mind by showing the great disproportion between the number of offences in Ireland and the number of convictions obtained. Now, the cause of that is perfectly clear. Why are the convictions so few in proportion to agraian offences? Because the police are not a crime-detecting force. To call them police is a misnomer. They are trained to act in battalions and to manœuvre in the field; but they are not trained, as they ought to be, and as police in other countries are, for the detection of crime. They are trained to overawe the people at public meetings and to expel them from their homes. They do this work readily, rapidly, and competently; but they are not trained—the right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary (Colonel King-Harman) will agree with me—for the detection of crime. The very moment a man enters the force he is required to submit to a perfect military discipline. Until you change the system you will never have a crime-detecting force in Ireland. The costliness of the police arises out of the fact that the people are not in sympathy with your law. Until your laws are changed, until the people spontaneously and freely uphold the law, you will always have a police force the cost and inefficiency of which will be a disgrace to your rule. Some reference has been made to the cost of affording police protection. Now, no doubt, the Estimate for this year is greatly swollen by the cost of what is called special police protection. We learned from a recent Return given by the Parliamentary Under Secretary (Colonel King-Harman), who has left the House just at the time he is really wanted, that there are 1,001 persons in Ireland receiving police protection. That I suppose keeps a good many constables employed. Now, I decline to assent, without active resistance, to the passing of any Vote for the Irish Constabulary until we are told who are the persons, and where they are, who are receiving police protection. I say the refusal to give the names of these persons is a mockery and delusion. I pressed the Parliamentary Under Secretary on this subject the other day. I asked what were the conditions of the persons who were receiving protection? He divided them into two classes, those who receive casual protection—namely, persons whose houses are visited and observed by patrols several times in every 24 hours, and those receiving complete police protection, who pass their lives in the presence of the police, who have scores of police in their houses, who are accompanied in their walks and rides by the police. What is the commonsense of withholding the names of these persons from the knowledge of the House? Their condition, if it is such as described, is notorious. It is known to every man, woman, and child of the district in which these persons live. What harm can publicity do in this House when they have publicity in their own district to the fullest and most absolute extent? Now, this is a fraud. There is no defence to the denial to give the names of these people. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for North Longford (Mr. T. M. Healy) has just pointed out that these people make money by being Boycotted and being protected by the police. I know cases where people in Ireland procure police protection for the purpose of making money, for the purpose of receiving money for the accommodation of the police, and upon the sale of provisions to the police. Many people make a larger profit by these means than they can make out of their laud. Therefore, we challenge you tonight to give us every information upon this subject of police protection. We challenge you to say who these people are, as Mr. Forster did in 1881, to enable us to sift the question, to ascertain, for ourselves how far in any particular case the Boycotting and police protection is the result of the man's own recklessness and obstinacy, and how many make a profit out of the fact that they are under police protection. Some reference has been made to the subject of evictions, and I wish to know what is the meaning of a statement made this morning in reference to eviction on the estate of The O'Grady at Herbertstown in Limerick. I see it stated that County Inspector Moriarty has sent the Sheriff word that the required force will be ready on Tuesday morning, and that it is perfectly understood that the evictions would commence on that day. The statement adds—it appears in The Daily News—that Mr. Moriarty also indicated that no more police would be supplied for duty at evictions for non-payment of rent. Well, I hope the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland (Mr. A. J. Balfour), or someone in a responsible position, will tell us what is meant by the statement that no more police will be supplied for duty at evictions for non-payment of rent. What system is hereafter to be adopted? Now, I have to ask a question concerning the constables who lately resigned their places in the police force, in consequence of the passing of the Crimes Act. I call the attention of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland particularly to the case of the resignation of the constables in the Castleisland district. These men resigned their position in the force because the Coercion Act would render their odious duties still more odious; and I wish to ask the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland how many constables have resigned in consequence of the passing of the Crimes Act; and whether it is true, as I have heard, that in the case of the constables who have resigned for a cause which I consider to be highly honourable to them, the Government have refused to give them, upon their leaving the force, the ordinary certificate of good character which constables receive on their discharge? I have heard that a constable named Maguire, quartered in Devis Street Barracks, in my own constituency, has been refused such a certificate. The cause of his resignation was similar to that of the constables in the Castleisland district, and he stated it in the most respectful language before his superior officer. The man resigned in obedience to his conscience, and I suppose no one will say he was obliged to violate it. He hated the duty he was called upon to discharge, and when he was about to emigrate to America to strive to make his way in a foreign land, he was refused a certificate of good conduct. Not only that, but the authorities refused to refund him some money he had subscribed to some fund which he would have been entitled to have refunded if he had been discharged in the ordinary manner. Now, I wish to ask for some explanation with regard to the circulation in the Irish police barracks of the abominable libels circulated by The Times under the name of" Parnellism and Crime." We asked the Government for an inquiry into these allegations; but they ran away from it. They never granted us an inquiry; they foresaw what the result would be. Since then they have proclaimed the association in Ireland to which we all belong. Every man of us is a member of the National League. There were three other grounds connected with crime on which they might have proclaimed that organization, Why did they refrain from doing so? Because they wore afraid of the falsity of the miserable accusations of The Times being demonstrated. Now, I ask the Government whether, having refused the Irish Members a Select Committee to inquire into these allegations, and having refrained from proclaiming the organization to which we all belong upon any ground connected directly or remotely with crime, they are going to allow police barracks to be flooded with this libellous literature? The other day the right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland (Colonel King-Harman), replying to a Question put in this House, said— "We cannot undertake to interfere with the literature studied by the Irish police." I cannot compliment him upon the grace with which he appears in the novel capacity of a patron of literature. It is said, Mr. Courtney, that the Irish police are allowed to read United Ireland. They are not; and I say that the shrift of the constable who was seen reading United Ireland would be very short indeed.

THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDER SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Colonel KING-HARMAN) (Kent, Isle of Thanet)

I said I have seen them reading United Ireland.

MR. SEXTON

If the right hon. and gallant Gentleman saw them reading United Ireland they were not doing so by leave. It is a very curious thing that the same post which brought the Proclamation of the Irish counties under the Coercion Act last month to the police barracks in every county in Ireland brought to every barracks in Ireland, so far as I can discover, a packet of The Times' libels under the name of" Par-nellism and Crime." They were sent in great quantities addressed to the Sergeant in charge, R.I.C., such and such station, such and such county. They bore not the ordinary postage stamp, but the impressed stamp, showing that they had been posted in large quantities. I look at this question from two points of view, and I ask, first, will the Government permit the police barracks of Ireland to be used for the dissemination of libels upon the Representatives of the Irish people here; and, secondly, will they permit police constables, who have sympathy with the people, to be insulted by the dissemination of these libels? I have received a letter from a constable enclosing a wrapper in which the pamphlets were sent, and in which the writer says— I hope you will be able to see your way to ask a question on this matter, if it is to do nothing- more than to show our English friends how careful some people are "—some patrons of literature—" to keep the Royal Irish Constabulary a non-political force. I have received another letter from a constable, who said the men of the force dare not show United Ireland, nor The Weekly Times,nor The Nation in barracks; and he added that several most objectionable publications containing the grossest libels on the Irish National Members, and on everything Irish and Catholic, were sent to every head quarter station in the county, and to almost all the out stations of the county from which he wrote. In these papers the police were lauded up to the skies, and one gave the portraits of a Cavalry policeman and an Infantry policeman. Underneath were, according to the writer, a number of most disgusting verses about the Irish Members, who were called seditious mongers, &c. One of these, he says, is hung in the day room of every police station. The police tear down placards outside police barracks by your orders, but I tell you plainly that there are police constables in Ireland with sufficient spirit to tear down inside the stations such placards as these if the order is not promptly given for their removal. I shall press to-night, and ask my hon. Friends to assist me in pressing, for an engagement that the buildings paid for by public money will not be flooded, and that the constables paid out of the taxation of the United Kingdom will not have their minds corrupted by the circulation of libels against the body of the Representatives of the people, the falsehood of which both by the omission and commission of the Government have been abundantly proved. Now I have to refer to one or two questions of finance. First of all, let me say a word or two with regard to the position of the police pensioners who left the force between December, 1872, and August, 1874. A Royal Commission sat in 1872, and reported upon the pay and pension of the Royal Irish force. They recommended an increase of both pay and pension, and that the increase of pay should come into operation from December, 1872, but that the increase of pension which was founded upon the increase of pay should not come into force until August, 1874. The men, therefore, who left the force between those dates were not allowed to receive the higher pension. As a matter of strict justice, I had desired to plead with the Government for these men. I believe Irish Members of every school of politics are of opinion that those men who received higher pay in consequence of the Report of the Commission ought to be placed on a level with the constables who left the force subsequently. I have also to refer to the extraordinary position of the Constables' Fund. The Government need not hope that they will be allowed to escape lightly in respect to this question, which is one of the very greatest moment. This Constabulary Force Fund was founded in 1836, more than 50 years ago. It was maintained for many years by a compulsory reduction from the pay of the men of the force. For many years that deduction amounted to 2½ per cent of their pay, it was then reduced to 1½ per cent. During the last 50 years that this fund has been in existence—and it has amounted to many thousands of pounds—the administration of the fund has been entrusted to one individual, the Inspector General of Police, and there has not been a correct or public account rendered until the 14th of day of June of this year. What has become of the hundreds of thousands of pounds paid into this fund? It was a fund founded ostensibly for the relief of the widows and orphans of constables and pen- sioners of the force. The pensioners claim, in the first place, that they shall have a full account rendered for the years prior to, and not only for the last seven years. The accounts presented in June give three or four general heads of receipts and general heads of outlay; the men who have subscribed to this fund for 50 years, and many of whom are yet alive, require a different account. They ask for an account showing, in the first place, the general heads of receipts for every year since the foundation of the fund; and, in the second place, with regard to the expenditure showing the particulars of each payment made, and the cause of the payment. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for North Longford (Mr. T. M. Healy) showed considerable forbearance just now in his references or allusions to this subject. Among others, County Inspector J. E. French, had, at one time, control of a considerable portion of this fund. There is a belief that French used the money of this fund for secret service; some people have been led to the conclusion that he used it for his own secret service. He purchased landed property which has since come under the control of the Bankruptcy Court, and it is also believed by many members of the force that French was allowed to draw upon this fund in order to meet the expenses of his own action against Mr. W. O'Brien and United Ireland, and actually for the defence of himself when he was indicted criminally by the Crown. We do not commit ourselves to these rumours, but I submit, as men of all parties will agree, that it is undesirable that a fund made up from the subscriptions of constables should be so privately administered, and so kept out of the view of any responsible auditor as to keep the subscribers totally in the dark as to the appropriation of the money. It is necessary the fund should be checked. I now ask the Government that they will lay on the Table of this House, with the utmost possible speed, an account showing upon the debit side the principle heads of receipts since 1836, and upon the credit side the payments made to every person and the reasons for which they were made. We shall press this matter, and continue to press it until we receive an answer, as I have no doubt we shall eventually. Now, this fund operates very unfairly as between officers and men of the force. I asked the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. A. J. Balfour) lately, whether it was not true that the officers of the force had at one time a fund for the relief of their widows and orphans. The right hon. Gentleman did not know that there was such a fund, and that the officers desired that the fund should be wound up, and that in obedience to their request it was wound up. I can well understand why the officers' fund was brought to an end, because I plainly see on examining the return presented to the House that the officers are quartered on the men. In the last seven years the force subscribed to this fund £98,000. Of this the officers subscribed £7,000 odd, and the men £90,000 odd. How much did the officers and their widows and orphans get out of the fund? The officers subscribed, as I say, £7,000 odd, in the last seven years, but they and their widows and orphans received £22,000 from the fund; that certainly is a very comfortable and lucrative fund for the officers. The men paid to the fund, as I say, £90,000 odd, but only received from it £67,000; so that the officers had taken out three times the amount they subscribed and the men had only taken out three-quarters of what they paid in. I do not wonder the officers wound up their own fund, neither do I wonder that the men, whether they be constables serving in the force, or pensioners outside, are very anxious that this fund should be wound up also. Last year the receipts amounted to £20,000. The officers paid £1,000 of this amount, and the men £13,000. [An hon. MEMBER: £19,000.] No; the rest is made up in another way. Now, the officers who paid £1,000 drew out £ 4,000, and the men who paid £13,000 drew out £9,000. This is, I think, inequitable and monstrous. If the officers want gratuities for their widows and orphans let them make a fund for that purpose, and let their widows and orphans be paid out of it, and not impoverish the widows and orphans of poorer men. Now, Sir, the pensioners are placed in a very peculiar position; they are still obliged to pay to this fund although an Act was passed in 1883 which practically brought the fund to a conclusion. I suppose the Attorney General for Ireland (Mr. Gibson) is aware of the nature of the Act passed in 1883. No man who joined the Constabulary Force after that date is permitted to subscribe to this fund—it is intended that this fund shall die out in course of time. It is now dying out in consequence of the new law; annual payments to the fund being less than the amounts drawn out. Pensioners are obliged, however, to contribute to the fund, whereas men joining the force are not allowed to do so, and yet they are entitled to receive awards. The pensioners are, therefore, obliged to go on paying for the benefit of their widows and orphans; but if a pensioner's wife dies before himself he receives no grant from the fund; if his children die before reaching the ago of 18, he receives no grant. If, instead of deductions having been made from his pay compulsorily, he had been allowed to insure his life in some Life Assurance Company, he would have been able to procure an annuity for his old age, and the comfortable allowance for his family in case of his death. I have to asked the Government, will they consent to wind up this fund? They agreed to wind up the officers' fund at the request of the officers; why should they refuse to wind up this fund at the request of the men? This fund is now represented by £130,000 worth of Government Stock. This amount has been piled up out of payments compulsorily made by these poor men, men who could not very well spare the money. I ask the Government to inquire—to send out circulars of inquiry to ascertain—from the 4,000 Constabulary pensioners and the 12,000 men now in the force, whether they desire this fund to be wound up or not; and I ask the Government to act on the plain principle of equity, and, as they have by legislation recognized the fact that this fund must cease, and as they have forbidden the men now joining to subscribe to it, I ask them to carry out their policy to a logical conclusion, and if they find the majority of the constables and police pensioners desirous that the fund should be wound up, wind it up. Whether they wind it up or not, I tell them they will never get 1d. in this House for the maintenance of the police without a fight and strong resistance so long as this principle of allowing one official to administer this fund exists. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary (Mr. A. J. Balfour) may smile; but it is a disgraceful and scandalous system, and one that holds out a premium for dishonesty and the wrongful appropriation of public money to allow any one officer in Dublin, without proper check, to administer a fund amounting to £20,000 a-year. I know how this fund has been applied; I know where a good deal of the money is gone. You say it goes to the widows and orphans of the men; but a good deal goes otherwise. I know, for instance, that in the Barbavilla case, where perjurers were suborned, the men who had charge of the case received grants of money out of this very fund. In that case, Constable Lynch swore that the M'Coans—father and son—had no opportunity of consulting together. That has been discovered to be a falsehood; it has been ascertained, in fact, that they were put together in order that the father might train the son in the lies he had to tell. Lynch swore a false oath; but because of his meritorious conduct in allowing the father and son to come together, and allowing them to manufacture their story, he was rewarded. Judge Lawson said that if the father and son had any means of coming together and concocting their story, it would be a great matter to go before the jury. Lynch, for his meritorious and efficient conduct in the case, and for procuring the conviction and sentencing to penal servitude of 11 men, against whose characters nothing had been alleged, figured for meritorious conduct, and. pocketed £15 out of the fund intended for widows and orphans. Now, Sir, we shall press this matter to the uttermost. I have, I think, now opened these questions sufficiently to enable the Government to reply. Before I sit down, however, I should like to inquire what the Government intend to do—this is the 29th of August, and the Session is nearly at an end—with regard to the maintenance of social order in Belfast? My patience in regard to this question is very nearly worn out. The Committee is aware that the Belfast riots took place in June, July, and August of last year; the Committee knows that 40 lives were lost in those disturbances, and the Committee knows that 60 houses were wrecked. Every Member of the Committee is familiar with the fact that Belfast, intermittently for three months, was given up to a carnival of riot and bloodshed; every Member is aware that it took an army of 6,000 soldiers and police to reduce that town to a condition of peace and order; everyone is aware that the cause from which these riots sprung was the stimulus given to political feeling by certain well known gentlemen. Moreover, it is a familiar fact that these were the fourth riots within 30 years in that town—there were the riots in 1857, 1864, 1872, and again last year. We have these riots proceeding from the same cause, continuing to the same extent, involving the same terrible and calamitous loss of life, and the same widespread destruction of property. I questioned the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary (Mr. A. J. Balfour) on the 24th March last—it was the occasion of the All-night Sitting, as you, Sir, may remember. The right hon. Gentleman was absent during the night, and when he returned, at 11 o'clock in the morning, I drew his attention to the subject. He replied not in detail but in substance satisfactorily, and, under the circumstances, I did not think it was fair to press him to go into details. He pleaded he was new to Office; he pleaded, also, that although four Commissioners had reported, the fifth Commissioner had not; and the right hon. Gentleman pleaded also, not only that the Government accepted broadly the recommendations of the four Commissioners, and was labouring to carry them into effect, but he hoped to proceed to practical action on the subject as soon as possible after the Report of the fifth Commissioner reached him. That Report came to hand on the 25th of March, five months ago. The Report of the four other Commissioners had been presented in January, two months earlier. What view do the Government take of their position as conservators of the peace in Belfast in view of the solemn warnings given by the four Commissioners, and in view of the fact that Belfast is a town in which formidable riots may break out at any moment? What do they think of their responsibility in dawdling along for months and months toying with human life without taking action? Is it to be understood that Belfast is to be given over for another year to its present inefficient system, and no effort made before next Session to legislate on the question? The Commissioners recommended two important improvements—they recommended improvements of an administrative character, and improvements in regard to legislation. One of these improvements was an increase in the number of the police force. What has been done to carry out that recommendation? I know there is a Bill before the House, but what is to be done with it? Is it pretended that in a case of such serious moment the mere fact of a block standing against a Bill—a block by local Members politically interested in the screening of rioters—is to prevent the Government from further attempting to make progress with the Bill? My hon. and learned Friend the Member for North Longford (Mr. T. M. Healy) referred to the case of Head Constable Gardner. This officer was shot dead in cold blood in the streets of Belfast; he left a widow and orphans penniless; but the cunning Corporation of the town of Belfast have so framed their law that the representatives of a soldier or policeman killed in the progress of a riot cannot recover any damages. A Bill was brought in to amend this law; do the Government intend to pass it? Riots may occur this winter, and soldiers and policemen may be killed, but their relatives will be unable to recover damages. If your window is broken you can recover the damage, but if your skull is fractured you cannot; that is the law in Belfast, and this is the law which the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary regards in what I may call a languid attitude of mind. Now, on the 21st of March the right hon. Gentleman promised to act immediately in this matter; but here we are at the 29th of August and nothing has been done by way of legislation, and nothing by way of administration. The law remains the same as last year; the police force remains the same; nothing has been done to increase the force; nothing has been done to improve the class of barracks; nothing has been done to establish telephonic communication. The Commissioner, Mr. Wallace M'Hardy, of whom we have so high an opinion, gave page after page of his experiences as a police officer, and made certain recommendations for the improvement of the police system of Belfast; but nothing has been done. You were ready enough to coerce the rest, of Ireland; you were ready enough to pass for districts where there was no crime to speak of, and where the peace is never broken except in the struggle for dear life and home, a code as drastic as ever was enacted for Algeria; but you do nothing for the town of Belfast, where passion runs riot, where property is constantly destroyed, and where Catholics and Nationalists are placed at the mercy of an overwhelming and hostile majority. The majority is composed of your political partizans, the rioters are your supporters; and I cannot wonder that the Government are so supine, that they are unwilling to move in the matter, when I remember that all these riots sprang from the political stimulus imparted by a Member of their own Government. I shall press again and again to-night for assurances upon two points. First, that the administration of the police force of Belfast will be immediately placed upon the basis contemplated by the Commissioners; and, secondly, that the Bill now before this House shall be passed this Session, Why should it not be passed? The Government have been dawdling away the time; they have had the Report of the Commissioners in their hands since January, and they did not bring in their Bill till June, and then, after taking a second reading, they discovered some occult cause for referring the Bill to a Select Committee; then they postponed it week after week, and now the Government, having at their disposal the whole time of the House, plead the half-past 12 o'clock Rule as a reason for not bringing on the Bill at all. The Government accept very heavy responsibility. Their responsibility may not result in any guilt; but, on the other hand, it may do so; there maybe a renewal of rioting in Belfast. If the riots are renewed and lives are lost, the blood of the victims will be on their heads. Before I sit down I want to make an inquiry concerning the riots at Portrush. I complain that the Nationalist Foresters of Belfast, some of whom are my constituents, and whom I know to be most respectable and law-abiding men, have been calumniated by Members of the Government. Every year that they have made an excursion they have been assaulted. They cannot go for a day's outing without having mobs of furious partizans lying in wait to assault them. They went to Portrush a few weeks ago; they gave notice to the police of the excursion, in order that their peace might be preserved. This proved their good faith. What happened? A mob was organized in the town of Coleraine. Everybody in that town knew from a very early hour on the Sunday morning that this mob was being organized, and intended to proceed from Coleraine to Portrush for the purpose of attacking the excursionists. They did attack the excursionists. Where were the police; what was the virtue of the notice that was sent to the police; why did not the police act upon it? They stood by, and allowed the attack to be organized, and to be carried out. They never interfered; and then, Sir, when the disturbers of order had had their way, the police arrested men who had been subjected to the attack. I have just received a telegram from Belfast to say that what is called a Loyalist witness, one of the assaulting party, has been committed for perjury. I am here to say that the Foresters, who warned the police of their excursion, in order to prevent an infraction of the peace, are anxious and desirous to have a full and exhaustive inquiry into the merits of the case; and I have to ask the Government whether they will grant an inquiry? If they are not prepared to grant an inquiry, I maintain they are not justified in using their position in this House to defame the character of as law-abiding and respectable a body of men as there is in Ireland. You are ready to prosecute the Nationalist Foresters in Ireland, but you will not prosecute Major Lydwyn, who is a Justice of the Peace in County Tipperary, and who has been engaged for the last seven years in constant litigation with his tenants. He has served on one tenant writs, summonses, processes, and legal documents of various kinds to the number of 108. I want the police to bring this man to justice. He lately trespassed on the holding of a tenant; he brought a body of emergency men with him, and tried to carry out some operation on the tenant's holding. A squabble took place, and a donkey happened to be killed. The magistrate summoned the tenant for the killing of the donkey. The tenant believed he had a right to resist the trespass, but omitted to engage counsel; he was sentenced to three months' imprisonment. When the landlord found the man in gaol, and his wife and nine children helpless at home, he came at 10 o'clock one Sunday morning, when he thought the family would be at church, bringing a body of emergency men with him, and blow up with dynamite, or some other explosive, a small bridge leading from the farm of the poor woman to the public road; and one effect of the explosion was that a stone which was dislodged struck a woman on the temple. The work, however, was not complete. Major Lydwyn returned at 9 o'clock in the evening to complete the destruction of the place by another explosion. He then wont to the house of the woman, and used such terrific threats that four neighbours came in, and remained in the house all night, or else it is likely that the woman would have gone mad with terror. What has been done to prosecute this man? He is not a Nationalist Forester; he is a Major who continues to adjudicate from day to day on the Bench at Templemore. I believe that half the time of the Bench is occupied in the hearing of disputes between this man and his tenants.

THE CHAIRMAN

I do not see how this question is relevant to the Vote before the Committee. It would be relevant to the Vote for Prosecutions.

MR. SEXTON

This Vote is for the pay of the police, and the duty of the police is to report all outrages. I have not heard that they have reported the outrage I have described. May I inquire from the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary whether the police at the adjoining station reported this outrage; and if not, why not; and if they have, what steps will be taken for the maintenance of law and order, and the removal of Major Lydwyn from the Commission of the Peace?

MR. FLYNN (Cork, N.)

We have just listened with great interest to the characteristically able speech from the hon. Gentleman the Member for West Belfast (Mr. Sexton). In the course of his speech, the hon. Gentleman referred to the resignation of constables in Kerry and other parts of Ireland. Now, I should like an expression of opinion from the Government upon this matter. I trust the Members of the Committee observed the manner in which the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. A. J. Balfour) replied to the observations of my hon. Friend the Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon). My hon. Friend pointed out that there was an increase this year in this Vote of £15,000, and that since 1881 there has actually been an increase of £260,000. The right hon. Gentleman says that is not much; but what my hon. Friend the Member for East Mayo pointed out was that the increase is continuous, that the Estimate has increased steadily since 1881, and that it has increased considerably during the past 12 months. Surely an increase of £260,000 in a Vote of this kind is a matter sufficiently serious to require the grave attention of the Committee. Now, the average cost of the Irish Constabulary is about 6s. 6d. per 1,000 inhabitants; that is about twice what it is for the same population in England. The number of constables in Ireland, excluding the Dublin district, is 2.65 per 1,000 inhabitants; including the Dublin district it is, speaking in round numbers, about 3 to every 1,000 inhabitants. In Ireland the number of constables per 1,000 inhabitants is three times greater than in Great Britain. The bare mention of this distinction is enough to excite the attention of this Committee, and to call for the gravest and closest examination of the Estimates which lead to results of this kind. The right hon. Gentleman says that the large amount required for the Irish Constabulary is not greater than the absolute necessity of the case demands. What causes the necessity of the case? what brings about this result? why is such a large Estimate necessary? Ought not this Committee to inquire into these matters just as the head of a business would? We shall make it our business to do so; we shall make it our business to acquaint the people of England with the amount of this Estimate, with the extravagant expenditure of the British taxpayer's money, with the result not of advantage to the country in which it is spent, but of the greatest possible mischief and disturbance of the cause of social order. The right hon. Gentleman seemed to take very great exception to the remarks of the hon. Gentleman the Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon) with regard to the Irish Constabulary. He said that, no matter what operations they may be engaged in, we, as Irish Representatives, ought to be proud of this body, which everyone thinks is second to none in the world in the qualities usually possessed by large bodies of men. We recognize the intelligence, the ability, and the fine physique of the Royal Irish Constabulary; but what we condemn is the spirit with which this fine body of men is imbued. We condemn the training they receive, and the uses to which they are put. Great exception was taken by the right hon. Gentleman to the remarks of the hon. Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon), and the remarks of the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for North Longford (Mr. T. M. Healy), as to the non-detection of crime by the Royal Irish Constabulary. The non-detection of crime by this force is due to the character of the force, to the systematic manner in which men are employed in semi-political and semi military duties. In fact, Sir, the Constabulary of Ireland are not a body of men employed for the preservation of the peace, the conservation of public order, and the detection of crime, as the Police Force of a country should be; but they are a quasimilitary body engaged to a very great extent in upholding a condition of things which the bulk of the population of Great Britain at the present time condemn. They are, in short, engaged in maintaining a system of land tenure, and in upholding the present system of landlordism, in upholding the system of eviction, and of harassing and annoying the people, which is admitted at the present time to be the greatest of all social questions in this country, and which is admitted to be a scandal to English rule in Ireland. They are not used as a force for the detection of crime. A most striking and significant illustration of this came under my observation not very many months ago in Kerry. Two very smart men came from England engaged upon a very ingenious system of fraud. They represented themselves as engaged in travelling for a firm which was publishing a certain directory. They collected a large amount of money from men in the City of Cork, from men engaged in business, and then they proceeded to Limerick, where they also collected a large amount of money. Two days before these men were arrested in Limerick information was given by two or three men, respectable traders, that this fraud was being perpetrated. The police would not arrest the men, and it is very probable that had it not been that two or three private traders in Limerick on their own initiative stopped the men and detained them, they would have got clean out of the country. We hoard shortly afterwards that one of the detectives in Cork who was apprised of the fact, and a constable to whom the information was given, were degraded. The detective was put back into the ordinary uniform of a constable, and the constable was reduced in his position. Why was it that the two men were allowed to go about perpetrating this fraud with impunity? It was because the constables were engaged in other work—in following, for instance, American tourists who visit the country. Every man who wears a wide a wake or resembles a Yankee in any way is suspected at once, and his footsteps are dogged by the police. It is because the members of the force are engaged in work of this kind that they do no other work, and indeed have no taste for the ordinary duties of a police constable—the detection of crime and the maintenance of public order. I think that in. addition to explaining to the people of England and to the Committee the enormous cost of this force to the British taxpayer—over £1,500,000 sterling a-year—we should also strive to show its uselessness, and the absolute mischief which it produces in Ireland, and the disturbance of social order which it creates. If any public man goes to Cork in the discharge of a public duty, and he is suspected of Nationalist tendencies—if he goes, for instance, to deliver a lecture or to address a public meeting —the constables seem to seize every opportunity of harassing him and those who may accompany him or meet to welcome him. The chief object of the police seems to be the molestation in every possible way of Nationalists, and of people who are identified with the political opinions which are possessed by the vast bulk of the population of Ireland. A very short time ago a perfectly peaceable and orderly meeting was being hold in the City of Cork, no complaint had been made by the local police as to the meeting, and yet at a moment's notice a number of constables, armed with bludgeons and swords, sallied forth and attacked the unarmed and unoffending crowd who were listening to the speeches which were being made. The people were knocked down and otherwise most brutally treated. Many people who were coming from church at the time were included in the attack made by the police. Such proceedings seem to be the conception by the average Irish constable of his duties. None of the Representatives of Ireland yield to the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary in admiration for the intelligence, the fine physique, and the many admirable qualities which are possessed as a body by the Royal Irish Constabulary. What we object to is the manner in which they are employed, the duties upon which they are engaged. We object also to the enormous amount of money which is expected to be voted in this Committee for the support of the force, while no advantage accrues to the community, inasmuch as the force is used in perpetuating an anomalous and disgraceful condition of things.

MR. M. J. KENNY (Tyrone, Mid)

the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland replying to my hon. Friend the Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon) was anxious to know who was responsible for the state of facts existing in Ireland, and which necessitate the maintenance of so large and expensive a force as the Irish Constabulary is. That opens up the whole question of the Government of Ireland, and I do not know whether it would, be useful to speculate upon this subject now, but it appears as though the Chief Secretary were prepared to maintain that the Irish Constabulary were politically and morally a particular body of men. Now, I wish to call attention to specific instances of proceedings by the Irish Constabulary to show that they are very far from being the decent and respectable men which the right hon. Gentleman imagines them to be. In the first place, I desire to call attention to the proceedings of the Constabulary at Bodyke evictions, and I do so for the purpose of directing the notice of the Committee to what I consider to be a gross and glaring scandal—namely, the way in which the police are used, not to protect the Sheriff in the discharge of his duty, but to do the Sheriff and his bailiff's work, at evictions. I was present during the whole time that the Bodyke evictions were in progress, and I saw from day to day a great body of the Royal Irish Constabulary, something like 200 men aided by a considerable force of military, form themselves into volunteer parties to break into houses and throttle and wrestle with the people, after which the emergency men came up and did their work. I and others remonstrated with the officers as to the proceedings of the Constabulary, and the reply we received was that the men who were acting in the manner I described were simply volunteers, that they were acting without the orders of their officers, and that the officers were unable to prevent them from volunteering to do this work for the Sheriff and his bailiff. Now, Sir, I refuse to believe that an officer in command of Irish Constabulary has not exactly the same power and the same authority over his men as a military officer has over his men whether in action or at review. The fact is that the officers in command of the Royal Irish Constabulary at Bodyke were perfectly competent to prevent the men doing this work—to prevent them breaking into the houses and seizing the people inside, and it is useless for the Chief Secretary or any other Member of the Irish Government to pretend that this work was not done because I saw it done. I saw constables break into houses before the Sheriff entered, and the best possible proof that the constables did break into the houses is that in every case they were assaulted and they carried away many marks of the violence inflicted upon them, while the emergency men, certainly during the last five or six days of the evictions, were not wounded or touched at all. That is most perfect proof that it was the constables who broke into the houses. I suppose they were not only in receipt of their ordinary pay, but that they received extra pay and allowances, and I believe the Sheriff was quite prepared, out of the funds at his disposal, to compensate them still further for the alleged danger they underwent by breaking into the houses. I altogether object to the Constabulary being allowed to act the part of bailiffs and emergency men at evictions. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary has asked who is responsible for these evictions? We have heard people talking of the responsibility for evictions, we have heard the responsibility placed upon the shoulders of members of the National League, but Lord Salisbury has from time to time referred to harsh and unjust evictions. I have never heard the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary or any other Member of the Government say a word in defence of Colonel O'Callaghan. It is in respect of unjust evictions, such as these which have taken place on Colonel O'Callaghan's estate at Bodyke, that we have been legislating. It was at these evictions that the Constabulary acted for the bailiffs and emergency men, they acted really as housebreakers. To my mind, and from a legal point of view, the police were nothing more or less than housebreakers. They acted in a totally illegal manner, and I am convinced the people inside the houses were morally and legally justified in resisting them just as much as they would be in resisting any other class of housebreakers. Now there is an increase of this Vote. The increase has been continuous. I am not prepared to blame this Government for the increase in the pay and pension of the Constabulary. I blame the last Government, who, in 1883, brought in a Bill to legalize an increase in the pay of the Constabulary. I believe that was a totally unjustifiable Bill. It increased the annual charge for the Constabulary, and, in face of that increase we see there is this year an increase of something like £15,000. Under what sub-head does this increase fall? It falls, oddly enough, on the charge for the transfer of men, and for car hire and extra pay. Now for what purpose, let me ask, was this extra charge of £3,500 incurred for extra pay and £4,500 for travelling expenses? It is perfectly apparent that the only real cases where extra pay is given are cases in which the Constabulary discharge eviction duties, and the only purpose for which Constabulary are sent about the country, except at times of General Elections and occasionally on the 12th of July in the North of Ireland, that is to attend the evictions. We see, that from 1886 to 1887 there has been an increase of £8,000 in these two items. Now, I mean to contest these items one after another, by moving a reduction in respect of both of them; but before I conclude my observations I want to refer to the manner in which the Constabulary are governed, especially with regard to the literature they are allowed to read. A Question was put some time ago in this House to the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland (Colonel King-Harman), with regard to the circulation amongst the Irish Constabulary—the gratuitous circulation—of the scandalous and lying pamphlets recently issued by The Times newspaper. We are in a position to assert, and we do assert, that these pamphlets were sent from Dublin to the different police stations in Ireland, and that they were circulated gratuitously among the Constabulary. But the Under Secretary (Colonel King-Harman) in replying to the Question put to him, said, that he believed the Constabulary were allowed to read what literature they liked, and he added that he had seen United Ireland in police stations. Now, I have in my hand a letter from an Irish constable, who says that in February 1886 he was reported for buying two copies of United Ireland. He admitted the charge and pleaded justification; but the County Inspector recommended his discharge from the force for the offence. The matter was submitted to the Inspector General of Constabulary, but he did not deal with the case for five or six weeks, and then, but only on the application of the constable for a reply, he said, that inasmuch as the constable had obeyed the orders of his officer to discontinue reading or buying the paper, he would take no further notice of the matter. The constable very properly adduced this influence—" I am therefore the only constable in Ireland specifically prevented from reading this paper, if the words of Colonel King-Harman are correctly reported." The fact is, that if a constable was seen reading United Ireland he would be instantly dismissed the force. So far as the system of espionage exercised over the constables, that the sergeants search the trunks of the constables under them to see if there is any of this so-called seditious literature in their possession. It is useless to pretend that the Irish constables are allowed to read any kind of literature after that. They are prevented, under pain of dismissal, from reading United Ireland. Whereas there are circulated gratuitously for their mental elevation and instruction, pamphlets printed in this country, and circulated in this country, and which the great body of the people of this country now recognize to be scandalous in their nature and totally unfounded in their facts. There are several other points to which I wish to direct attention. There is one with regard to the manner in which Questions are answered by the Chief Secretary. Questions are put in this House frequently with regard to the conduct of the Constabulary on certain occasions. The Chief Secretary or the Parliamentary Under Secretary come to the Table and say that the statements made are totally unfounded, that the police discharged their duties with impartiality, and in a proper manner, and that the accusations made are totally unjust. Well, Sir, from whom do these replies come? They come from the persons who are incriminated. The Chief Secretary or the Parliamentary Under Secretary give the sanction of their position to these replies. It is really the constables, who are charged with certain misconduct, who speak through the Chief Secretary or the Under Secretary. The public outside read the replies and believe that they come from impartial sources. They are merely ex parte statements which are made in reply to other ex parte statements, and it is absolutely impossible to attach anything like reliance to the answers of Ministers in regard to the actions of the Irish Constabulary. The Constabulary are, I believe, always ready to send up whatever answers they may think agreeable. They are always prepared to send up whatever answers may, in the first place, suit the Ministry of the day, and, in the second place, what will suit themselves. What I want to recommend is that, when charges are made against the Constabulary, there should be some authoritative body in Ireland, distinct from the Constabulary themselves, who would be able to inquire into the truth of the charges. The local Resident Magistrates would be a better authority from whom to obtain information touching the actions of the Constabulary, than the Constabulary themselves. As a rule, Resident Magistrates are in attendance when events of the kind complained of occur. Take the case of evictions. In all instances there are two Resident Magistrates present at evictions where there is anything like disturbance expected. But if any inquiries are necessary they are directed to the County Inspector or to the Sub-Inspector who were present, and these are the men who are directly responsible for the action of the police. It would, of course, be expecting too much from them to ask that they would send up reports which might have the effect of leading to criticism of the action of the police, or lead to condemnation in this House of the conduct of the police under a given set of circumstances. I venture suggest that inquiries with regard to Questions put in this House should be directed, not to the police themselves, but should be directed as a substitute for the police, though I admit they are a very defective authority, to the Resident Magistrates who preside in the district with regard to which complaint is made. Now, the question which I wish specifically to call attention to is the question of extra pay. I notice that £,000 for extra pay was set down in 1886–7, and a similar amount for 1887–8, and I wish to know from the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary if these two items cover the two General Elections of 188–5 and 1886? I assume the item for 1886–7 covers the Election of 1885, and that the item for 1887–8 covers the Election in 1886. If it is true that these items cover the General Elections in question, I may point out that the similarity in the amount is rather peculiar. The expenditure incurred dining the Election of 1885 in Ireland must naturally have been very much greater than the expenditure incurred during the Election in 1886, for the very reason that in 1885thore were, I think, more than 80 contested elections, whereas in 1886 there were only 30 contested elections. Notwitnstanding these facts, the extra pay on account of elections and disturbances is exactly the same in both years. The arithmetical similarity in regard to these items is extremely suspicious, but I think that, if I were to go through this Vote point by point, I should be able to discover a great many inconsistencies in the way in which the calculations are made, and should be able to show that the amounts put down are totally unjustifiable, and that the expense of the Constabulary Force is purposely kept up. I think I should be able to show that if the force were properly administered this Vote, instead of showing an increase, would show a substantial diminution. Three or four years ago there were something like 14,000 policemen in Ireland, but, if I am not mistaken, the number has since been decreased. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for the Bridgeton Division of Glasgow (Sir George Trevelyan), when Chief Secretary for Ireland, was repeatedly forced to admit in this House that there were more police in Ireland than there was any real necessity for. There were, as I say, something like 14,000 policemen at that time, and the way in which the men were disposed of was to send them as extra police to the different counties, and, being sent as extra police to the different counties, the counties became liable to a moiety of their charge. It was by this means that the charge on the Consolidated Fund for the Irish Constabulary Force was diminished and that the amount spent in their maintenance appeared to be less than it really was. Certainly if the Constabulary Force in Ireland were properly managed it could be worked at a very much less cost than £1,500,000 sterling annually, which is now practically expended upon it. As a protest against the increased cost of the Constabulary, which is to be attributed to the manner in which the force is used in aiding the landlords of Ireland to evict the people from their homes, I beg to move that the Vote be reduced by the sum of £3,500, which is set down as extra pay.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That item E—Extra Pay—be reduced by £3,500."—(Mr. M. J. Kenny.)

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I should like to reply to the particular point that has been raised by the hon. Gentleman (Mr. M. J. Kenny) before going into the general questions which have been raised by the hon. Gentlemen who are at the present moment absent from the House. The hon. Gentleman (Mr. M. J. Kenny) is not unnaturally puzzled by the increase of £3,500 in the item for extra pay over last year's Estimate. This increase, I may mention to the Committee, is an entirely nominal one, because there was a Supplementary Estimate of £19,800 on account of extra pay due to the recent Election. There is, therefore, rather a reduction in this item than an increase. I may mention to the hon. Gentleman that this must always be rather a matter of conjecture and forecast, and the forecast is based upon the actual expenditure of the previous year for extra duty. I have great hopes of being able, in consequence of the Acts we have passed this year, the Land Act and the Crimes Act, to reduce this amount to a lower figure than it stood at last year. I trust the actual expenditure will not be in excess of the Estimate of expenditure, and that it will not be necessary to come forward next year with a Supplementary Vote based on the exceptional transactions of the autumn and the winter. I think I have explained to the hon. Gentleman how the matter stands. I do not know whether there is any further information I am capable of giving on the subject, but, if so, I shall be very glad to afford it.

MR. M. J. KENNY

I stated that the circumstances of the two recent General Elections were totally different, and I pointed out that the expenditure for extra police duty in respect of the two Elections was the same.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I should think that the amount spent upon extra duty at election times, as compared with the other expenditure, is comparatively small.

MR. DILLON

I should like to know from the Chief Secretary if the expenses connected with the suppression of proclaimed meetings will come under this heading?

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I should think that any exceptional demand made on the police would come under the head of extra pay.

DR. TANNER (Cork Co., Mid)

As we are asked to vote an increase of £3,500 over the Estimate of last year, I think we may reasonably ask for some further explanation of the item. Having moved about very much from place to place during the course of the last financial year, I can easily understand why it is that the Estimates have been increased. The reason is that Her Majesty's Government, or at least Her Majesty's present Advisers, have certainly employed the police in a most unwarrantable and most unjustifiable manner. I like them to hear what I have got to say about it, and to understand what has occurred. I suppose the police get extra pay for what they have to endure on some occasions like those to which I will have to refer. I suppose they get extra pay for following Parliamentary Representatives about the country—for following Parlia- mentary Representatives when they, in the discharge of their duty, go to address meetings of their constituents. When Irish Members address their constituents —as happened to me during the Easter Recess—is it right that they should be followed about by police? I would ask the right hon. Gentleman whether this practice will be continued as heretofore? I am not speaking of the movements of hon. Members in connection with the Plan of Campaign. When we are engaged upon work of that kind we expect to be followed, and we do not complain of it. On the contrary, I may say for my own part that at times I have felt almost uncomfortable if I did not have the company of three or four policemen on my outside car. I am alluding to the ordinary cases in which Members have addressed their constituents. I attended a meeting early last year at a certain place, merely for the purpose of addressing my constituents. The Plan of Campaign was not in existence in any part of the district, nor was it in existence within 30 or 40 miles of the particular district I was in. When I went down there, we had the usual accompaniment— the Government notetaker, with over 100 policemen, and an extremely amiable young man, a Sub-Inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary. I observed this Sub-Inspector of Police for a considerable portion of the day, and, as far as I could see, all he did was to endeavour to make himself sick by smoking bad cigarettes. This is the way the police are mostly employed in Ireland—not in the performance of ordinary police duties, but in the carrying out of operations which are intended merely to intimidate the Representatives of the Irish people. It is for that reason that we are now called upon to pay all this money. I ask English Representatives—I do not care on what side of the House they sit—to look upon this matter in a clear and calm way, and say is the demand now made just or not. I would ask Members on both sides of the House to consider the matter; but, unfortunately, there do not happen to be any Members on the Front Opposition Bench at this moment. Notwithstanding that, I say is it right or wrong that we should be called on to pay an increased amount for these things? Just after Christmas I addressed a meeting at Millstreet, and, leaving Millstreet, I drove across the mountains to a place called Ballyborney at half-past 10 oclock at night. If hon. Members would like to know why I went I will tell them. I went there for a little cock-shooting. Well, what happened? Why, the Police Authorities sent over two car loads of police after me, and on one of these cars it happened that there were a couple of policemen whose acquaintance I subsequently made, and they complained to me very bitterly of the hardships they had had to undergo on this journey. They said that their car had been upset three times in their passage across the mountains; so that not only are foolish and unjustifiable proceedings instituted by Her Majesty's Advisers, but they actually put these unfortunate policemen in danger of their lives without any cause. I could, if the House wished it, give them instances galore—as we say in Ireland—to prove my assertion; but I do not wish to weary the House. There is no necessity for giving more cases, for I feel certain that, though the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary has little or no acquaintance with the country which we come from, still he must be aware of the fact that money is unjustifiably and unwarrantably spent on the police in Ireland. After all, Sir, however wearisome these topics may be, we must bear in mind that we are here to look into these subjects. We are here in Committee of Supply to sea that the money of the country is spent in a proper and justifiable manner—we are here to account to the taxpayers of the country for the way in which that money is spent. I should like the people of this country to understand the ins-and-outs, the byways and lanes, by which Her Majesty's present Advisers pursue this policy of intimidation and outrage in Ireland. The police in Ireland who are to be paid extra this year are, as a rule, chiefly employed in intimidating unfortunate creatures who have not the wherewithal to live, and intimidating them in order to enable a small minority to obtain their incomes. I think, Sir, that the time has come when this sort of method should no longer be pursued in any civilized country, and I think if nine-tenths of the English people could only see for themselves this system of police intimidation, it would no longer continue in Ireland. In saying this I do not wish to impugn the majority of the police force themselves. You have black sheep in every flock; but what I maintain is, not that the police themselves are to be found fault with, but that they are sot on in this organized intimidation by Her Majesty's Government, and when Her Majesty's Government have done that they turn round and ask us, forsooth, to pay an increased item for this extra work! Well, Sir, the present Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant is an able young man, and I hope that with diligence and close attention to his business he may yet come to know something about these matters. It is not beyond him; but I think that a Gentleman like him, who is capable of philosophic reasoning, if he will only take the trouble to make inquiries in order to inform his mind, may see his way to correcting many of those evils which now exist. If he will come with me I shall be very happy to show him round, and I have no doubt that the same would be done by others in other districts. If he would only avail himself of these opportunities, I have no doubt he would correct many of the errors we are called on at the present time to criticize, I trust in no extreme or undue manner.

MR. DILLON

There are two matters which I think can be conveniently discussed at this point in connection with this Vote. I have, on many occasions, brought under the attention of the Committee the fact that the police are very much occupied in Ireland, and that a great deal of money is spent unnecessarily in the way I am about to describe. First, with regard to the suppression of public meetings. A large amount of this" extra pay" which is not relevant to disturbances is for sending large bodies of police to suppress meetings. This course was taken very frequently during the early part of last winter; but as no meetings have been suppressed lately, I will not dwell at any length upon the subject at present. There is another matter which I have on previous occasions endeavoured to direct the attention of the Committee to, and which has now become an established practice in Ireland, It is not the practice in this country or in Scotland; it is, surely, objectionable, and I promise the Government that so long as it is maintained in Ireland I shall never cease to protest against it. The system is this—wherever we hold a public meeting in the open air in Ireland you always send a spy called a Government reporter to take down every word we say. Personally, I have not the smallest objection to the Government incurring expense in this way, because the extra pay of these men will be included in this sum. I have no objection to the Government filing up all the speeches I make in Ireland in the archives of Dublin Castle. Not that these reports are of any use. I asked the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Se-Secretary the other day to mention a single case of a prosecution based on these reports in which a conviction was obtained. I only remember one case of conviction, and that is not one which could be offered as an answer to my challenge, because this was the case of the conviction of the hon. Member for the Harbour Division of Dublin (Mr. T. C. Harrington) in a curiously unjust manner. My hon. Friend was punished for a speech which he had never made—for words which had been uttered by someone else and which had been put into his mouth. He was convicted and sentenced, I believe, to some months' imprisonment. During the past 10 years there have been no fewer than 1,000 meetings held, at which, I suppose, there have been no fewer than 10,000 or 15,000 speeches delivered. These speeches have been reported and have been transcribed at enormous length by police spies, and are preserved in Dublin Castle. Where they are preserved there I cannot say; but there must be some gigantic apartment set apart for the purpose in Dublin Castle. These speeches are reported and the notes transcribed necessarily at very great expense; but the experience of seven years shows that the reports so procured and transcribed have been absolutely worthless. Only one man has been convicted on the evidence of these police reporters, and in that case, as I have pointed out, the conviction was a failure of justice. The police reporters have been brought up two or three times to give evidence; but the whole thing in such cases has been a fiasco and an absurdity. As far as I myself am concerned, I have no objection in the world to have my speeches reported verbatim by police spies; but what I do object to is that this system involves a great danger, as it lays open the possibility, and in many cases more than the possibility, of serious disturb- ance at our meetings. What is the system adopted by the police in regard to these spies at our great mass meetings in Ireland? Why, a man fixes himself in the middle of the meeting as a short-hand detective. Whenever I am atone of these meetings and see one of these persons before me, I endeavour to get him one the platform. This I sometimes manage to do; but it does sometimes happen that the feeling of resentment at the presence of a person of this kind is so strong amongst the people attending the mooting that he is refused a place on the platform, even though the request may be made by myself. When that is the case, 30 or 40 policemen form a square round the shorthand writer, and I have not been easy in my mind on such occasions that bloodshed would not occur. On two or three occasions I have known the people on the point of rioting. At Bodyke, for instance, the police square was broken, policemen were upset, and the crowd trampled over many of them, and if it had not been for the efforts of the local loaders, I doubt if many of the police would not have been killed, or, at least, something very serious have happened. I remember attending a meeting last autumn at which there could not have been fewer than 10,000 people present. The meeting was held in a large field, and owing to some omission on the part of the Police Inspector, only some 20 policemen were brought down to protect the shorthand writer. The Inspector insisted upon putting his police spy in the thick of the crowd. I wanted him to allow the reporter on the platform; but he would not do that, he preferred to put the man in the middle of the crowd. Well, what was the result? A man came up—he may have had some drink for aught I know—and rode a horse right at the body of police, and before any influence could be brought to bear to check them, the police ring was broken up, and the members of the force were attacked by 10,000 men— that is to say, they were violently shoved and hustled. In a foolish moment, the officer in charge gave the order for the police to fix bayonets; the clanging and the flashing of those weapons was heard and seen by those assembled, and it served only to infuriate them the more. There can be no doubt in the world that we had not interfered, and by strenuous exertions exercised a moderating influence upon the concourse, every policeman there would have been killed. They were hemmed in; they could not get to their bayonets to use them. If a single drop of blood had been shed by them, not a man in the force would have come out alive. This is a condition of things which exists in Ireland almost every day, and I say it is monstrous to subject the people and those who wish to take part in meetings of this kind, to this continual danger of disturbance, riot, and bloodshed. And that is not all. I would like to ask the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant how much of this sum for extra pay is owing to the necessity of car hire for the purpose of transporting bodies of police to those very meetings in order to protect their police spies? Whenever we hold a meeting in Ireland, and there is not a police reporter present, the police no not find it necessary to attend in anything like force. That is very well known. There is no use for them. The system adopted by the police authorities, therefore, is an extremely costly one. I will give an instance to prove my point. Last winter I attended a meeting in a remote district of the county of Cavan, some 15 miles up in the mountains. It was a meeting of enormous size. The District Inspector of Police very probably knew that we should have a large meeting. It was in a wild mountainous place, and no police would have come near, or would have dreamt of coming near, had it not been for the police reporter. They were ordered to have a reporter there, and knowing the enormous size of the meeting they concluded that a large force of police would be necessary. A large force of police therefore attended; I do not think it could have taken less than 30 cars to transport them from Enniskillen. All those cars had to be paid for, and this expense, which could not have been less than £50 or £00, was incurred in order to procure reports which, when made, would be absolutely worthless, and would lie mouldering away, for I cannot say how long, in Dublin Castle. I should think the cost would certainly amount to some £50 or £60, because, not only was it necessary for them to hire cars, but they had to feed the police, owing to their inability to obtain provisions from the peasantry. Can hon. Members conceive anything more absurd? Well, I say again if the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary will get up and, in regard to the numerous meetings we have held in Ireland lately, point to a single case in which a conviction has been obtained through the reports of those police spies, I shall be content and will promise to say no more upon this matter. But he cannot do so. It is monstrous to continue wasting this money. It is monstrous to continue that which, to my mind, is more important than wasting money, which is bad enough in itself—that is to say, it is monstrous to allow this system of inciting to disturbance, and danger, and bloodshed, and so on. I cannot conceive anything more outrageously disastrous than this system of introducing police reporters into the midst of our meetings, and it must be obvious to hon. Members why I say this. A single blow struck, it may be by a drunken man, under the provocation of the presence of one of those spies, might raise a row which, by no human possibility, could be prevented from resulting in disturbance and bloodshed. It is an outrage upon decency and common sense to allow those things to take place without the possibility of obtaining any real public object, because, as I have pointed out, although something like 1,000 meetings must have been held during the last few years in Ireland, and although thousands of speeches must have been reported, not a single conviction has resulted from all this employment of shorthand writing spies.

MR. COX (Clare, E.)

I should like to ask the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant if it is under this head that the Irish Government pay the police, and others in Ireland, for the purpose of suborning perjury, and the manufacture of in formers—

THE CHAIRMAN

The hon. Gentleman must be aware that his question is not couched in the manner in which it ought to be put.

MR. COX

I am referring to this item for extra pay.

THE CHAIRMAN

I do not speak of the subject the hon. Member refers to, but to the manner in which he puts his question.

MR. COX

Then I will not put it in that way; but I will let the Committee determine for themselves in what way it should be put. I desire to bring under the notice of the Committee the question of how some of the money granted under this Vote is spent in Ireland. There is one case in which I am particularly interested. There is a police functionary in Clare named Head Constable Maurice O'Halloran—a name which is frequently brought up in this House. I wish to ask if it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government to continue this man in the nefarious work he has been engaged on for some time, and to pay him large sums of money for what, I contend, is suborning perjury? I wish to ask the right hon. Gentleman out of what fund that money comes? I hold a letter in my hand, written by this man, Maurice O'Halloran, to a man named Patrick Loughrey, living near Crusheen. The letter is dated 26th November, 1886—that is, November last. In this letter he says— Dear Patrick,—I cannot find the exact time the train do arrive at Portarlington; but come to Limerick Junction on Wednesday, 1st December, 1886, by mid-day mail train. I will meet you there, and arrange where we will go to from there. I will start before you. When you come into town on Sunday post the enclosed envelope to me, and what you will do as to how you will travel. If that day would put you about, you might name Friday, 3rd December, with hour of meeting, at Limerick Junction, at Tipperary Fearing a disappointment, I take this precaution. I herewith enclose £10 to you. " Yours sincerely, JOSEPH COX. P.S.—Mind, keep this money close to you; no foolishness; and be sure to write me the letter naming the date and hour you will meet me at Limerick Junction. —J.C. You sign your letter 'S. Neylon.' I would ask the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland if he approves of his minions and subordinates in Ireland writing such letters as that in the name of Members of this House? This is the name of the man to whom the letter is written—Patrick Loughrey, Throckreddan, Crusheen. I asked the right hon. Gentleman what was to be done with the £10 enclosed in this letter, and he replied that if I handed it to him across the floor of the House he would take charge of it. I did not do that; but I think I put it to a very good purpose. I placed it to the fund for the relief of the tenants evicted at Bodyke. I should like to have an answer from the right hon. Gentleman on this point. What I want to know is whether this man is still continued to be employed at Ennis, and if it is the intention of the Government to continue to keep him in a district where he has been a cause, I might say, of a great deal of the crime which has been committed in County Clare? The district of Feakle was one of the most orderly and peaceful districts in Ireland until this ruffian in uniform went into it. It soon ceased to be quiet and orderly under his auspices. It was owing to the representations of the priests and others that he was removed from Feakle, and with his removal ceased all crime and outrage there. Whilst he was there the district was a scene of continual moonlighting and outrage; but, as I say, the parish priest, and a number of others, seeing that he was leading the young men astray, by pretending that he was the only real genuine patriot amongst them — another Corrigan, or rather, another Talbot, who would help them to redress their wrongs—used their influence and got him removed, and with his removal the outrages ceased. Whether he was a patriot or not, the fact remains that during the time he was stationed at Feakle it was one of the most turbulent districts in County Clare, and that when he left it became once more a quiet and peaceable place. Since he left there has not been a single outrage committed there. He is now in Ennis carrying out his atrocious programme. I would ask the right hon. Gentleman whether his functions are not those of a Head Constable, and, whether he should not be confined to those functions, instead of prowling about over the Counties of Clare, Limerick, and part of Tipperary, or for what purpose he makes those journies, if it is not with the object of suborning perjury and inciting to outrage? I would ask whether it is a part of his functions to go round the country endeavouring to manufacture informers? I will not trespass further on the time of the Committee; but I hope we shall be able to get some information from the right Son. Gentleman as to the employment of such characters as this by the Dublin Castle Authorities.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I believe the observations of the hon. Gentleman who has just addressed the Committee with regard to Head Constable O'Halloran are not strictly in Order, as no doubt the money which would pay the expenses of this man does not come out of this Vote, and does not appear on the Estimates. The hon. Member asks me what O'Halloran is doing at this moment, but I have no information to give him upon that point. I believe this constable is a very useful public servant, and if the hon. Member will put a Question to me on the Paper, I shall be glad to tell him where Constable O'Halloran is now stationed. The hon. Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon) has raised a question of some importance—that is to say, he has raised the question of the attendance of Government reporters at meetings in. Ireland. In reply to the hon. Member, I have to say that the reason the Government send reporters to public meetings is because they believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that speeches are made at those meetings which very often are not of a purely political character, and are calculated to promote great disorder. Under these circumstances the Government hold that the best thing they can do is to make themselves acquainted, through some authentic channel, as to what really takes place, and as to what is really said. It is for that purpose, and for that purpose alone, that the Government send reporters to those meetings. The hon. Member asked me, I think, whether there has been any conviction resulting from those reports during the last rive or six years. I confess I am not sufficiently acquainted with the past proceedings upon this point to be able to give a specific reply. I may say, however, I do not think it possible for the Government to alter their policy in the matter so long as they have reason to believe that speeches may be made as they have been made in the past, which may lead, however little the speakers themselves may desire it, to riot and disturbance. The question is one of principle as to whether the Government should or should not take the precaution of ascertaining themselves what takes place at these meetings, which they have reason to believe, unfortunately, are not always of a political nature.

MR. EDWARD HARRINGTON (Kerry, W.)

There may be something plausible in what the Chief Secretary says, but from our point of view—and we go to the root of the question—we believe that this extra pay which is taken for the police under this Vote, is the result of perfectly unnecessary proceedings. We believe it to be the result of proceedings which are an utter sham. Everyone, even those who may not be expert stenographers themselves, who attends these meetings in Ireland, and see how the speeches are taken down—who sees one of those reporting constables come up armed with about two dozen pencils all sticking ostentatiously out of the pocket of his tweed coat, and sees him subsequently drawing all sorts of absurd characters, angles of figures all utterly devoid of meaning and incapable of transcription, must appreciate what an utter absurdity the whole thing is. I have heard someone who has seen one of these persons say that by the time he had taken down the name of the speaker, the speaker had finished half his speech, and I scarcely think that that is correct. There is an unfortunate British taxpayer who has to pay the cost of all this, and an unfortunate Irish taxpayer too, who has to share the burden. I think it is time that these taxpayers should understand that they are paying unnecessary for a lot of these ridiculous proceedings in Ireland, and when they do understand this, I believe they will begin to raise objections to this course of proceedings. Now there is no Vote which can be devised in any civilized country which is so prolific of discussions, and what is so likely to lead to discussion as this Police Vote for Ireland. There are a sufficient number of points arising under this head of "extra pay" to afford almost inexhaustible discussion. A Vote for "extra pay" for the Irish police force is a sort of artesian well of Irish grievances down which you can bore thousands of feet. You will always come up with fresh cases. If the hon. Gentleman the Member for the Camborne Division of Cornwall (Mr. Conybeare) were here, he would be able to enlighten the Committee very considerably upon this matter. I went down a few months ago to attend a meeting of my constituents in West Kerry, in the town of Dingle. During the whole of the present agitation there has probably been no place and no district in Ireland so free from any agrarian disturbance as this district of Dingle. There is in this district a respectable parish priest named Canon O'Sullivan, a gentleman who, from his mental attributes and his high personal qualities, has been able to command the good feeling and to influence the conduct of the people around him. He stands very well with the local gentry, and has discussed many a haunch of mountain mutton with them at the festive board. This gentleman has managed all along to maintain peace and order in the locality. Well, such was my opinion of the position in which this rev. gentleman stood in the regard of the Government and of their police officials, that I thought it would be enough for them to know that he was to preside at our meetings to make them feel sure that nothing in opposition to their views would take place. I believed, as did many others, that knowing that this gentleman was to preside, they would not think it necessary to send a police force to the meeting at all. However, whether the Government took this view or not, they at any rate thought it necessary to send a reporter. My practice has always been for reasons of convenience and in the interests of the safety of these Government reporters — though the proceeding has been somewhat repugnant to my own feelings—to put them upon the platform where even I could do so. If you do not take the police reporter who is attending your mooting on the platform, he posts himself some 15 or 20 feet from the platform with a series of concentric circles of Constabulary around him, and while you are speaking from the platform and looking to the people before you for applause, you see staring you in the face a cluster of spiked helmets, which is anything but a pleasant prospect. Well, on the occasion to which I refer, there happened to be at the back of the crowd a young man looking out of an open window whilst my hon. Friend the Member for the Camborne Division of Cornwall was speaking. The spectacle of an English Member making points against the Government was an unusual one, and this young man who was looking out of the window, struck by the novelty of the thing, and no doubt delighted at the new departure, in the exuberance of his feelings cried out now and then when a new point was made, "Take that down, Stringer !" There is nothing seemingly very offensive in this phrase. Stringer is a very ordinary name, but it was considered offensive as describing the fraternity of police re- porters, as Stringer was the name of the gentleman who was the forerunner of this class. Well, that young man for merely using that expression in the enthusiasm into which he was led by the hon. Member for the Camborne Division, was prosecuted before a Court composed exclusively of local landlord and land agent magistrates, and he was sentenced to and suffered two months imprisonment for using that expression. I do not call in question the amount of punishment because it is now too late, it has been suffered, and the whole thing is passed and done with. We cannot undo that, but I pledge my word that while I have during the past five or six years attended and spoken at innumerable meetings in Ireland, I never in my life saw a more peaceable, a more unanimous, and of course a more enthusiastic meeting than was the one to which I am referring. There was not the slightest danger in the world of any disturbance occurring. There was no danger of this police reporter being in any way assaulted, but as we were told by the hon. Member for West Belfast this evening, the imagination of the police is extremely lively. The police in the case I refer to, swore that both before and after this expression was used by this young man, there was a swaying of the crowd from one side to the other, and that they interpreted into an attack on the reporter or an attempt to hustle the police. But everyone who is accustomed to meetings of this kind in Ireland knows that this swaying to and fro constantly occurs, and is simply owing to a large concourse of people being packed together so closely. Your open air meetings in England are merely small knots of people collected together compared with the masses which congregate around the platforms in Ireland. Everybody knows that this packed mass in their enthusiasm have a tendency to sway slightly backwards and forwards, and there may have been a time in which in connection with the crowd of which I have been speaking, it may have appeared to an unpractised eye that a disturbance was beginning. The constables swore that there was a swaying and surging movement on the part of the crowd, and that the police had to put their backs against the people. Well, the police are paid for putting their backs against the people, and so long as they were not assaulted and were in no way interfered with they could not have been put in any fear for their lives. Their barracks was only 14 yards away from them. I think it is a most odious thing that people should have imprisonment inflicted upon them for such a ridiculously slight offence, if offence it really was. I heard a friend of mine making a calculation with regard to the ordinary pay and the percentage of costliness in these matters between this country and Ireland in proportion to the population; but it is not the percentage of the costliness of the police in Ireland, as compared with England that we complain of. It is bad enough that we should have to make these large payments compared with the small return we get for it.

THE CHAIRMAN

I must remind the hon. Member that the question before the Committee is the question of the extra pay of the police.

MR. EDWARD HARRINGTON

Sir, I was just crossing the boundary into the subject at the very moment you interrupted me. What I wanted to refer to was that we object to this extra pay, not so much on the ground that the Irish police receive more in proportion to the English police, but that they get extra pay for such duty as eviction duty and so forth. A constable gets 2s. 6d. a-day extra for eviction duty, and for attending meetings such as I have described. A constable has very little to do during the week in Ireland. According to a description I once heard given of him by an English gentleman, all that a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary seems to have to do is to get his coat smudged with whitewash inside the barracks, and to come outside to brush it off. The Government reporter is paid for taking down any speech which I might happen to make to my constituents. Surely the Government cannot think very much of that, it can do them no good, and while it is true it does me no harm. I cannot forget that the public have to pay for it, and to pay heavily for the transcriptions of whole reams of paper. The Irish police reporter has a most beautiful method of his own. If there is any hon. Member here interested in the advancement of the reportorial profession I think it would be well that he should closely observe the style of the Irish police reporter. He has a most beautiful way of transcribing his notes. He takes the notes of a public meeting on Sunday, and he transcribes his special shorthand notes on Monday morning by cutting out the report which appears in the local journals, and then he swears to the truth of his own notes in the shape of his scissors and paste work. The Committee must not think that the Irish police reporter is going to stick at a trifle, when it is a question of swearing to his notes. Why, he will swear even to the very cough or sneeze of the speaker, and whether the speaker is reported or misreported in the public papers the constables' is there just the same. There has been cases of reports of speeches sworn to in Court, although it has been shown by the shorthand notes and reports of newspaper reporters that the transcript sworn to has consisted of a series of broken sentences linked together by the ingenuity of the police reporter himself. Speeches summarized and made up in this way have been sworn to as accurate reports of speeches. That is the value the British taxpayer gets for his money. I wish we could have some representatives of the British taxpayer appointed for the purpose of going through Ireland in order to see how ridiculously this money is spent in extra pay for the police. There is another point to which I should like to draw attention—that is to say, the charge of extra pay for medical attendance upon the police. I do not know whether the charge for medical attend-comes under this Vote; but if it does I should like to say a word upon it. There is an allowance for medical officers while the police are away on special eviction duty, say for instance at the Glenbeigh evictions. The doctor gets 10s. for examining every man, 10s. per man for examining 250 policemen once a week, who have nothing serious the matter with them once in half a generation. Although the men are as strong and as healthy as it is possible for them to be, the doctor receives 10s. every Saturday for examining them medically. Why it is assumed that the constitutions of these men are likely to suffer, I fail to see, because all they have to do when on this extra eviction duty is to stand around while the crowbar is being used. That seemingly is considered a very laborious and re- ducing operation, seeing that the medical officer examines each man once a week to see whether his health is suffering. Then there is another matter. The sergeants get proportionately increased pay when they are out on this eviction, duty, although their duties on such occasions are much, lighter than they are when in barracks. Besides, it is a Godsend to these people, and also to the District Inspectors to be sent upon those expeditions, because they get this extra pay; and, not only that, but they get extra dinners besides sometimes. I remember once a Dissenting clergyman speaking upon a platform in Ireland, and accusing a District Inspector of police, who was there for the purpose of reporting his speech, of being a party to the taking of two heifers from somebody's land in connection with some claim in regard to rent. But if I went into the question of the perquisites of the Constabulary I should probably be out of Order; if it were not so, I could confirm the view put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon). As there are matters to which I wish more particularly to address myself later on, I will not occupy the time of the Committee any further than to say that if Her Majesty's Government will even now at the eleventh hour will—during the Recess, in place of proposing the heroic scheme which they are about to burst upon the people of Ireland—take into consideration and allow themselves to be influenced by the advice of those who know Ireland, and are as disinterested in offering that advice as they are in the Government of Ireland, there would be a probability of shaping the form of Government which is to subsist in Ireland somewhat in accordance with the wishes and desires of the Irish people; and there would be very little need for the discussion, not only of the extra pay for the police, but for any abnormal pay for the Constabulary in Ireland.

MR.CHANCE (Kilkenny, S.)

I trust that the right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland will give me his attention for a moment. I do not think that there is any very great grievance in the speeches delivered by hon. Members in Ireland being reported by the police, or by anyone else. I do not think, however, that any reporter, whether police reporter or any other reporter, has a right to thrust to the front place in a crowd, and to get policemen to stand round him, in order to protect him, as this proceeding is calculated, more than anything else, to irritate the people, and to provoke a disturbance. I imagine that a reporter should be no more than anyone else in a crowd, and should be content to take what place he can get in it, without bringing down 20 or 30 constables to support him, and to make what one might almost call a hostile demonstration. I presume the object of the Government in sending these men to our meetings is to got correct reports — at any rats, that ought to be their object, for, if they are satisfied that they cannot get correct reports, they should not send these men to our meetings. It is impossible for these reporters to give correct reports. A man attends one of these meetings, it may be on a cold October or November day; he takes up his place in the crowd, note-book in hand, and has to report proceedings which last from two to three hours. I need not say that it is absolutely impossible for any reporter, even if he is comfortably seated, to report with accuracy for three hours consecutively. Probably not more than three or four reporters in the United Kingdom could do it. I see the right hon. and gallant Gentleman looking up at the Reporters' Gallery, but I think the reporters would confirm the view that although such men as Mr. Pitman might be capable of doing this, very few shorthand writers would be able to stand the physical strain. I believe the reporters in the Gallery come into the boxes every 15 or 20 minutes when they wish to take verbatim reports. Of course they come in less frequently when they have merely to write summaries. As I say, it is impossible for a reporter on a November or an October day to take reports of speeches for two or three hours together without the slightest rest, but that is what these police reporters profess to do. I claim that if reporters are sent to these meetings in this way they cannot be expected to furnish full reports, and, that being so, it is merely extending to those men the greatest temptation to furnish something which purports to be a report, but which is in reality nothing but a vamped-up account of what they have heard. These men know that full reports are expected of them; they know they will be punished, directly, or indirectly, if they do not furnish something which has the appearance of a full report; and the result is that they get the newspapers the next day, and with the aid of cuttings therefrom, and their own scrappy notes, they prepare something which is sent down to Dublin Castle, and is there kept in the archives, to be acted upon, if necessary, by the Irish Executive. We had an example of that sort of thing in the case of the four Members of the Irish Parliamentary Party who were prosecuted for conspiracy. We had a number of these police reporters as witnesses. Their notes were produced. One man in particular, Sergeant Christopherson, produced his notes, and read a transcript of them to the Court. The Court ruled in some extraordinary plea that the defendants were not entitled to compel him to read from his notes, so that he read from the transcript. He swore that he had taken down every word of the speeches in his notes, and that he had transcribed from his notes everything that had appeared in his transcipt. Unfortunately, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for North Longford (Mr. T. M. Healy) was one of the examining Counsel, and he and my hon. Friend the Member for the Harbour Division of Dublin (Mr. T. C. Harrington) are both expert shorthand writers. They called for the witnesses notes, and when they were produced, the first thing my hon. Friend discovered in them was a hiatus where there was no hiatus in the transcript that the witness had read. The witness was cross-examined that he had supplied the hiatus himself, and that he had road no newspaper report whatever until he had road his own notes, and prepared his transcript and sent them to the Police Authorities. Well, we got the shorthand notes of one of the newspaper reporters who had attended the meeting in question, and what happened? Why it turned out that this man had dropped a sentence, and he had taken from The Freeman's Journal a sentence to supply the place of that which he had dropped. It was my duty to instruct Counsel to apply for a summons against this man for perjury; but, as is the general rule under such circumstances the application was refused. This man stood guilty as clearly as any man ever did in this world of perjury, In Green Street lie went back upon his original story, and he admitted that he had The Freeman's Journal report, and said that in writing his transcript he might have written it partly from recollection of the speech, and partly from his notes, and that his mind might have been affected by reading The Freeman's Journal report—a circumstance, mind you, which he denied before. As I have already said, I do not object to the presence of reporters at meetings so long as their presence does not irritate the people, and stir them up to creating a disturbance. I complain that, as a rule, they take up the most aggressive position. I do complain, however, most seriously of the character of the reports that are produced. I complain of one man being expected to take the notes of speeches for two or three hours consecutively on a cold afternoon, and to such notes being used for the purposes of prosecution. And I do most seriously complain of those men being permitted to read newspaper reports and to vamp up transcripts from these reports and their own scrappy notes. I ask for a pledge from the Government that those police reporters shall be forbidden to read newspaper reports of the meetings they have attended—I ask that they shall be forbidden to read newspapers until they have written their own reports to the police officer. The next thing I ask is that the Government will not almost force a man, I will not say to commit perjury, because they may not be sworn as to the reports they make, but I will say compel them to be guilty of deceit in saying that they have prepared an accurate report when by putting them in a crowd for two or three hours on a winter's day and requiring them to take shorthand notes for that time, you have placed him in a position in which it has been physically impossible for him to take an accurate note. I ask for an assurance on these two points, and if the Government cannot give me one or both I would press them for an assurance that they will not permit their police reporters to read newspaper reports of meetings they have attended before sending in their own transcript; and I trust that upon that point I shall receive some assurance. Notice taken, that 40 Members were not present; Committee counted, and 40 Members being found present,

MR. M. HARRIS (Galway, E.)

This item for extra pay seems to me a very indefinite one by the word "etc.," after it, at the end, which may mean anything. I believe there is not a force in the world so thoroughly demoralized as the Royal Irish Constabulary owing very much to the large amount of extra expenses which they get in various ways. The men are so highly paid and have so little to do that they become almost helpless from over-feeding. You cannot get them to go half-a-dozen miles without a jaunting car; and very many of them in order to keep themselves in health devote themselves to the amusements of fishing and shooting. They receive extra expenses for looking after elections in Ireland, though why, I do not know, because near almost every polling booth there is a police barrack. In the Division in which I live, especially in the town, we have the headquarters of Constabulary, both horse and foot, and within a circle of six miles there are 11 police barracks. Well, you would think that those men ought to be able to look after elections without requiring any extra expenses for performing that duty. They ought to be able to do so in my Division, even though there were no more police than those I allude to. As regards disturbances, I believe that they are mainly owing to the action of Government officials themselves, because if, instead of sending policemen to those meetings to make reports those officials would send some of Gurney's men, no objection would be taken to them by the people, and respectable reports would be supplied. In some cases the Government have done this, and the result has been that there has been no question of the man's rights to attend on the platform. When you bring a policeman to report those meetings, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon) has said, there is always great danger of a disturbance occurring, because the presence of those men is always a great source of annoyance and irritation to the people. On one occasion I went to Portumna for the purpose of attending a meeting in my Division. When I went there I could not get accommodation, or the only accommodation I could get was in a house which was entirely opposed to anything like agitation. That was owing to the fact that the police had come in force. On another occasion in Connemara I was present when a disturbance did take place. The meeting was in a very remote district of Connemara, near Clifton. It was a case of eviction. There was only one man to be evicted, who was a farmer, but the people collected round him, and very foolishly imagined that they would be able to resist the police; but, fortunately, Father Rattigan came on the scene, and with his efforts, together with such aid as I could myself afford, a disturbance was prevented. Most of the people were women and children, and on the other side were 100 of the Royal Irish Constabulary all armed to the teeth. I went to the people and endeavoured to pro-vent them from flinging stones at the police; but the only result was that one of the policemen ran after me with his bayonet fixed, and I was nearly losing my life in consequence of my efforts to quell the disturbance. On another occasion at a public meeting at New Bridge on a fair day, when there was plenty of drinking going on, the Constabulary who were present indulged freely, and when I got up to speak they were all drunk, the Stipendiary Magistrate being more drunk than anyone else. I called attention to this man's conduct some time afterwards, and he was suspended and dismissed altogether for his behaviour on that day. The police behaved in a most riotous and violent manner. They arrested me on the platform and brought me into Portumna, and it was only by the greatest efforts on my part that I prevented a collision between the police and the people. Now, as a matter of fact, the people who attend those meetings are far more anxious to preserve the peace than either the police or the authorities who send them are. For my part, I shall vote against every shilling given by this House for the support of the police in Ireland. "We can do with one-tenth of the present force of Constabulary, if the views of the Irish Members were regarded. If the suggestions of hon. Members who sit on these Benches were regarded by the Government we could do without this force; but as things are we have a policeman at the corner of every street, at every cross road, and two or three in every village. There is no more peace-loving man in the world than I am, but I must protest against this extra charge for the police. I trust that this Amendment will be carried to a Division.

MR. CHANCE (Kilkenny, S.)

Some of these police reporters vamp up speeches from their own notes, which are very inaccurate, and from the reports which appear in local newspapers, and sometimes they supply what purports to be a report, but which in reality has never been uttered by anybody. If the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, who is now in his place, will inquire into the case of Sergeant Christopherson he will find that he deliberately committed perjury in giving evidence against my hon. Friend the Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon). What is wanted is, first, that a general instruction should be given to the men not to road a newspaper report before transcribing their notes; and, secondly, that where the notes are taken for the purposes of a prosecution a single reporter should not be sent down. Just remember what he has to do. Possibly in very cold weather he would have to stand in the centre of a crowd with a note book in his hand for throe or four hours at a stretch. He cannot be expected to take a full and accurate note under such circumstances; at least two or three reporters should be sent down, so that they might adopt the usual course of shifts; you would thereby secure reports a little more reliable. I trust that the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland will assent to this being done.

THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDER SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Colonel KING-HARMAN) (Kent, Isle of Thanet)

The hon. Member has complained that he cannot get answers from Ministers; but this is the first opportunity I have had of speaking on this subject. He asks the Government that the reporters should not be allowed to read the newspapers until their shorthand reports are transcribed. Now, I think that most certainly the reporter ought not to do so, and a report made under such circumstances ought not to be accepted. I have no doubt whatever, if instructions have not in the past been given to that effect, they will now be given, and I should imagine that any man who was found refreshing his memory in such a manner would not be employed on like work again.

MR. CHANGE

You cannot find them out.

COLONEL KING-HARMAN

And, as far as I understood the case referred to, on the man being made to read his notes they showed a remarkable difference from the newspaper report; and, fortunately for the gentleman then on his trial, his counsel—being men of great ability—detected this at once, and made the most of it. As regards sending down two or three reporters, the hon. Gentleman spoke about one man not being able to go on two or three hours. But he must be perfectly well aware that if a meeting does last three or four hours only one or two of the speeches require to be reported verbatim—a man sent down is not expected to take every word that Is uttered. I can assure the House that every care is taken by the Government to ensure that the reporter sent down shall act in a most satisfactory and straightforward manner, and shall act fairly towards every person.

MR. CHANCE

I think the right hon. and gallant Gentleman is under a complete misapprehension as to what occurred at the trial referred to. I am referring to the evidence given by Sergeant Christopherson. I myself got the original notes and the newspaper report, and on going through the speech of the hon. Member for North-East Cork (Mr. W. O'Brien) with the sergeant I found that there was hardly a single sentence accurate. He had left out two or three sentences at a time, and I preserved as a curiosity the front page of the Government print of the transcript with my corrections and interpolations marked on it. A more difficult draft for anyone to decipher could hardly be imagined. On the second point raised by the right hon. and gallant Gentleman, the sergeant, who was the only police reporter called, admitted that he had used the newspaper reports in order to refresh his memory, and I certainly am accurate in stating that the great majority of the police reporters who were examined in Green Street in the proceedings which led to the abortive trial admitted that they read the newspaper reports long before they made their transcripts. It is their invariable practice, and they are almost bound to do so. It is impossible for any shorthand reporter, with, perhaps, an exception in favour of two or three in the United Kingdom, to stand in the middle of a crowd surrounded by police holding a note book in his hand, to report with any attempt at accuracy, or any attempt at sensible condensation, for a space of two or three hours. Any shorthand reporter knows that it is an absolute impossibility; yet these men are sent down there and charged to bring back an accurate report; they must get mixed in taking notes for two or three hours under such circumstances, and in their struggle to read their notes they are bound to have recourse to the newspaper reports. It is undesirable, in the first place, to send a single man down to take notes for two or three hours at a stretch, and, in the second place, to allow him to read the newspaper reports and to fabricate an alleged shorthand report from them. The right hon. and gallant Gentleman has given us no pledge. I allege, without fear of contradiction, that if not every one, at least a great majority, of the Government shorthand reporters admitted on the State trials that they had used the newspapers to refresh their memories. That is a most improper practice. It is admitted to be so, and yet in face of that I am merely given a delusive answer on the false assumption that only one man admitted having done so. That is the answer given me, instead of a direct and satisfactory undertaking; and now, therefore, I must appeal to the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for such an undertaking, so that in the future no political opponent of the Government in Ireland will be sent before two Resident Magistrates, who are creatures of the Government, liable to dismissal at will, dependent for the bread to put into their mouths and the clothes to be put on their backs upon the Government; and I therefore say it is necessary that these men should have no chance of convicting on improper evidence. I know very well that if these reporters go up with evidence which may be vamped-up or otherwise, it will be received as if it is true. I desire to prevent that being done; and I think that if the Government will act fairly towards their political opponents they will give a straight- forward, manly, and unqualified pledge to prevent any chance of such a thing occurring. Up to now they have failed to do so, and therefore I shall move, Sir, that you report Progress, unless I get a satisfactory answer. I do not wish to do so now, because I believe that I have justice on my side; but I again warn the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary that if he does not give me this pledge I will make the Motion I have stated.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I do not know what is the nature of the pledge which the hon. Gentleman desires to get from me. One aspect of this matter appears to have escaped his attention. I apprehend that in a speech that is made the subject of judicial consideration there are two considerations which influence the decision arrived at—namely, one the general tenour of the speech, and the second the actual verbatim words on which the trial takes place. I imagine that never the whole or even the greater part of any speech is brought into Court word for word as grounds for an indictment.

MR. CHANCE

If the right hon. Gentleman will read the charge of Mr. Justice Murphy to the jury of the county of Dublin, he will find it laid down as undoubted law that the jury are to disregard any special paragraphs or sentences picked out from the speech, but that they are bound to consider the whole speech and the tenour of it; and in the case of a speech which is proved to have been inefficiently reported, such as was the case in regard to the reports of Sergeant Christopherson, then the jury are directed to disregard it altogether, and not to be led away by it for one moment. If any words are found to be inserted in the transcript which do not appear in the original note, then the speech ought to be rejected.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I am not lawyer enough to know whether a mistake in a single word is sufficient to quash an indictment.

MR. CHANCE

The whole speech is never alleged in any indictment.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

That is just what I am stating. The general tenour of a speech is undoubtedly the matter which is to be considered, as well as certain separate parts of the speech which are reported verbatim.—[Mr. CHANCE: No, no!] The hon. Gentleman argues on my side. I was going to point out that even if his allegation be correct about the general tenour of a speech, the important portions of the speech ought undoubtedly to be reported verbatim by the Government reporter. But he is also supposed to give the general tenour of the speech. Without question, the Government reporter would not send in an absolutely verbatim report of every speech which may be delivered in his hearing; but he is a perfectly competent witness as to the general tenour of the speech, and as to the character of the general arguments used. As to the legal aspect of the question, I must leave that to the lawyers. But it does appear to me that an actual verbatim report of a speech from beginning to end is not required for an indictment framed under the Act, and it is quite clear that a reporter present during the whole of the speech is a perfectly competent witness as to the tenour of the speech, and as to the character of the arguments used, as well as to the exact words used on special occasions. Now, Sir, the hon. Member has asked me whether I will give a pledge that a direction shall be given to every shorthand reporter never to look at any other report before he transcribes his own notes. As I understand the matter, when a shorthand reporter is examined as to his report, he has to say, upon oath, whether or not he heard particular passages, or the whole speech on which the indictment is framed; and that is the evidence which is expected from the shorthand writer. The hon. Gentleman appears to assume that the shorthand writer may possibly commit perjury. If he would do such, a thing, of what use is it to give a general direction to him as to his transcript? Is it not apparent that a shorthand writer who is so lost to all sense of duty in the matter as to swear in Court that he heard certain things which do not appear upon his notes will not be bound by any general directions given by the Government? The hon. Gentleman will, therefore, get but a very small safeguard for the clients he wishes to protect by exacting the directions he desires to obtain. I have no objection whatever to telling him that I will give a pledge to direct that any shorthand reports given by any shorthand writer shall be from his own notes, and snail not be made up from the reports which appear in newspapers. It is clear that the writer's transcript ought to be an exact copy from his own notes; and I am, therefore, perfectly prepared, on behalf of the Government, to give a general direction that the shorthand writer, when he sends in his report of a speech to the Castle, shall send it in on the strength of his own notes only. I hope that that pledge will satisfy the hon. Member.

MR. CHANGE

I fancy that the right hon. Gentleman is wrong as to the position he has taken up. If the shorthand reporter fails to produce a verbatim report of the speech he is sent to take a note of, I submit that, although technically he may be a competent witness as to the general tenour of the speech, he cannot be accepted as a competent witness on the point of the words used; and, therefore, his evidence would be completely valueless, or, at any rate, of far less value than the evidence of a person who attended and did not take notes. If a shorthand report is produced it should be nothing but a transcript of the shorthand notes, and the Government ought to rely upon the very words alleged to have been spoken according to those notes. The general impression of a policeman certainly ought not to be submitted to a jury; and I have the dicta of Mr. Justice Murphy in support of the view that it would not be sufficient to support an indictment for perjury to produce a witness who swore that he heard the person prosecuted say such-and-such a thing; it was incumbent upon the witness to prove every word which had been uttered before prosecution for perjury could be maintained. What is required is that the shorthand reporters shall be guarded from the temptation of vamping up their reports from the newspapers. I am not putting this forward as a purely imaginary danger. It is a danger which exists. It existed in every one of the men examined at the trial of my hon. Friends the Member for North-East Cork (Mr. W. O'Brien) and the Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon), and it is a temptation which should not be allowed to exist. The right hon. Gentleman says a man who would perjure himself on this point would not follow out any directions of the Government. There is a certain element of strength in that argument, provided the right hon. Gentleman assumes that shorthand writers will perjure themselves; but what I say is that he should deprive the shorthand writer of the power of getting hold of the newspaper reports before he makes his transcript. That is a very simple point. The police are well under control, and I do not see any difficulty in giving the direction I ask. Unless the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary will assume a more independent and satisfactory position on this subject, I shall be compelled to do that which I suggested a few moments ago.

MR. FLYNN (Cork, N.)

I hope my hon. Friend the Member for South Kilkenny (Mr. Chance) will not find fault with my statement that the real gravity of the situation is this—that incompetent reporters are employed to take reports of speakers, on the transcript of which the speaker may be prosecuted. I do not believe anyone would expect a Government reporter, standing in a crowd surrounded by an escort of police, would be able to take a verbatim note of a meeting extending over two or three hours, as the case may be. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland must have been convinced by the laugh in the Gallery that it is an utterly impossible feat for anyone situated as a Government reporter is to furnish a verbatim report of speeches delivered at a meeting extending over two, or three, or four hours. We have had an illustration this very day that this is actually attempted by Government reporters. It is not that they are asked to furnish verbatim or correct reports of the speeches of the principal speakers at meetings; but they attempt far more. I have seen the reporters' pencils travelling over reams of paper long after the principal speakers have left the platform, and when minor speakers have been addressing the meeting. A man of great respectability in the town of Mitchelstown has been served with a summons to appear before two Resident Magistrates next Monday, in company with my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Cork (Mr. W. O'Brien), to answer for a speech he made on Friday week. His speech was probably the third or fourth in order at a large meeting. This case affords an instance of the danger we are endeavouring to point out. This Government reporter will come forward, and I have not the slightest doubt he will be able and ready to prove to the complete satisfaction of two Resident Magistrates that certain words were used by Mr. Mandeville on the occasion in question. Mr. Mandeville runs the risk of getting a certain term of imprisonment for the speech, the sense of which may be completely misinterpreted by the Government reporter. The present Mayor of Cork was sentenced to two months' imprisonment with hard labour for the delivery of a speech which was utterly and entirely misrepresented by the Government reporter. All we ask is, that if reporters are to be sent to meetings, and if their reports are to be accepted in evidence, only competent men should be employed. It is a notorious fact in Ireland, or, at any rate, in the South of Ireland, of which I have personal knowledge, that policemen who presume to have an acquaintance with shorthand, who may have a greater or lesser acquaintance with shorthand, but who are not faithful or accurate shorthand writers, are sent to meetings. Perhaps they only divested themselves of their uniform a day or two before. They are entrusted with a large amount of power over the liberty of the men whose words they are taking down. My hon. Friend the Member for South Kilkenny (Mr. Chance) quoted a case which is now very well known. The right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary (Colonel King-Harman) replied that that case showed that it is impossible for a reporter to come forward and commit perjury, or to vamp up his transcript by reference to The Freeman's Journal or some other newspaper. That is not the case. In the very case quoted, if it had not been for the fact that the counsel for the prisoner happened to be experts themselves—happened to know shorthand particularly well, and were enabled to deal with the matter from a technical point of view—the probability is that the case would have gone against the prisoner. I believe that it was at the second sitting that it was shown that Sergeant Christopherson had entirely misrepresented the speech; that he had written words in a so-called transcript that had never been uttered at all. As a matter of curiosity, I have got into a corner at meetings, and watched the proceedings of the Government reporters. I find them ostensibly writing away for their lives; but in reality they are not taking notes at all. The notes were neither those of Pitman's system, or of any other shorthand system. On the contrary, their proceedings were a mere make-believe. Now, Mr. John Mandeville, as I have said, has been, served with a summons, and he will have to submit himself to the tender mercies of a Resident Magistrate in a few days' time. It is quite possible that the transcript, upon which the proceedings have been instituted, has been vamped up from one or other of the local papers. Now, Sir, I should like to be clearly understood upon the matter. I do not want to accuse anyone in the capacity of a Government reporter of wilful and deliberate perjury; but the temptation to men in the position of Government reporters to do their duty, or what they consider to be their duty—that is, to support the cage of the Crown—is so great that we can have no faith or reliance that the Government reporter will not be induced to stray from the path of rectitude, rather than run the risk of being denounced for incompetency. It is an acknowledged fact that frequently the Government reporters in Ireland do furnish reports which are neither accurate nor faithful, nor contain the meaning of the speakers. We know from painful experience that many cases of misreporting have occurred—that instances are only far too numerous in which policemen, from a sense of duty, have committed perjury. What we want is a guarantee that competent reporters only will be employed; that policemen who have but a very small acquaintance with shorthand will not be sent to meetings, and be asked to undertake the difficult duty—a duty requiring a great deal of experience and cleverness—of recording speeches made at political meetings, the report of which speeches may be produced in evidence against men by persons who are prejudiced against the prisoners, and prejudiced against every man who espouses the National cause.

MR. CLANCY (Dublin Co., N.)

My hon. Friend the Member for East Gal-way (Mr. Harris) suggested that one of Gurney's men should be appointed to attend Nationalist meetings on behalf of the Government in Ireland. My hon. Friend must have forgotten that the employment of policemen as reporters was a necessity of the case. That was in consequence of the failure to get any other sort of men to report speeches in Ireland for the Government. It is well known that no man connected with the Press in England or Ireland would do the dirty work of Dublin Castle in this matter. It was because they found that out during the land agitation that policemen were, with a very short experience of reporting, and probably with no experience at all, imported into the service of the Government. Of course, if there was an objection at that time on the part of Pressmen to do this work, there is an equal objection now. As a person connected with the Press myself, I imagine there is not to be found in England, Ireland, or Scotland a single man employed on any journal, whether it be Tory, Whig, Liberal Unionist, or Radical, or in the employment of any association formed for the purpose of reporting speeches, who would undertake the dirty work. The suggestion of my hon. Friend the Member for South. Kilkenny (Mr. Chance) seems to be impracticable. That suggestion is that directions should be given by the Government to policemen not to consult newspaper reports until after writing out their own notes. Why, as the Chief Secretary very fairly points out, if a policeman is inclined to perjure himself, he will not shrink from disobeying such a direction. I have not the least doubt that a police reporter who will deliberately put into his transcript words which the speaker has never uttered, or leave out words which have been uttered, in order to advance the interests of the Government, will disobey the direction not to consult a newspaper report before writing out his notes. It seems to me that what the Government ought to be asked to do is to insure, by some examination, that the men employed shall be real shorthand writers. Let the men employed as Government reporters be examined. The Government have already set up an establishment in Ireland, which is known throughout the civilized world as the Informers' Home. This establishment has been in existence for several years, and a Vote is taken every year in respect of it. Let them now supplement this establishment. Let them build an additional wing, or take additional houses in the same neighbour- hood, and lodge in them a corps of Government reporters, especially trained for the reporting of the speeches of Irish Nationalists. We shall have in Ireland another Institution peculiar to the country; and everyone will see what a pretty thing Constitutional Government in Ireland is if there is on one side of the street an Informers' Home and on the other an Institution for the training of Government reporters. I commend this suggestion to the Government. I feel so enamoured of it myself that if the hon. Member for South Kilkenny does not move to report Progress I will do so, in order that the right hon. and learned Attorney General for Ireland (Mr. Gibson) or the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland may have time to consider it. The right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland (Colonel King-Harman) stated that the case of misreporting mentioned by my hon. Friend (Mr. Chance) was only detected by the fact that the counsel employed for the defence were men who had been reporters themselves, or who had a practical acquaintance with reporting. We know perfectly well that if similar assistance had been afforded in all cases during the last seven years, it would have been found that there was misreporting in every case in which a transcript was submitted to a jury. It is impossible it could be otherwise. These reporters were never trained to report, and there is not a single man amongst them who can report a speech. There is not a single one of them who has not been seen by us to hold his hand helplessly for several minutes, because he is not sufficiently practised in the art. There is not a single one of them who does not vamp up his transcripts by consulting newspapers. A very remarkable instance of this was mentioned the other day in a letter written by a reporter of one of the daily journals. He said that in the report he made of a meeting in County Kerry he mis-spelt the name of a river in the neighbourhood of Tralee. He consulted afterwards the report of one of the speeches at that meeting submitted to a Judge and jury in Dublin. He did so for the purpose of seeing whether the same mistake which he had made occurred in the report of the police reporter. Curiously enough, the speech was identical in every respect, including the mis-spelling of the name of the river near Tralee, clearly showing that the Government reporter did not take notes himself, or else that he cast aside his own notes, and adopted the report in The Freeman's Journal. I rose, however, to say that, in my opinion, the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland will be regarded by the police reporters in Ireland as one containing directions for their future action. I understood the meaning of that speech to be that the Irish police reporters are now told by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary—their master for the present, and, I suppose, for some time to come—not to report any speech verbatim. [Mr. A. J. BALFOUR: No.] Yes; I am giving the substance of the speech of the right hon. Gentleman. The inference to be drawn from the speech is that no police reporter is to be expected to report a speech verbatim; he is to report speeches as speeches in this House are reported— some speeches are to be reported in the third person, and others are to be given verbatim—and what is to be submitted to a jury is the general tenour of a speech, or such passages from the speech as the police reporter thinks important. Now, after reading the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, a police reporter will say— "I can report meetings precisely as I like, and as I know my masters in Dublin Castle will like. I will not give a verbatim report of the passages of a speech which will tell for the prisoner; but I will give a verbatim report of the passages which will tell against the prisoner;" and I do not wonder he should expect a conviction if this code of regulations is carried out. I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary upon his singular frankness in this matter; his views will be made known to the policemen of Ireland. I undertake that they shall be made known also to the English people; and I will undertake, as far as I possibly can, to make them known, and to strive to induce others to make it known, that here in this House of Commons the Chief Secretary for Ireland rose in his place to advise police reporters to adopt a system of reporting which has not been heard of in any civilized country, and which is a disgrace to any Government.

THE ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR IRELAND (Mr. GIBSON) (Liverpool, Walton)

I was present at the trial referred to.

MR. CHANCE

You were not present in the Police Court at all.

MR. GIBSON

I was present at the trial in Green Street when a great number of Constabulary shorthand writers were examined and cross-examined. It has been alleged by the hon. Gentleman the Member for North Cork (Mr. Flynn) that these police shorthand writers write a system of shorthand that is totally unknown, and that practically they only play at shorthand writing; that in reality they do not write anything that can be understood, either by themselves or by anybody else; but that afterwards they write a transcript from local and other papers.

MR. FLYNN

What I said was that I had not seen these reporters reporting minor speeches, or making pretence to report minor speeches.

MR. GIBSON

I understood the hon. Gentleman said that these shorthand writers were not competent because they were not able to write a proper system of shorthand. What I saw in Green. Street was this—there were eight or ten shorthand writers produced. The reason the Government employ Constabulary shorthand writers is substantially what was stated by the hon. Member for North Dublin (Mr. Clancy)—namely, that it is impossible without incurring enormous expenditure to bring shorthand writers; besides, it is very likely that it would be impossible to secure ordinary shorthand writers who would be available at all times to go to meetings required to be reported. We should have to keep up a great staff of shorthand writers, and ordinary Press shorthand writers might not be available. The only alternative, therefore, is to have police shorthand writers, or no one at all. Granted that there was no one at all to report these speeches, these speeches would be made with perfect impunity—it would be impossible to prove from reports of speeches in newspapers that anyone uttered given words. As I say, there were about seven or eight shorthand writers examined at the trial in Dublin, and these witnesses were subjected to a very severe test. The trial lasted several days, and it so happened that these police witnesses had to pro- duce their original shorthand notes, and a very unusual thing occurred, which I suppose has never happened in any previous trial. The witnesses were examined by counsel who were accomplished shorthand writers themselves, and who were not only able to read their own notes, but to read the shorthand written by others. The counsel required the police witnesses to read what they had taken in shorthand, and the witnesses did read out page after page of their original shorthand notes. That, I apprehend, was good evidence that the witnesses did write a shorthand system—Pitman's or some other, which was intelligible not only to themselves, but also to the counsel examining. It is impossible to suggest that these speeches had been transcribed in cold blood from the local newspapers, because there is a peculiarity which has been observed in the speeches reported by local and other newspapers. Some of the more spicy and dangerous passages are omitted in the reports which are found in certain newspapers. It is alleged that the Constabulary witnesses did not take proper notes; but it is a strange thing, if this is true, that their transcripts contained important passages which did not appear in newspapers. There were, as I say, a great number of these witnesses examined at the trial in Green Street, among them appeared to be men of experience and able to write a practically verbatim note. I do not say they could write an exactly verbatim note, because everyone who is acquainted with shorthand knows perfectly well that to take a verbatim note is nearly impossible. [A laugh.] The hon. Gentleman the Member for North Dublin (Mr. Clancy) is incredulous about that—perhaps he has had no experience. When I say a practically verbatim note I mean that The Times note, for instance, is not verbatim, but substantially so. Anything else would be impossible. Now, after the ordeal which the police witnesses went through in Green Street, nobody can have any doubt that they knew shorthand, and that they were capable shorthand writers. The able counsel who examined them entirely failed to shake their evidence. If there was any doubt about the matter, how could it come to pass that not a single independent shorthand writer was called on behalf of the defendants to contradict the police in any material particular? Some observation was made about one of the police witnesses, called Sergeant Christopherson. No doubt he was able to write shorthand and to read it; he has reported a great number of speeches. The hon. Gentleman the Member for South Kilkenny (Mr. Chance), who was solicitor in the case, will recollect that Sergeant Christopherson took a greater number of speeches than any of the other witnesses. It so happened that in one of his notes there were a line and a-half he was unable to read. The notes he had made were imperfect, and he had taken from a paper a passage he supposed to be the passage he could not transcribe. I suppose he did this a few days after taking the notes, and that he thought that the passage contained the substance of what was said. Now, the line and a-half which was taken by him to supply the passage which was admittedly defective in his notes is used here to convict Sergeant Christopherson of having committed perjury in every single line of the note he took. I do not know whether there are any other matters for me to deal with with reference to what has fallen from the hon. Gentleman. The hon. Member for North Dublin (Mr. Clancy), I think it was, said that no man would do this dirty work except the police. Well, it is a very strange thing that everyone who is connected with the enforcement of the law in Ireland is to be denounced, notwithstanding that he does his work thoroughly and in the face of day, and at the peril of his life. By what contortion of the English language can it be said that a policeman who attends a meeting under circumstances of great discomfort to himself, under circumstances of great odium and possibly of danger, in order to do the work of a responsible Government, is to be denounced as a spy. An individual policeman may be a bad man or a foolish man; but, at any rate, a policeman who attends these public meetings in Ireland for the purpose of taking shorthand notes is certainly not a spy, no more than a lawyer or any other person engaged in the administration of the law or in the conduct of a legal inquiry. In reply to the hon. Member for North Cork (Mr. Flynn),I admit in the frankest and fullest way that it is the duty of everyone concerned in this police reporting to try and examine the substance of the words in order that it may be proved beyond a doubt, because it is a serious matter to convict anyone by the words he has spoken, the words he has used in his speech. In certain other matters, no doubt, it is necessary to prove a fact with great minuteness; but in the case of words spoken, all that it is necessary to get, in order clearly to establish guilt, is the substance of the utterances, and when that substance is clearly demonstrated, I do not see where the difficulty can be in establishing guilt—where it is clearly proved that the language was used with a deliberate intention. I think the only thing we can look to in these matters is the procuring of efficient shorthand writers, and it is a matter of no great importance whether they are policemen or otherwise. The examination of witnesses will always be an examination in the face of the public, with newspaper reporters present. The local reporters who have attended the meetings in the interests of their journals will be there, and may be called on to give evidence, and, if necessary, to contradict the police reporter. The worst allegation against them seems to be that the police report speeches at all, not that their reports are untrue. No doubt it is said that they do not transcribe their notes accurately, because their reports contain passages which are not to be found in the local newspapers; but I cannot admit that because a local journal will not give certain sentences, therefore the transcript of the police report is incorrect. The accuracy of their reports can only be ascertained in Court in evidence which is subject to cross-examination.

MR. DILLON (Mayo, E.)

This debate has become of much greater importance than it seemed likely to be at an earlier stage. When I spoke on this subject earlier in the evening, I confined myself chiefly to the question of the inconvenience which had resulted in the past from the necessity of having these reporters at our meetings—I pointed out the great expense which the employment of these persons entailed, and also the constant danger of breaches of the peace which attended their operations. I never said that these police officials performed their duties at the danger of their lives, and the right hon. and learned Gentleman clearly mistook me when he attributed that language to me. What are the facts? I should take it that there have been at least 1,000 meetings in Ireland of recent years, and at not one of these is there any record of a police reporter having been injured. What I pointed out was that in every case where my influence was sufficient to secure them a place upon the platform I used it on their behalf. Wherever I could I got them into a position of security; but I said that when that was not possible and they got among the crowd they were surrounded by police, and I said that that endangered the public peace, and that it was a most objectionable proceeding, not because it was particularly dangerous to the reporters themselves, but because it rendered possible a breach of the public peace, which otherwise would hare remained undisturbed. A fresh spurt has been given to this discussion with, regard to the use to be made of these speeches. The right hon. and learned Attorney General for Ireland says that if police reporters were not sent to our meetings violent speeches would be delivered with impunity. Well, I challenge the Front Bench opposite to point to a single instance in which a man has been convicted through a report furnished by one of these police reporters. The Government have wasted public money, and have carried on this insulting system, all to no purpose. As to speeches of a violent character being made in the absence of police reporters with impunity, that is just the case now when they attend our meetings. As I have said, for seven years speeches have been made in the presence of police reporters with impunity, and there is not a single instance in which a man has been convicted solely upon a speech made at a public meeting. Why do not the Government send round their police spies to public meetings in England? They do not do so, because they know that these men would be kicked out of the meeting; the public would not stand it. A Member of this House is to be placed on his trial on the 9th of next month, and against him you will have no evidence but the sworn testimony of a police spy. You are going to try a Member of this House for words spoken to his constituents, and, from the nature of the case, you are going to have no evidence against him except the evidence of one of these police spies. The right hon. and learned Gentleman oppo- site said that to try a man for spoken words is a dangerous game to enter upon. It is a game almost unknown in this country. When you come to try a man for spoken words, and when the only testimony you are going to put before the Court is that of a single, unsupported police spy, I hold the proceeding to be in the highest degree dangerous. What has occurred in the past? Why, you have been unable to get convictions. I have pointed out—I have always pointed out—that you could not get a decent jury to convict a man upon such testimony. I have always said that you are squandering the public money by piling up these records of speeches in Dublin Castle, because they are unsupported and useless. What is the result of the system you carry on? Why, it is that policemen unquestionably perjure themselves. There is great reluctance on the part of jurymen to convict people on the unsupported testimony of police reporters; but what are you going to do under this new Crimes Act? A man is to be brought up, not before a jury, but before a bench of magistrates holding their offices under the Crown, and he is to be put upon his trial under the 5th sub-section of the 2nd clause of the Act, charged with no offence except certain words spoken. And what evidence are you going to put before these magistrates—the tools and servants of the Government? Why, the only evidence will be that of the police spy, and nobody else. A Member of this House, for having spoken at a meeting of his own constituents, is to be placed upon his trial like the meanest pickpocket, and is threatened with the same consequences as usually attend the course of action of the common thief. This is an intolerable system, if that be the intention of the Government. If it be their intention in the future to use these police spies, as I shall continue to call them— detectives the Government might prefer to have them named—all I can say is, you would not dare to do such a thing in England or Scotland, for it would not be tolerated for an hour. Whilst sitting in Court I myself heard Sergeant Christopherson perjure himself. I heard him admit that he had previously sworn what he knew to be untrue. I heard him swear, in the first place, that he had not consulted a newspaper in preparing his report of certain speeches, but that he had relied solely upon his own note. He swore he did not take a particular passsge out of a newspaper, and then, in subsequent cross-examination by my hon. Friends, who fortunately understood shorthand, he admitted that he could not read a part of his shorthand note. He was asked whether he had written a passage which he could not read in his note from memory, and after much beating about the bush he admitted that he had read the newspaper report and copied that particular passage from it. If that is not perjury, will the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General for Ireland tell me what perjury is?

MR. GIBSON

What the man was asked was a general question as to whether the note was his own note, and he said it was.

MR. DILLON

I remember this—that not until he was convicted out of the newspaper did this Sergeant Christopher-son admit that he had taken a passage in his note from the newspaper. He was one of the chief witnesses, and was praised up to the sky as being everything that a policeman ought to be by Mr. Jury-Packer O'Brien, who is now Solicitor General for Ireland. Of course, the jury did not believe what Christopherson said. They discounted his evidence, and valued it at exactly what is was worth. At that time I was on my trial for conspiracy. There was a very great deal of evidence, so that the statement of one witness was not a matter of great importance. The question for the jury was whether the thing was criminal conspiracy or not—my participation in the operations of my Colleagues, if that were conspiracy, was proved up to the hilt; and, as I say, there was a vast mass of evidence as to our movements, and so forth, so that the breaking down of an individual witness was a matter of minor importance. But what have we now to face? We have to face a trial the result of which may depend upon a single sentence in a speech. There will be no documentary evidence required in future; we shall have no longer to go before a jury, but before two magistrates; and we shall be asked—"Did you say so and so, or did you not? "Who will be called to prove the case? Why, the police spy. We shall be called upon to prove a negative, and how shall we be able to do that? If we bring up 20 men to swear that we did not utter the words attributed to us, the magistrates will believe the police and not us or our witnesses; therefore the whole thing will be turned into a perfect mockery. Of course, these fellows will swear to please their, paymasters. I have not the slightest doubt that Christopherson did perjure himself—he admitted that he did. Will they send this man round again to take notes with the intention of bringing him before the Court again to be sworn? That is a very serious question. Now, just let me point out a couple of cases winch happened within our own experience, and which show how easily this objectionable state of things I describe occurs. I need not repeat the case of the hon. Member for the Harbour Division of Dublin (Mr. T. C. Harrington). That hon. Member was unquestionably punished for words which had been used by another man. The witness against the hon. Member in that case took his note in longhand, and of all the idiotic performances ever seen this performance of the Government longhand note-taker was about the most ridiculous. A speaker whom this person was reporting would have uttered about a quarter of a column of The Times, before two sentences had been jotted down in the note book, and the most natural thing in the world for this person to do was to ram two speeches into one. As a matter of fact, that was what was done in the case of the hon. Member for the Harbour Division. Take another case—namely, the prosecution of my hon. Friend the Member for West Belfast (Mr. Sexton). He was prosecuted for a speech he made at a meeting in the County of Wexford, and this was one of the things cited at his trial—he put this question to the people he was addressing—"What shall we do with these Irish landlords?" and someone in the crowd replied—"Send them out to the Zulus!" When the report of this speech appeared this observation— "Send them out to the Zulus," was given as having been uttered by my hon. Friend. The local reporters swore that it was uttered by a person in the crowd, but the policeman stuck to his longhand note through thick and thin; he insisted that the words were used by my hon. Friend. What may happen in the future under these circumstances? Cases may occur all over Ireland where a drunken man may call out "Shoot them," or use some equally violent and improper expression. What security shall we have that some policeman will not stick that expression into the speech of the speaker, particularly as these police spies are always on the look-out for some violent expression or other in order that he may have something to report, and may prove himself a valuable policeman? What protection shall we have against such a person? Two Members of this House and some other gentlemen are to be put upon their trial before a pair of hireling magistrates at Mitchelstown for words used at a public meeting. They are to be tried simply on the evidence of a police spy. I say the sentiment of this country will rise up against it. We ought to press the Government to give us a pledge that the reports of these creatures will not be treated as sufficient evidence before their magistrates in dealing with prisoners under the Crimes Act, and more especially under the 5th and 6th sub-sections of the 2nd clause. Under those sub-sections one single sentence may consign a man to six months' imprisonment with hard labour. Whatever the present experience of the Governors of Ireland may be, we know that in all these matters the magistrates take their directions from the Castle, and that if they are ordered to convict a man upon this evidence they will do so. If they are ordered not to convict a man they will not do so. I say if you succeed in this trial you will have a considerable number of hon. Members more to deal with, and it is a matter of great importance that we should have an understanding as to what use the Government are going to make of evidence of this kind. I do not believe that in England a pickpocket would be convicted on such evidence, and yet upon that evidence two Members of this House are to be put upon their trial. I say two Members, but probably before the winter is out it will be 30 or 40 Members; and I say that if the evidence of police spies is to be used for this purpose, when once the people of England understand the character of that evidence there will be a tremendous reaction against the course the Government are taking.

MR. ANDERSON (Elgin and Nairn)

I desire to ask the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General for Ireland a question as to a reply he made to an observation from those Benches. As I understand it, the right hon. and learned Gentleman says that all a shorthand writer is called upon to do is to give his version of certain parts of a speech which he has listened to without swearing to his notes in full—that he is not obliged to prove certain passages as in a system of verbatim notes. That is a doctrine of the most extraordinary character ever delivered by a Minister of the Grown. I quite agree with what has fallen from the hon. Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon) as to the importance of this question. You are going to try these persons for observations they have made in speeches delivered at public meetings, and I have always understood that no shorthand note could be admitted in evidence unless it was a verbatim note of what had been said. I should like to ask the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General for Ireland if he agrees with the extraordinary doctrine laid down by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland—namely, that it is to be left to the discretion of the shorthand writer to give a full report or a summary of what takes place? "Will he say that a report which is considered most important can be handed in in other than a verbatim form, and that the shorthand writer who has taken that note and supplied that report can be a competent witness for the Crown? I am anxious to put that plainly to the right hon. and learned Gentleman, because it is startling to me to hear that such a thing is possible even in Ireland. It is altogether unknown in this country.

MR. GIBSON

The hon. and learned Member for Elgin and Nairn must have misunderstood what was said. What I understood my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for Ireland to say was that the substance of the words must be proved. There is no rule or law, as the hon. and learned Gentleman must be aware, as to verbatim notes. The question is as to the weight of evidence and the admissibility of evidence. If a man has no note of observations he has heard he gives his evidence from memory, though I admit that the Court must be very careful in admitting such evidence, and in admitting summarized reports. It is not necessary that a man should be able to write shorthand in order to make a note of criminal utterances, or in order to take down the effect of a person's statement. I know a Judge on the Bench who is able to write down almost every word a witness says, though he only writes longhand. As a matter of fact, the question which arises is this—is a witness a capable witness or not? As to shorthand, no doubt a witness who is able to take a correct verbatim note is a most desirable witness to have; but the question is not as to the desirability of the evidence, but as to the substance of a report—as to whether a man who is giving evidence is really telling the truth as to what has been said in his hearing.

MR. CHANCE

I think we have got a stage further, and the Committee and the country have now before them a clear indication of the manner in which prosecutions are to be conducted in Ireland. It now appears that reporters who are not competent to take verbatim reports are sent down with specific instructions to take the speeches of certain men for the purposes of a prosecution— are sent down with instructions from the Chief Secretary to take down the inflammatory portions of speeches accurately and verbatim, and, as to the rest of the speeches, to give the two Resident Magistrates their impressions of those speeches. That certainly appears to me to be a new method of obtaining a conviction—a peculiarly Unionistic method, and one which I hope the people of this country will recognize in all its nakedness. Anyone who will refer to the proceedings at Green Street, when hon. Members of this House were prosecuted for conspiracy, will remember how the witness in some cases declared that he had put words into the speeches from recollection; that words he had left out in his note he had put in from recollection; that in other places the speaker had gone too fast for him to follow; and that, as a matter of fact, the witness never seemed able to get along in writing shorthand for more than eight words without falling behind the speaker and having to begin in the middle of another sentence. Some passages the man admitted taking from The Freeman's Journal, and altogether his report was an incoherent jumble of meaningless and incomplete sentences with, frequent blanks. That was a specimen, of the evidence upon which Members of Parliament were to get six months' imprisonment with hard labour. Of course, if such evidence had to be given before a jury, there would be no fear of its leading to a conviction, because no 12 men could be brought together anywhere to agree to convict anyone upon such evidence; but for the future these cases will not have to go before juries, but before two Resident Magistrates, and the Committee can easily imagine what their attitude is likely to be. I leave this matter to the consideration of the Committee itself. I most firmly allege—and my statement can be corroborated by 50 witnesses if necessary—that Sergeant Christopherson, who is the witness whose shorthand report I have been describing, deliberately perjured himself. He produced a speech which he alleged to have been uttered by the hon. Member for North-East Cork (Mr. W. O'Brien), but not one word of which had fallen from that hon. Member's lips. The right hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General for Ireland declared that the "spicy bits" had been left out of the local newspaper reports; but the fact of the case is that those so-called spicy passages not only did not appear in the local papers, but did not appear in the police reporter's notes. They only appeared in the transcript; so that it is clear that these passages were inserted in the solicitor's office in Dublin Castle. I have here the notes I myself took at the trial, and I have case after case where words were inserted, and, if necessary, I could occupy the next hour by giving additional instances. Unless I receive a most distinct pledge that in the future these shorthand writers will be prevented from vamping up their notes from the local newspapers before they send in their transcripts to the Central Authority, whatever that authority may be, I shall be obliged to move that you, Sir, report Progress, and ask leave to sit again. Considering that there is not the slightest chance of the Government depriving themselves of the services of these infamous instruments, I now move that Progress be reported.

Motion made, and Question put, "That the Chairman do report Progress, and ask leave to sit again."—(Mr. Chance.)

The Committee divided:—Ayes 5G; Noes 112: Majority 56; — (Div. List, No. 431.)

Question again proposed, "That Item E—Extra Pay—be reduced by £3,500."

MR. MAC NEILL (Donegal, S.)

There is one observation which has been made by the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General for Ireland, in his defence of this system of police reporters, that I very cordially hope may be well reported tomorrow. He has defended, or he has justified the system on this ground— that police reporters, and police reporters alone, were possible, because other reporters are not available for the Government. If the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland had made that observation, or had justified the action of the Government by such an argument, it would not be so significant. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland speaks purely on information derived from official sources, which may or may not be correct. The right hon. and learned Attorney General for Ireland occupies a different position. He knows the Irish system, and the Irish people, and the Irish Government well; and still what is his testimony? His testimony is this —that all the ordinary newspaper reporters, whether they be Orange, Whig, or Liberal Unionist, are unavailable for Government reporters. The system of Dublin Castle is so detested by all classes of the community alike, whether they be Orange, Liberal Unionist, or Whig, that a reporter cannot be found who will do their work for them. Therefore they are constrained, according to the right hon. and learned Gentleman's contention, from the lack of independent evidence which their system renders it impossible for them to obtain, to go to the Police Force for this information. When we have got a police report, like the report read out by my hon. Friend the Member for South Kilkenny (Mr. Chance), perhaps it may be suggested that there will be a difficulty in adjudicating upon that report. Not the slightest difficulty. For in these cases, the Crown, or the Government, occupy a three-fold position. They are first of all prosecutors, then they are witnesses, and then they are Judges; because it is absurd to contend, in the light of day, that the Resident Magisgrates who are to adjudicate upon these reports are themselves anything but the agents of the Executive Government. They will be satisfied on smaller evidence than would satisfy even a Castlehack jury. I am justified in again directing the attention of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary to this matter. An hon. Gentleman, a Member of this House, will be tried in a very short time before two Resident Magistrates. He will be tried on police reports—on reports given by persons who are not experts—Who are not trained to report, but who are trained by officialism to convict, and whose object is to convict. The right hon. and learned Attorney General for Ireland said, and said with spare justice, that the law of evidence, both in England and Ireland, is the same. A great authority in England on evidence—Mr. Taylor on evidence—cites some very pertinent cases in reference to police evidence, and he save that they give evidence in reference to reports as to which they are mere amateurs, and he compares them to bloodhounds. And that is in fair Eng land, where the policeman is the friend of the people and not the enemy. But before whom in Ireland are the reports of these police witnesses to be submitted? They are to submit their evidence to Resident Magistrates, who are themselves Government agents. I wish to call attention to these Resident Magistrates—

THE CHAIRMAN

That will be entirely outside this Vote.

MR MAC NEILL

I was not in the slightest degree speaking with reference to these magistrates. I was simply saying this—that the tribunal is such that the evidence which should be placed before it should be very carefully sifted; that it should be beyond suspicion and beyond taint; that this evidence is clearly tainted evidence; and that it is the only evidence on which the Crown can go, who are themselves the prosecutors, the witnesses, and the Judges.

Question put, and negatived.

Original Question again proposed.

MR. SEXTON (Belfast, W.)

I think, Mr. Courtney, it may be convenient now to call attention to a number of questions connected with this Vote, some of which were raised at an earlier hour this evening. I stated my views on a former occasion, and I shall content myself on the present occasion with briefly recapitulating my observations. The Police Force in Ireland is considerably employed in giving special protection; and I claim both in respect to the policy of coercion, and also in order that we may apply our critical faculties to the present Vote, that we ought to have fuller particulars of the names and residences of the persons in Ireland who are wholly Boycotted than we have now before us. The right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland (Colonel King-Harman) has informed us that persons described as wholly Boycotted are persons with whom their neighbours refuse to hold any intercourse, and that persons under complete police protection are persons always specially protected by the police in their houses and when they go abroad.

COLONEL KING-HARMAN

I did not say "always."

MR. SEXTON

I will state my reason why I think I am right. The right hon. and gallant Gentleman divided these persons into two classes. The second class are those under police protection, and their houses are visited at different times; but with regard to the first class receiving more sufficient protection, I think his words were these—that they are "always" under police protection.

COLONEL KING-HARMAN

I most distinctly did not say they were "always" under police protection. I said they were under police protection, and frequently in their own houses; but I said their houses were in such a position that it was impossible for the police to be always there.

MR. SEXTON

What are we to understand from the right hon. and gallant Gentleman? Are the bulk of these people "always" under police protection, and some few of them "nearly always?" Is that it? I cannot understand the right hon. and gallant Gentleman otherwise.

COLONEL KING-HARMAN

What I said was that the persons who were wholly under police protection were those whose lives were in evident danger, and as to whom the police were constantly on the watch. I forget the exact words I used; but I said, I believe, the police were generally quartered in their houses. But there are persons who are under police protection in whose houses the police are not quartered.

MR. SEXTON

Then the persons who are less closely protected are persons whose houses are surrounded at different times in the 24 hours? The first class is more completely protected, and the protection usually takes the form of a police guard accompanying these persons when they go abroad. What I submit is, that the fact of the protection of these men in Ireland by the police is so public and so notorious that there is no conceivable reason why their names and residences should be withheld from this House. That is my statement; and I claim for the Representatives of the people that we have the same right now as we had to the information which Mr. Forster gave in 1881, and that we have a right to discover whether these are bogus cases, and to discover for ourselves in how many cases there is real danger, and in how many cases the police protection springs from vanity. Secondly, I ask what is the meaning of the statement in the newspapers this morning, that the County Inspector of Limerick intimates that no more police will be supplied at evictions carried out for the non-payment of rent? Have the Government returned to the policy of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Bristol (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach) last winter? Do they still stand on the inviolability of the law, or do they intend to exercise a dispensing power? Do they bring conscience into play as that right hon. Gentleman did last winter, and do they consider in every case whether the merits of the case between landlord and tenant are such as to justify interference or not? Then, Sir, with regard to the resignations of constables because of the passage of the Crimes Act. I wish to know how many constables have resigned in consequence of the passage of the Crimes Act; and whether it is true that the Government have refused to constables who upon a case of conscience resigned their places in he force the certificate of character which is given to constables receiving ordinary discharge? Then with regard to The Times' libels in "Parnellism and Crime," I pointed out already that the Government have fled from their position, both by their refusal of a Select Committee, and also by their Proclamation of the National League. I pointed out that pictures and verses of the most insulting character to the people of Ireland are hung up in every headquarter station of the Constabulary in Ireland. I want to know if they are to be taken down, or whether the Government will allow these places to be made centres for the dissemination of such malignant and insulting effusions? My hon. Friends have read letters from the police, in which they point out that they cannot dare to have a popular newspaper in their hands; and my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Tyrone (Mr. M. J. Kenny) has read a letter from a constable, in which he states that simply because United Ireland was found with him he was discharged from the force, but that the Inspector General, taking a merciful view of the case, allowed him to remain on the promise that he would not do it again. The right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland, who is a great example of political impartiality, will, perhaps, tell us whether men are to be sent out of the force for reading United Ireland, and whether, on the other hand, any filth or calumny that vindictiveness can dictate will be allowed to be sown broadcast with the sanction of the Government? In regard to the Constabulary pensioners, their case is a perfectly good one. The Royal Commission of 1872 reported that there should be an increase of pay from that time, and it was given. The increase of pension depended on the increase of pay; yet a number of men who received an increase of pay in December, 1872, and who retired from the force in August, 1874, have to be contented with the old pension, although men retiring after August, 1874, have got the higher pension. These men are not numerous, but they have a good case. They have a real grievance, and they are entitled to have it remedied. Then, with regard to the Widows' and Orphans' Fund, are you going to allow the Inspector General to administer this fund on his own respon- sibility hereafter? You have one class of constable that is not subscribers to this fund, and you have another class which is compelled to subscribe. The officers are quartered upon this fund of the men. The officers wound up their own fund, having taken every penny of it. Is that system to go on any longer? I think if you quarter the officers on the constables of the force, you will not promote discipline in the ranks of the Constabulary. First, we ask for an account. We want the chief sources of revenue from the year 1866—to whom the payments were made, and why they were made? If the fund has been honestly administered, why do you deny us this information. These poor constables and pensioners have paid almost every penny of this fund, and they have a right to know what is done with it. You have no right to deny this information, unless you wish to lay your officials open to the suspicion of knavery. We think this fund has been used for the emolument of constables and officers who, we consider, have acted in a way which is improper in connection with the administration of justice. After the access which we have obtained to the ear and the mind of Great Britain, if you think you can keep this fund of £130,000 in the hands of an official in Dublin to use corruptly you are greatly mistaken. If the men desire to wind up this fund, they have a right to have it wound up. These men say—"Wind up the fund and divide the money between us." It will do them some good in that way; it will not, as you have it. In the last place, Mr. Courtney, about the Portrush riot, will the Government grant an inquiry into the matter? Insinuations are thrown out that those Foresters are turbulent men. The fact is, that these men have on their annual excursions been constantly assailed. The right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland is a Forester. He is an Orangeman too; so he can hold justice evenly in tins case. These men gave notice to the police, and the police took no notice of this warning. These men were assailed by the Orangemen in the most violent manner. Their assailants have not been arrested. The men who were assailed have been arrested. One of the witnesses has been arrested for perjury; an d I ask that a public inquiry should be granted, which will reveal who were the assailants in this case—the members of the public society, or the members of the secret society, to both of which the right hon. and gallant Gentleman belongs. But by far the most important question of all is that concerned with social order in Belfast. My third question concerns social order in Belfast, and I have to say that unless the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland gives us reasonable hope that the administrative measures recommended by the Commissioners will be carried out this Session we shall raise this subject again. This is a matter which concerns the rights of Irishmen and the rights of my constituents. The right hon. Gentleman has had seven months in which to digest the Reports of the Commissioners and incubate his policy with reference to the police; and I ask him, in the first place, whether he will bring in the Bill, and, in the second place, whether the Policy Force will be administered in accordance with the Report of the Royal Commission?

MR. EWART (Belfast, N.)

The hon. Member for West Belfast (Mr. Sexton) has complained that the Belfast Municipal Bill has not come forward. I think that complaint proceeds with a very bad grace from hon. Gentlemen opposite, because we all know that obstructive tactics have been used with regard to the Bill. The hon. Member for West Belfast also complains of the oppression of the minority in Belfast by the majority. This complaint of the hon. Member reminds me of the fable of the "Wolf and the Lamb." The minority in Belfast seem to think that they may treat the majority there in the way in which the majority in the West of Ireland treat the minority, and they have found that it will not do. I say that from the unfortunate time when in the case of one of the docks the minority threatened that there should be no employment given to the majority the coercion has been on the part of the minority. [Mr. SEXTON: No !] the evidence given before the Commission and the Report itself sustains that view, notwithstanding what may be thought by the hon. Gentleman opposite. The Bill referred to by the hon. Gentleman passed through the second reading in the small hours of the morning, at a time when the House was in a temper which forbade deliberate discussion.

THE CHAIRMAN

I regret to interfere with the hon. Gentleman in replying to the statement made by the hon. Member for West Belfast, but I must point out that it is quite irregular to discuss the Bill upon the present Vote.

MR. EWART

I bow at once to your decision, Mr. Chairman, although I believe the hon. Member for West Belfast opened the question very largely in the speeches he has made this evening.

MR. SEXTON

I never did anything of the kind.

MR. EWART

In obedience to your ruling, Sir, I will reserve my observations to another opportunity.

THE CHIEF SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Mr. A. J. BALFOUR) (Manchester, E.)

I will endeavour to go through the various points raised by the hon. Member for West Belfast (Mr. Sexton) earlier in the evening, and which he has recapitulated in his last speech. The first point taken by the hon. Member was the duty on the part of the Government of giving the names of those persons who were undergoing police protection in various parts of Ireland. I confess that I do not feel myself able to give the hon. Member the promise which he asks for, nor do I perfectly understand the motive which induces him to ask for it. The principal ground on which I object to accede to the request is, that I do not think it would be fair to those persons who have already to undergo both the annoyance of police protection and the danger which makes it necessary, that the peculiarities of their cases should be canvassed in this House and made the subject of public debate. The hon. Member has rather hinted to the Committee that many of these cases were due to the obstinacy and folly of the persona under protection, and he has implied that they have brought their misfortune upon themselves. If that were the case with every one of them, I think it would be rather hard that we should give their names and allow all the supposed facts of their cases to be brought before the House in debate and criticized with the view to show, first, that they ought not to have received police protection; and, secondly, that if they have required it, it was entirely due to their own fault. The hon. Gentleman went on to discuss what he described as The Times calumny. [Mr. SEXTON: Libels !] I think the hon. Gentleman used stronger language; and he told us that the Government had fled from the position they had originally taken up in that matter. I have never altered my position in this respect, and I have never felt that I had any reason why I should withdraw from what I have stated in this House and in public. The hon. Gentleman asks whether we will prevent these publications being circulated in the police barracks. For my own part, I confess that I do not see my way to start what would be an entirely new thing with regard to the police force—namely, an index expurgatorius.

MR. SEXTON

Will you let them have United Ireland?

MR. A. J. BALEOUR

I should as much regret to lay down any regulations with regard to United Ireland as I should to lay down any regulations to prevent the police reading any pamphlet which they may desire to read, and I must entirely decline to do what the hon. Gentleman asks for. The hon. Member then proceeded to discus3 the position of the men who left the police force in 1882 and in 1884, and who consequently did not get the increase of pension which they would have got had they left after that date. It is not perfectly accurate to say that those members of the force are suffering from injustice, because they were engaged to enter the force on certain terms, and those terms have been rigidly adhered to. At the same time, I am ready to grant that they may have a sense of hardship when they compare their lot with that of their more fortunate brethren who did not leave until after 1884, I have had my attention already called to this matter, and I will again look into it and see if anything can be done. The hon. Gentleman then went on to discuss the police fund, and here, I think, he made several assertions which, had he been aware of the facts, he would, at all events, have refrained from laying before the Committee. In the hon. Member's opinion, there was an accumulation fund, which, in 1866, was used in an improper manner. But, as a matter of fact, there was no accumulation; the money was spent each year, as I am informed. I understand that the whole police fund was administered under Statute and audited by the public auditors under the supervision of the Treasury.

MR. T. M. HEALY (Longford, N.)

Where can we find the report of the auditor?

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

The accounts wore audited by a public auditor. I am not able to say that the audit was a public audit, but I will inquire into the matter, and if the hon. Gentleman will place a Question on the Paper, I will give a specific answer to it. In the meantime I repeat that the accounts were taken by a public auditor, and therefore there is no ground for suspicion or belief that there has been any improper use of the fund, or that it has been spent as Secret Service money. The hon. Gentleman asks that there should be power to divide the accumulation among the pensioners; but it is sufficient to say that many of these pensioners have not contributed to the fund at all, and, consequently, it would not be fair to give them a share of it.

MR. SEXTON

They all contributed to it.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I believe I am right in what I stated.

MR. SEXTON

We say that the officers got three times as much as their pay, and the men only half as much,

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I will now leave that question, and proceed to the point of the hon. Gentleman relating to the riots which occurred in connection with the excursion of the Foresters—first of all saying that the hon. Gentleman will excuse me for stating that I doubt the accuracy of his remark about the police fund, although, as I have said, I will look into the matter. Now, with regard to the riots. The hon. Member proceeded to say that his clients, as I believed he called them, have been libelled by the Government, and that the Orangemen were responsible for the riot. I never concealed from the House that the first aggressors were those roughs of whom the hon. Gentleman spoke; but while I admitted that I was also bound to say that the provocation was no adequate justification of the reprisals subsequently made by the members of the Foresters Society who fired several shots, they being the only persons who fired shots at all. At Ballymoney the excursionists fired several shots apparently without provocation, and wounded a man who was only preserved from death by an accident. But Ballymoney is not the only place at which the excursionists fired. After leaving Ballymoney they fired other shots, and no reason is given except that the drink was beginning to tell; at the distance of a mile and a-half from this the trains were attacked, stones were thrown, and the excursionists replied by firing pistol shots. At Ballymena about 30 shots were fired; there were many people about, and three persons were wounded; for this there was no excuse, as the train was high above the people; an attempt was afterwards made to upset the train; that was, of course, unjustifiable; but the shots were fired on people entirely defenceless, and without any provocation. These are the facts, and I do not think they demand the inquiry which the hon. Gentlemen asks for.

MR. SEXTON

Is not the attack on the excursionists a fair matter for inquiry?

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

No. I do not think it is, because I do not admit that it was a riotous attack. It was more a row than a riot. The excursionists were extremely scattered, and it was impossible for the police to prevent the disorder, although, as I understand, they made every exertion to do so. The next point of the hon. Gentleman related to the resignation of police officers in different parts of Ireland. I cannot say at the moment what was stated on their resignation with regard to certificates, but that is a matter which I will inquire into. The whole number of the men who resigned in Ireland was only 16 or 17, and they appear to have represented no part of the general opinion of the force; there has been no strain of the kind which the hon. Gentleman deplores, and I understand that there are 2,000 candidates anxious to enter the force and replace the 16 men who resigned.

MR. SEXTON

I hope the Government will not refuse certificates of the good conduct to the men who left the force because they could not conscientiously discharge the duty imposed upon them.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

I should imagine that that would not be a ground for refusing certificates. At the same time, I can imagine that a constable might resign in a way and under circumstances which would practically amount to insubordination, and if that was so in the case of any police constable he would not deserve that certificate of good character which the hon. Gentleman desires should be given to every member of the Force who resigned. The hon. Gentleman then asks what line the Government mean to take up with regard to the Belfast Bill? I do not know that I have anything to add to the answers I have given in this House to the hon. Gentleman from time to time. The Bill is one which, with others relating to Ireland, the Government intend to bring forward. I confess that at this period of the Session it is impossible to think of passing any Bill which is likely to excite any prolonged controversy, and I would ask the hon. Gentleman to consult with his Colleague the hon. Member for East Mayo (Mr. Dillon), who practically assumed that the Bill was dead because he intended to oppose it. Of course, the point of this particular question is the amount of the time which would be consumed on the Bill; and, after all, the hon. Gentleman must not suppose that opposition to the Bill would be entirely confined to Gentlemen opposite. The hon. Member said he should offer the Bill his most strenuous opposition if one clause was withdrawn.

MR. SEXTON

I said I should offer it most strenuous opposition if the clause was in the Bill.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

Then I think an hon. Member who announces his decision to give the Bill serious opposition cannot well complain that the Bill is not on the Order Paper together with Business which it is absolutely necessary to get through. I regret that we cannot pass this Bill; but I would remind the hon. Gentleman of a fact already under his notice that, in my judgment, although it is not possible to say that riots will not occur again, we may look forward to the absence of serious riots now with greater confidence than we could two months ago, because the Crimes Act has armed us with greater power than we before possessed for dealing with riots.

MR. SEXTON

Power to deal with them when they have broken out, but not to prevent them.

MR. A. J. BALFOUR

The hon. Gentleman, I think, will hardly underrate the operation of the Crimes Act, because, unless I am deceived, it was proposed by hon. Gentlemen opposite that the Bill should be made to extend to the whole of Ireland by Proclamation of the Lord Lieutenant, and they have recognized that the Bill might be of great use in checking riots in the North of Ireland. I would remind the hon. Gentleman that we have already passed the two anniversaries at which riots are most likely to occur in Belfast, and that we have passed them without any very serious disturbances arising. I contend that there is no serious danger of riots occurring at Belfast, and therefore I think the necessity for the Bill referred to is not so immediate and pressing as might be supposed. I do not believe that the Roman Catholic population whom the hon. Member is very properly desirous of protecting, or the rights of property at Belfast, are in the slightest danger in the future, and therefore I hope the hon. Gentleman will not think it necessary to prolong the discussion on this subject.

MR. CLANCY (Dublin Co., N.)

I do not think the reasons of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland for not pushing on the Belfast Bill are sufficient. Why does the Government not use the closure against hon. Members who are opposed to the Belfast Municipal Regulation Bill? The right hon. Gentleman the First Lord of the Treasury (Mr. W. H. Smith) was very ready to use the closure in the case of the Crimes Bill. Why, then, does he not bring forward this Bill and apply the closure to hon. Members representing East, North, and South Belfast, who are the only Members in opposition to the Bill? The reason given by the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for not proceeding with the Bill is futile; but I think we know the real reason perfectly well. We can easily imagine that the right hon. Gentleman is in the hands of the old Orange ring of Belfast, and the members of the Corporation of that town do not want to be deprived of their power by the Bill. A clause has been specially inserted to draw the teeth of these magistrates in Belfast who are responsible for all the riots which have taken place; the powers of those magistrates are to be curtailed, But the Government refuse to put in operation the very instrument they have at their disposal for hurrying on Busi- ness; and in the meantime those prejudiced magistrates remain on the Bench provoking riots and making the town a bye-word. The right hon. Gentleman says that the Belfast crowd would know that the Crimes Act was in existence, and therefore further riots were not to be expected; but if the Belfast crowd were assured in addition that the Government would use the Crimes Act against thorn we should be much more assured that this anticipated good result would happen. But the people of Belfast believe that the Crimes Act will be used against the Nationalists only. No sufficient reason has been given by the right hon. Gentleman for not passing the Bill. Any excuse seems sufficient to the right hon. Gentleman, in his flippant and insolent manner in this House—

THE CHAIRMAN

the hon. Member must withdraw that expression.

MR. CLANCY

Well, Sir, I withdraw. The reasons given for not stating the names of the persons Boycotted are very amusing. The idea of concealing from persons Boycotting the names of the persons Boycotted! Boycotting means that a large proportion of the population have united in avoiding certain people, and under these circumstances you refuse to give the names of the persons Boycotted, for the reason that, the persons Boycotting them would know them! It is ridiculous and absurd. the only reason I can give for the refusal of the right hon. Gentleman is that these statistics are a mass of fraud, and that they are filled up with cases which never occurred. We are entitled to think this from what has resulted from the examination of similar statistics in the past. When the late Mr. Forster produced a list of outrages in 1881 hon. Gentlemen in this house had an opportunity of examining them, end in scores of cases they were found to be of a most frivolous character, while many were found never to have occurred at all except in the minds of policemen and clerks in Dublin, who were paid £20 each for the work of preparing the statistics. I have looked at the Return for the Division of the County of Dublin which I represent, and I find a blank in connection with it, although there are there a number of National League branches. I want to know why the Government do not fill up these blanks? They could easily have done that, and nobody would have been able to find them out, because they refuse to give all information. I will give the Committee some information with regard to these cases of Boycotting. At a Petty Sessions, about a week ago, a man came before the magistrates and complained that he was Boycotted and intimidated by his brother farmers; he swore that he was driving home cattle and that he was called a dairyman and an emergency man; the charge of being a dairyman seems to be the one which he felt most. Now, this man was actually the provoker of all the disturbances in the neighbourhood, and he had summoned people in the neighbourhood before the magistrates on charges which on examination proved to be without any foundation. We believe that these cases of Boycotting are like that of the midwife whom the right hon. Gentleman has carefully avoided since he became Chief Secretary, and to whom he has never offered any apology for having grossly libelled her; nor has the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer made any apology to the people of Wexford, who were charged with depriving a child of milk, which charge was also disproved. I believe the Government know that these cases are more or less bogus cases, and that is the reason why they refuse the information asked for—

THE CHAIRMAN

The hon. Gentleman is again imputing to hon. Members of this House that they are saying what they know to be false. I must call on the hon. Member to withdraw.

MR. CLANCY

If I have said anything implying a want of truthfulness on the part of Members of this House upon the Treasury Bench, I do withdraw the remark; but a very strong suspicion is raised in our minds by the fact that investigation has shown that a number of cases of alleged Boycotting were bogus cases. After what has occurred, and after the Government have refused the information we ask for, we cannot avoid the strong suspicion that the cases they now put forward would also turn out to be bogus cases.

MAJOR RASCH (Essex, S.E.)

I have lived some years in Ireland and have had experience of the Irish Constabulary. I thoroughly agree with the hon. Member for West Belfast (Mr. Sexton), who has stated that the Irish Constabu- lary are not a crime-detecting force. We know that in point of physique they are the finest body in existence; but we also know that there is about them too much of the soldier and too little of the police-man. I have always thought that if they were more of a civil and less of a military force they would get through more work and cost the country less money.

MR. T. M. HEALY (Longford, N,)

I admit that the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland has endeavoured to meet our points; and I do trust that when he goes away for his holidays he will not forget to look into the matters brought under his notice. The right hon. Gentleman says, with regard to the police fund, that there has been no accumulation, and that there has been every year a Government audit. But it is a curious evidence of the distrust of the Government in Ireland that the police force themselves are alleging that the English Government is the most corrupt Government on earth, because they have been handing over immense sums of money to men like French, and others of the higher members of the force. These charges show the utter want of confidence in the Government; and I think that when you have these charges made the time has come for inquiry. If the Constabulary make charges of this kind, why do you not publish this audit; why do you allow these suspicions to go abroad, which blacken the British name in Ireland? You allege that these audits exist. If you say that they shall be published, I have no objection to withdraw from any further observations on the subject, and I shall be glad to hoar from the right hon. Gentleman a statement that he will carry out our views. The present police system, in Ireland puts into the hands of English gentlemen enormous powers which they do not know how to exorcise. Those gentlemen come to Ireland and spend a great deal of their time in shooting, fishing, and playing at lawn tennis with the girls. Why, all the pockets in Dublin may be picked and the whole of the city robbed so far as these gentlemen are concerned. They are very nice gentlemen for the purposes I have described; they want to be military men without police duties, because thieving and trespass are too much for their high notions. I assure the right hon. Gen- tleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland that the right hon. and gallant Gentleman at his side (Colonel King-Harman) can give him every information on this point, I will refer to the notorious case of Mrs. Lucas. Her husband is a magistrate, and the family has been under police protection for three years; there have been three burnings in the house, and they have made three several applications to the Grand Jury for compensation. It was not enough for those people to have ordinary patrols; they had the police actually in the house. Mrs. Lucas was convicted of having poured petroleum on the curtains, setting fire to them, and then claiming compensation. I think that by giving compensation you put a premium on acts of this kind. Take the case of a farmer when the season is wet; it is much better for him to get compensation at the rate of £5 a-ton for his hay than to sell it in the market for 30s. a-ton. The right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland (Colonel King-Harman) once went up to Dublin Castle and said that he should be shot if a certain man named M'Ewan was not arrested, and the man was sent to prison for six months because he had a knife in his pocket.

COLONEL KING-HARMAN

I beg the hon. Member's pardon. The man's name was Weldon.

MR. T. M. HEALY

The man's name does not matter. But the fact remains that the right hon. and gallant Gentleman went up to the Castle and said that someone was going to shoot him.

COLONEL KING-HARMAN

The man was not put in gaol. I have never asked for police protection, and never will.

MR. T. M. HEALY

Whether the man was put in gaol or not will easily appear from the list of suspects. Of course, if the right hon. and gallant Gentleman denies this I withdraw that portion of my case; but the story has been told in The World, and I presume it was on the authority of the right hon. and gallant Gentleman. At all events, I have shown that there is a distinct premium on this system of police protection; and I think that, as Representatives of the tenant class and of poor men, we should have some opportunity of testing what amount of real substance there is in these alleg- ations. We do not want these men to appear as persecuted persons when they are selling their eggs at 1s. 6d. a-dozen to the police. If you cannot particularize the names of individuals, you should give us some small area of the country, so that we may have some means afforded us of testing these allegations. This is a fair demand on the Government, seeing that a Member of the Government—the right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland—has been the first to throw discredit on the statistics of the police, and that the Government are now laying themselves open to the charge, whether true or false, of manipulating these returns. The statistics of crime in. Ireland suggest the idea of a concertina, which can be drawn out and shut up at pleasure. If it is wanted to prove that the Crimes Act is a success, it will be pushed in; and if the opposite course is thought desirable, it will be drawn out. I think we are entitled to what we ask for; and, considering that the liberties of the Irish people are being taken away upon the authority of the merest cyphers, I trust that when other statistics are laid upon the Table of the House, some opportunity will be afforded of enabling our local knowledge to be applied for the purpose of checking them.

MR. FLYNN (Cork, N.)

I think the answer of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland has been unsatisfactory in the extreme; but, after what has been said by the hon. Member for West Belfast (Mr. Sexton) and the hon. and learned Member for North Longford, who has just sat down, I do not propose to occupy the Committee at length. I will, however, give an example of the way in which this system of police protection works. There exists in a town on the borders of my constituency a large trader, who has property and farms in that constituency. This gentleman has had disputes for years with the farmers round about him; it became his interest to be Boycotted, and, as a matter of fact, since he was put under police protection the man has been making his fortune. He is supplying the police force for miles round him with things which the police could get cheaper in the neighbouring towns; he is sending carts for 20 or 30 miles over the country round him, and he is making a splendid profit; he has now practically the monopoly of one kind of business, and I have no doubt he blesses his stars that police protection was granted to him. We have been discussing this evening the Special Vote, and have gone into the question as to how far this expenditure is for the good of Ireland or for the benefit of the British taxpayer. I wish to call attention to the fact that on many occasions the Constabulary go beyond the law in Ireland, and that practically we have no redress. I will give an instance for the purpose of illustrating my meaning. I was asked to attend a social meeting to be held in the town of Kanturk. As I passed through the town the local band met me and accompanied me to the priest's house, and when they arrived at the gate leading to the private grounds of the priest the band entered; the police were about to follow, and the priest spoke to the Head Constable forbidding him to enter his grounds; the constable insisted on the right of entry. I stated that there was no intention of holding a meeting, and that I should certainly support Father Collings in this matter; the crowd gradually became more excited because the police were inclined to force their way through the gate over the body of Father Collings; the Police Inspector went away and returned with four armed men. This was a clear case of the violation of the law. There was no intention of holding a meeting; my visit was purely of a social character to the priest in question, and yet this party of police assumed that they could violate the law and enter the grounds of this gentleman without any warrant or authority whatever. It is of such things as that we complain. I asked the Inspector if he had a warrant, he said no; I asked him for his authority, he said that he acted on his own authority, and he added that he would use force; I said—"I will show you a way by which you can go round and observe everything that goes on, and if a public meeting takes place you can then exercise your right to enter." But when a policeman gets his back up in Ireland all thoughts of legality vanish; he knows no law but the ideas of the moment. These men actually forced their way across a ditch, and if I had not used my best exertions there would have been a collision between the people and the police, who committed the trespass. I contend that there was no right of entry; there was no meeting, and even if there had been there was no right of entry without warrant. All that the police were asked was not to commit a trespass. The notetaker drew a revolver; but the priest placed himself beside the policeman, and no harm was done. I addressed a Question on this subject to the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, and, to my indignation, I got the answer that the constables were perfectly right; that they had information that a meeting was to be held, and that the crowd were armed with pitchforks. The whole story was absolutely unfounded. We complain that on occasions of this kind the police, in their endeavour to gain promotion by their officiousness, are constantly breaking the law and endangering order. Instead of guarding the peace, their action has directly a contrary effect. I asked the right hon. Gentleman if he would grant a local inquiry, and he refused to do so; but he will receive the ex parte statement of the District Inspector, who will, no doubt, exonerate the police, no matter what they were guilty of. We are asked to vote £1,000,000 of money for the purposes of this force, and we, in return, ask that some restraint shall be put upon the action of the police. If, on the occasion I refer to, the Member for the District had not been present it would have been impossible to prevent a collision between the people and the police, because the crowd was composed mostly of young men who would easily have swept the police down the road. I could give half-a-dozen cases in which I have witnessed the exasperating and overbearing conduct of the police, and in which they have distinctly broken the law. It was only last winter that I was returning from a walk in the City of Cork and saw a large number of people coming from their evening devotions; a charge was made by the police at a short distance, and I saw the people who were coming from church beaten and be laboured in the most unmerciful manner by a number of constables who had been attacking the people at the distance of a few streets from the spot. What wonder is it that the police are not respected in places where these things are done? If the Government gave it to be clearly understood that the constables in the discharge of their duty in isolated districts must remain within the lines of the law, I prophecy that there would be a state of things very different from that which now exists in Ireland. We know that the Constabulary are not supposed to do more at evictions than simply protect the Sheriffs and bailiffs in charge, but I say that they show an anxiety to pass beyond the legitimate lines of their duty, which we might expect that any Government having at heart the best interests of the country and a sense of responsibility would seek to repress. We contend that the police in Ireland conceive it to be their duty to range themselves deliberately on one particular side—on the side of the so-called oppressed minority in Ireland, and it is under that view that the most harsh and illegal acts are committed by the Constabulary in Ireland; nor does this occur alone in cases which are known at the Castle, for there are hundreds of cases in which the people themselves are only too glad to allow what occurs to blow over. I think we should only be doing our duty to our constituents if we were to discuss these matters at very considerable length; and I regret that on the present occasion there is not a large attendance of hon. Members above the Gangway. [Ironical cheers.] I have stated nothing which is not within my own knowledge, and there is nothing that I have stated with regard to the action of the police for which I cannot give authority, and therefore the ironical cheers of hon. Members opposite have no bearing on the cases I have stated. I wish there were more hon. Members present, because I could lay before the Committee such instances of oppression on the part of the police as, I believe, have never occurred in a civilized country. But if we cannot get a large audience in the Committee to whom we can expose these things, we have a large audience outside to whom we can explain these acts of contemptible tyranny.

MR. DILLON (Mayo, E.)

The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland by what he has said to-night has exhibited to the Committee a very good specimen of the class of men who administer government in Ireland. Of all the absurdities of which the right hon. Gentleman has been guilty, the greatest is that of refusing to state the names of persons in Ireland who are Boycotted. We are told that, as one of the first essentials of Boycotting, men are denounced by resolution and by name, and yet we are told that you decline to give names because individuals may suffer in consequence. You must know perfectly well that whatever you may take away from the sufferings of these people, you cannot add to them by giving their names. We know that in many instances public sympathy has reached these people when their case has become known in England and elsewhere, and it is only by giving their names that it can be known. But to refuse their names and yet to say that these people are under police protection is absurd. The right hon. Gentleman asks why we want to know the names. We want to know them in order to be able to inquire into those matters. The late Mr. Forster treated us a great deal more honestly than the present Government, because he brought forward the names of the persons and the places in which the cases occurred. Mr. Forster laid a Blue Book upon the Table of the House which we were able to examine, and, from the particulars it contained, were able to prove that a great number of the cases were of a bogus character. What security have the Committee that a great number of these cases are not bogus, absurd, or altogether wrong? We know that shortly after General Buller reached the County of Kerry, he deprived a great number of the people of the police protection they were receiving; he found out that this police protection was given without adequate inquiry, and frequently without any inquiry at all, and in consequence he withdrew it from a great number of people in the district. I ask hon. Members if that is not a proof that in other parts of Ireland numbers of bogus cases may occur. Many of these cases are unquestionably of that character, and it seems to me that you encourage the people to act in this way, because you grant police protection to them without the slightest inquiry. Some time ago a Resident Magistrate went to the County of Mayo; he arrived in the district, and in three months he increased the turmoil; he wrote a letter to the newspapers describing the state of things which was so preposterous that he was got rid of. This gentleman who was a divisional magistrate, had seven or eight policemen about his place; they patrolled his plantations, they stopped every one who went up the avenues: even beggar women were stopped and questioned; when he went out he had constables with him on the car, and when he came to a hedge the constables jumped down and beat the woods before he arrived. This system went on for mouths. I know another magistrate who resided in the same district, and who although he did his duty well, and was promoted by Lord Spencer, yet walked about his district unattended and, I venture to say, never had a car during the whole time he was in the county. That proves that you furnished without inquiry a bodyguard to a man who did not require it at an expense of £1,000 a-year, and instead of its doing any good his district became a focus of disorder. Here is one sample of the stupidity of the Government in encouraging men in this unnecessary and idiotic course without inquiry; and the case of the magistrate who fearlessly did his duty, and walked about the country free from all idea of danger, proves, I say, beyond contradiction that there must have been something wrong in the conduct of the other magistrate who was afraid of and insulted everybody about him. Mr. Clifford Lloyd cost this country £5,000 a-year; he kept 20 policemen on duty; he never went on his excursions unless he was surrounded by a bodyguard like an Eastern Pasha; he left a train of disorder behind him; you sent him to Egypt, and having made that country too hot for him you had to kick him out of Egypt. Then you sent him to the Mauritius and had to kick him out from there; and now you have him on your hands like a White Elephant, and do not know what to do with him. Then there was the case of the man who got police protection in Galway, and used to walk about, attended by policemen on a ear which he hired at 10s. or 15s. a-day. What security have we in cases analogous to this? Not the slightest. In these cases of police protection I am convinced that if you gave us the names and particulars—and there is no shadow of excuse for not doing so—we should be able to prove that the large majority of these cases are either bogus and unnecessary, or due to the outrageous con- duct of the individuals themselves, conduct that you encourage in Ireland by affording this protection. In the case of Miss Ellard the police took up their quarters in the house, and in a short time Miss Ellard got married to one of the constables. I do not know whether it is the duty of the Executive to find ladies with police officers to ride about wish thorn in carriages, but in this case she married one of the constables, and he took the name of Ellard. Then there is the case of Lord Kenmare. Last year you spent £1,200 in protecting his house near Killarney, and is not that a monstrous state of things? Here is a man who ruins himself by foolish extravagance, who keeps the whole district of Kerry like a boiling pot in consequence of his evictions, who has reduced himself to the condition of a pauperized absentee, who leaves his whole estate and his people without any supervision at all, who locks up his empty house and does not visit the place at all, and yet the Executive Government spend £1,200 a-year in protecting it. Do you not know that in this you are encouraging a bad spirit in these men, that if he was at home as he ought to be the Government would not have to spend this money, and the result would be better both for him and the Government. I have given these cases because they strongly illustrate the motives we have of inquiring into these cases of police protection. The naked fact that there are 2,000 or 3,000 people in Ireland needing police protection looks exceedingly bad before the country, but if the Committee analyzes case by case they will succeed in breaking down the force of the argument, and reducing the case of the Government into a poor one indeed. There are two other subjects I will draw attention to, and I hope the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary will give some explanation. First of all, I refer to the case of the literature which is circulated in the police barracks in Ireland. I agree with the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary, there ought to be no supervision over the literature of the force, but does the right hon. Gentleman contend seriously it is open for anyone to stick up in the barrack day room a cartoon from United Ireland or any other Nationalist newspaper? I should like to see the men stick up cartoons from English comic papers, but there ought to be the same rights given to any constable, whatever his creed or politics, but I do not believe that a policeman would be permitted to stick up in the barrack day-room cartoons from the Nationalist papers in Ireland. What we object to is this. Do one thing or the other, either make a rule that no Party literature is to be introduced, or, if it is allowed, make no distinction by which men are permitted to stick up only grossly offensive placards and caricatures which are insulting to those men of the force who are Catholics and Nationalists. I will conclude what I have to say by alluding to some proceedings of the police at Bodyke on Colonel O'Callaghan's estate the other day. The tenants are now in possession of their holdings, and are prepared to submit to the consequences imposed by the law upon those who go back upon their holdings. The law provides a stringent remedy, and if there is one thing more than another to be insisted on it is that when you make a law stringent you should observe it in all respects. The police on this estate go round in squads, and terrify the people. When they see a door open, they rush in, and sometimes burst the door open and frighten the lives out of the women and children; they rush in, and generally conduct themselves in a very offensive and grossly illegal way. There is no necessity for it, for it is open to them to summon all these people before the Court, and deal with them there. I maintain they have no right to do as they have been doing, and that it is unnecessary and monstrous to allow these policemen to rush about like so many bullies trying to intimidate and frighten the people. What I want to know is, upon what authority they do it? I contend that that part of the Crimes Act relating to re-taking possession is most brutal, and that it ought not to be enforced by the Government; and, farther, that this abominable system of police patrols, without any law at their back, ought not to be allowed. These people are prepared to go to prison, and to stand the worst the Government can do, but I protest, in the strongest way I can, against the brutal insults offered by the police to women and children.

MR. CHANCE (Kilkenny, S.)

I desire to make some remarks upon an item in this Vote, and to ask for some ex- planation upon it. Some time ago the hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for East Essex (Major Rasch) made some very sensible observations as to the extraordinary military character of the Irish police, and gave it as his opinion that the force should be as much as possible civilized. He emphasized his observations by saying he had some experience of Ireland, and as he did not go there as a Crown official, or as a member of the landlord class, he was in a position to give an unbiased and a fair judgment, but I think that hon. and gallant Member would be rather surprised if he looked at Sub-head H. He would there see that the ammunition provided for the force cost last year £150, but that under the rule of a Unionist Government, provision has been made for the purchase of ammunition of the value of £650 for this year. I know that the police have their weapons, that they have bayonets, and I admit it is reasonable they should have some ammunition for their firearms. As was proved by that affair in Youghal, a policeman with a bayonet can hardly be expected to murder more than one man at a time. In that case the policeman pursued him and killed him on the spot, sending his bayonet into the man's spine. The police generally pursued these running people, even into private houses, where they had no right to go; but they wore unable to do to death more than one of these people who were running away. Therefore, firearms are so much more superior to the bayonet. Of course, with firearms, even though a crowd is running away, you can shoot them down at a distance of 200 yards. Formerly the police were armed with firearms that fired a bullet, but they were not good enough shots to bring down their men. I admit that in a dense crowd the odds were that a policeman would lodge the bullet in someone; but lately the Government appear to have discovered that dense crowds are a rarity— except in Belfast, but there it would be criminal to interfere with riots when they bear a political complexion—and accordingly the old bullets were discarded in favour of the buckshot cartridge. Many hon. Members may not thoroughly understand what that is. These cartridges have the ordinary charge of powder, perhaps a little less, and a certain number of buckshot, the interstices being filled with plaster of Paris. When the cartridge is fired it goes solid for a certain distance, and then opens and scatters so that the police are able to fire with a better chance of hitting and killing someone. The buckshot is large enough to kill at 100 yards, or even at 150 yards, and as the shots spread, I have no doubt whoever invented this method of assassination prides himself upon the increased returns the Government are likely to get for the ammunition expended. Up to the present about 30,000 rounds have been issued for the use of the police every year, costing £150. Taking the outside price for these cartridges to be 10s. per 100—though I believe the cost is something nearer 8s. per 100—£150 would represent 30,000 rounds. This year the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland has taken provision for 130,000 rounds, £500 additional for the declared object of buying an extra 100,000 rounds of this ammunition. The financial year ends on the 31st March next, and this addition, if it is to be expended at all, will have to be expended within the next six months. I assume that every hon. Member of the Committee admits that up to the present the principal duty of the Police Force in Ireland has been to aid at evictions. Last year you had the disturbing element in the case of the Belfast riots, but I assume there is no intention now on the part of the police to use buckshot or any other weapon upon the loyal and patriotic rioters of Belfast. The Land Act of the Government has been described by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham (Mr. J. Chamberlain) as a boon which has put a stop to evictions, except those that are just evictions, and therefore I think I am entitled to ask the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary if he would be good enough to explain to the Committee on whom it is intended to expend this additional 100,000 rounds of ammunition, for the purchase of which this additional sum of £500 has been asked from the Committee? I think it is absolutely necessary and highly desirable for the Representatives of the Irish people, upon whom the police most likely will utilize this ammunition, to ask the right hon. Gentleman to sketch out for us, as near as he possibly can, upon whom this ammunition is to be ex- pended, and for what operations in Ireland he proposes it shall be used? Of course this ammunition is not got for nothing, and if it is not absolutely necessary, I would ask the right hon. Gentleman to submit to a large reduction in this special item. It seems to me that if he gets this large amount of ammunition in this present year for the benefit of these police constables, it seems to me to indicate to them—I am sure it is untrue, and has not entered the mind of the Government—they are to inaugurate in Ireland a reign of legalized police assassination and murder, that they are to consider the tenantry of Ireland as so many partridges to be shot down in a battue. I trust that is not the case, but I wish to learn why four times the amount of former years is required in the present year?

COLONEL KING-HARMAN

With regard to the last question, as to the ammunition, the amount under the subhead is about the average. The explanation is very simple. There is now very little ammunition in store, and the increased amount is to replenish the stores. It must also be remembered that the Constabulary require a large quantity of ammunition for the course of musketry instruction they have to go through every year.

MR. ROWNTREE (Scarborough)

I can boar testimony to the military character of the police in Ireland, and I would ask whether there is any reason why at every little roadside station, where there is scarcely anything to shelter them, you should be confronted with a military man, fully armed with his rifle and bayonet, as if a foreign force were expected by the next train? Is there not a better means of utilizing the men in Ireland than this extraordinary method? The only reason that has been given for the great expense occasioned by this extraordinary system, apart from historical reasons, is the agrarian agitation of hon. Members below the Gangway. But is not the answer to that suggestion to be found in every report of every Commission that has gone from Parliament to Ireland, and studied the agrarian question? It is too late in the day now to ask Englishmen to be satisfied, and go on paying this extraordinary charge, when the whole cause of the agitation arises from the distress and misery of the people. I only wish to say this in conclusion. Speaking to one of the officers of the Constabulary last year, in County Limerick, an officer who had no Nationalist proclivities, and asking him about the condition of things, he said—" Many of the people are hungering, and I scarcely know what they will do in the winter." I said—" Have you much difficulty with larceny?" and he said—" No, not much to speak of." "Anything to complain of in drinking?" "No, except at fair times." I said—" I suppose the serious difficulty arises from the agrarian question? ""Well," he said, with a sort of smile, "if the people were allowed to live upon their holdings at rents they can fairly pay, all the agitators in the world could do us no harm whatever." I think it is time, on behalf of the taxpayers in. this country, that this should come to an end.

DR. TANNER (Cork Co., Mid)

I should have liked to have spoken on this subject at greater length, if there had been more time. I had altogether 37 cases to make out, but I can assure hon. Gentlemen I shall not go into all of them now—I will only refer to two or three. There is one case in particular that I should very much have liked to have spoken upon, but I apprehend I should do better to defer it to some future occasion. I, once in my life, was surprised from the blow of a policeman's baton—the right hon. and gallant Gentleman the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland (Colonel King-Harman) suffered from the police, but he became the hero of Cremorne, whereas I became the victim of police misapprehension. But I will defer my case in regard to the Sub-Inspector to a future and more convenient occasion. Several instances I have already brought before the House in the course of the present Session, and had I received an answer couched in the tone one would expect from the right hon. Gentleman—had I received anything like a satisfactory answer—I should not have brought forward these cases, but I will only give two or three of them on this occasion. The first instance, I will call attention to is the case of Sabina Murphy, which I brought before the House before. Sabina Murphy lived in the vicinity of Millstreet; and in the early portion of last year, hon. Members will recollect—as a great point was made about this case by the right hon. Gentle- man the Chief Secretary—this girl was maltreated, her hair chopped off, and midnight ruffians poured gallons of tar on her head. The right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary denounced this terrific outrage in a way which only his mellifluous eloquence could; but what happened? Sabina Murphy, after this outrage, was visited by—amongst the police—one young man whom this girl dearly and fondly loved. Well, Sir, the Sub-Inspector of the Constabulary, who is a short thick-set young man, favoured the alliance between this young woman and Sub-Constable Austen, in hopes something might turn out for the benefit of Her Majesty's Government. What, then, happened? According to the statement of the right hon. Gentleman, Her Majesty's Government were determined to make a swoop somehow and somewhere, and, accordingly, arrested a number of men who lived in the vicinity. Having arrested these men, and lodged thorn in Millstreet, they wanted to justify their action, as there was absolutely no evidence against them; so they put the screw on Sub-Constable Austen, and he, in his turn, was to put the screw on this girl he was going to marry. Sabina Murphy did not seem to see it, and she refused to be any party to such a really underhand proceeding. If Her Majesty's Government wanted to do it let them do it themselves. What, then, happened? This girl got married to Austen, and after she was married Austen was brought back to this Mill-street district, and kept in communication with the police, in order, with the aid of his wife, to fix the crime on some one of these men. The girl told the story herself in a letter which she addressed to one of the Cork newspapers—The Cork Daily Herald. The girl's statement, since then, has been confirmed by her husband; and it appears from this that Sub-Inspector Smith—this gentleman who I have many more charges against—this Sub-Inspector of the Millstreet district tried to get her to bear false evidence against the men arrested by the Government. That is proved beyond all doubt; and the right hon. Gentleman ought to know that if he does not. What happened then? When this girl and the Sub-Constable both refused to bear false witness against their neighbour the Government were said on their job, and, being sold on their job, they were determined to get rid of the whole lot, and they gave this unfortunate man notice to quit. To my certain knowledge he was in the infirmary in the City of Cork, and being the tool of Her Majesty's Government—but being unable to work out the ends they designed him to work out—he very nearly lost his reason. He was in the north infirmary at Cork for a fortnight. After he came out of the hospital he went back to duty for a fortnight, and then was dismissed the Constabulary. Directly on his being dismissed the Constabulary he appealed to the people in the vicinity, and addressed letters to the Press; and then what did the Government do? They said—" Do, for goodness sake, go in peace, Austen ! Do not throw any more light on that moonlighting expedition. Go in peace; and we will get you a place in the City of Liverpool police." If ever there was a job in this country this was one—commencing with the right hon. Gentleman's statement in this House, and winding up in this ignoble way with the Government slinking from their guns, shirking their responsibility, and getting this man a place in the Liverpool police. That is the outcome of a tale of bogus outrage which was commended to the consideration of this House by the right hon. Gentleman in his speech at the commencement of this Session. I told you that I only intended to mention one or two cases. I would like to give you at least another case; but I will refrain. But I hope that the one I have given will sink deep into the ailettanti mind of the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary. It may, at all events, take root and bear good fruit, if it falls on good soil. Apologizing for trespassing, even in this brief way, upon the time of the House, I will only say, in conclusion, that even if the right hon. Gentleman does not listen to what I have said, it may reach the ears of the English people, who are his masters and paymasters.

MR. NOLAN (Louth, N.)

I should like to know how the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland accounts for the continuous increase of the Pension List of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and where he intends to draw the line. The total number of police in Ireland is 12,404, and there are no fewer than 5,333 pensioners. Now, that is a state of things which, I dare to say, it would be difficult if not impossible to parallel in any country but Ireland, and which would not be permitted in Ireland under a native Government. How does it arise? Reference has been made to the fact that the Irish police are more a military than a civil body. Just about the time that a policeman would be able to discharge his duty as a police officer efficiently he is thinking about retiring, owing to his distaste for the barrack-room life, for being hampered with military equipments, and for being compelled to patrol the roads day and night under arms as if he were in an enemy's country. Then, owing to the unpleasant nature of the work that the police are called upon to discharge, there is great anxiety amongst the older members to get away on pension; and, at the same time, the younger men of the force have to be induced to remain by removing the sergeants and head constables, and thus opening out the path of promotion to the younger men. Now, I should like to know what the right hon. Gentleman has got to say about this condition of things—whether he has any explanation to offer? Then there is another matter which, though small in itself, is of considerable importance to the constituency I have the honour to represent. I put, a short time ago, a Question to the Chief Secretary for Ireland. He did not answer it himself, but put up the Parliamentary Under Secretary (Colonel King-Harman) not to answer, but to "bluff" the Question, and to throw ridicule on it. It related to an outrage which was perpetrated on a poor man, one of my constituents. This man was in the habit of serving bread at the house of the District Inspector. When he called at the house for this purpose on one occasion, the District Inspector summoned him into his presence. When the poor man came into the room where the District Inspector was, that officer seized him by a long beard which he were, dragged him to a table in the centre of the room, took a large pair of sheers off the table, and while his son held him, cut his beard off close to the chin. those facts were sworn to by the man in his affidavit. Now, how did the Inspector meet the charge when an ac- tion was immediately afterwards brought against him? He swore that he committed no assault, and that no violence was used—that all that happened was that with the full consent of the man, he clipped about an inch off his beard. Further, he got the case put off until the Summer Assizes; and then before the case came on, he settled with the man by paying him £20 and all expenses, rather than allow the case to go into Court. Now, one of the statements made by the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Ireland in connection with this case was, that the alleged assault occurred six months ago, and that in the meantime, a witness whom the District Inspector could have called in support of his statement had loft the country. But the fact of the matter was that there were three or four ladies and gentlemen present at the time, who could have borne witness in favour of the District Inspector, had he chosen to go into Court and had the facts been as he had stated them. This may sound a rather small affair. It seems a trifling thing in the eye of the right hon. Gentleman that a poor man was assaulted in this way. But would he like to have such an assault committed on himself? And if he would not like to have such an assault committed on himself, what right has he to assume it may be committed with impunity on any of Her Majesty's subjects, however humble he may be? I hope that before the decision of the Committee is taken on this Vote, we shall have some more satisfactory account of this affair from the right hon. Gentleman. Apart from the assault, it is quite clear that the District Inspector committed perjury. He swore falsely in his affidavit and he, in effect, acknowledged this by afterwards paying £20 and all expenses. Now, in view of the extraordinary powers which even at any ordinary time are vested in a District Inspector's hands in Ireland, and of the still greater powers which will be vested in his hands under the Coercion Act, I ask are not the people of Dundalk and its vicinity justified in looking with some concern to the fact that this man will be allowed to remain in our neighbourhood—seeing his temper and the fact that he has no regard for an oath? I might, if I chose, make out a case from other circumstances against this District Inspector Supple, and the way in which he discharges his ordinary duties. Walking through the streets of Dundalk, a short time ago, I was followed by a half-witted creature—who made use of the most filthy and abusive language; and though this occurred near the centre of the town not a constable could for a long time be found. To escape from the annoyance, I went with a gen-gentleman to an hotel close by, and when there my attention was attracted to a crowd higher up, and there were two men in the middle of the street boxing in their shirt-sleeves in full view of the hotel windows. They fought for 15 minutes in the centre of the town with their seconds about them, and there was not a policeman to interfere. Before I left, I saw two armed and mounted constables ride off into the country as if they were going out to meet a foreign enemy. This is the way the time of the men is spent under the direction of District Inspectors like Mr. Supple. Their time is wasted in patrolling the country by day and night with arms in their hands, instead of attending to the ordinary duties of police. I will not, however, dwell on the matter further this evening; but I would ask the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary whether he has any intention of taking further steps in connection with this inspector? The Parliamentary Under Secretary said that Mr. Supple had been severely admonished from Dublin Castle. But will a severe admonition meet a case of this kind? If a young constable had committed this assault, and had also committed perjury, he would have been dismissed the force immediately. What action is to be taken against this man who has spent 30 years in the force, and now occupies a responsible position? It is, I think, a case which calls for a thorough investigation.

MR. MURPHY (Dublin, St. Patrick's)

I do not intend to refer to many of the topics which have been referred to this evening, though there is not a Member from Ireland who could not add something to the exposure of the faults of the police. I want to call attention to the supply of clothing to the Irish Constabulary. There is a Vote of £33,632 on account of this clothing. Now, in the Division of Dublin which I represent, there was a large clothing factory, and the proprietor of this factory complained to me that he did not get any fair opportunity of putting in a tender for the supply of Constabulary clothing. Such short notice, he said, was given when clothing was required, that it was impossible for Irish firms to compete with the authorities in London. I found then, to my great surprise, that the supply of Constabulary clothing came under the War Office, and what I want to call attention to is the desirability of having the police clothing made up in some Department connected with the Constabulary itself. This is an organization confined solely to Ireland, though it is one of a military character. It has no other connection with the Army, and it seems strange that their clothing should not be made up, as other supplies for the Constabulary are provided, by some Department connected with the Constabulary, and not by the War Office. I hope the attention of the Irish Government will be directed to this matter, and that something will be done to on able Irish establishments to get a fair share of these contracts. Another question to which I wish to call attention is the condition of the Constabulary barracks; £32,000 is voted in these Estimates for Constabulary barracks. That shows that Constabulary barracks are generally rented and are not the property of the Government. I know that in many country towns the Constabulary are very badly housed, and that the sanitary condition of the barracks is very bad. Besides that, in many towns many prisons have, under the new prison system, been closed up. The consequence is that there are no places to put prisoners except some miserable dens, where they are confined under conditions of great hardship until the Director orders their removal to one of the larger prisons. One of the recommendations of the Prisons' Commission was that licensed lock-ups should be provided in lieu of the disused prisons, but this has Dot been done. No lock-ups have been provided. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for West Belfast (Mr. Sexton) will be satisfied with the discussion that has taken place on the points he has raised; but I cannot think that the Chief Secretary for Ireland has given a satisfactory answer to one at least of the questions raised by the hon. Member for West Belfast. I refer to the Chief Secretary's answer in regard to the Police Fund, for I think the case for some investigation in respect to that fund seems overwhelming. The evidence goes to show that nobody knows anything about it. If so, I think it is clear that a thorough investigation should take place.

MR. CLANCY (Dublin Co. N.)

I want to know whether late Constable Macfarlane, who figured so conspicuously in the evidence before the Belfast Riots Commission, is still in the employment of the Government, or has been promoted? And I wish to give Notice that if the Chief Secretary for Ireland does not answer the question now, or gives an unsatisfactory answer, I will bring the matter up again on the Report of Supply.

MR. SEXTON

I am willing to defer any further discussion on the questions I have raised until the Report is brought up. I suppose the Government will report Progress after this Vote is disposed of.

MR. T. P. GILL (Louth, S.)

It is positively disgraceful that a man who has been publicly found guilty of committing an assault, and also of committing perjury, should occupy an influential position in an important town like Dundalk. I hope the Government will give some assurance that the man will be properly punished.

THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDER SECRETARY FOR IRELAND (Colonel KING-HARMAN) (Kent, Isle of Thanet)

The hon. Member opposite (Mr. Nolan) did me an injustice in saying that I was put up to "bluff" the question to which he referred. I investigated the case which he mentioned as far as I could, and I intended by my answer to convey censure of the officer referred to—District Inspector Supple. I said that he had been severely reprimanded by the Police Authorities, and that a reprimand to a Constabulary officer of his standing was a very serious matter. With regard to the questions of the hon. Member for North Dublin (Mr. Clancy), I cannot answer them at present.

DR. TANNER (Cork Co., Mid)

Will some steps be taken to curb the impetuosity of District Inspector Smith?

COLONEL KING-HARMAN

His conduct will be inquired into. I cannot now say more than that there shall be an inquiry. As to the clothing of the Constabulary, that is provided for by the Army Authorities. There is a certain amount of Army clothing supplied from Ireland; but I quite agree with the hon. Member that more clothing should be supplied from Ireland.

Question put.

The Committee divided:—Ayes 107; Noes 50: Majority 57.—(Div. List, No. 432.)

[2.0 A.M.]

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Chairman do report Progress, and ask leave to sit again."—(Mr. A. J. Balfour.)

MR. T. M. HEALY

I desire to say that I confirm the remarks made by the Chief Secretary, and that I find that he was right and I was wrong in regard to the man Weldon.

Question put, and agreed to.

Resolution to be reported To-morrow.

Committee to sit again To-morrow.