§ Mr. GINNELLasked the Home Secretary whether it is customary for the Home Office to use the power of the State to damage the professional prospects of a political opponent, as by advising the Royal Berkshire Hospital, the Royal Surrey County Hospital, and the Oldham County Infirmary to reject the applications for positions advertised by those institutions in the medical papers made by Dr. P. MacCartan, though doctors are badly needed; and, when the claim of the twenty-eight Irishmen deported without charge or trial for compensation for loss of positions, time, and salary comes up for settlement, what amount will the Home Office certify as due to its action in the case of Dr. MacCartan?
§ Mr. BRACEI have no knowledge of any applications made by this man to the Royal Surrey County Hospital or the Oldham Infirmary, but, in reply to an inquiry by the authorities of the Royal Berkshire Hospital as to the advisability of appointing him to be house surgeon at their hospital at Reading, the Home Secretary pointed out that Dr. MacCartan was the subject of an Order under the Defence of the Realm Regulations which requires1316W him to reside at Fairford, and he thought it his duty to add that, even if this were not so, there were objections to his being given an appointment in a hospital receiving military patients.
§ Mr. GINNELLasked whether it was by direction of the Home Office that when some of the men deported from Ireland to Oxford without charge or trial had arranged to pursue their studies in the Bodleian Library there, and the rest were making similar arrangements, they were all transferred to the village of Fairford, where no facilities of the kind exist; how this is reconciled with the Government promise of a choice of place of residence; why the police at Fairford were instructed to make provision for farm labourers; and whether the Cabinet concurred in these proceedings?
§ Mr. BRACEAs regards the first, second and fourth parts of the question, I would refer to the answer given by the Under-Secretary of State for War to the hon. Member for the Harbour Division of Dublin on 20th March; as regards the third part of the question, no such instructions were issued to the police, but I understand that the Chief Constable, in his desire to assist them immediately on arrival, made some provisional arrangements before he had seen the men, with a view to obtaining work on farms for them if they desired it.
§ Mr. GINNELLasked whether the English Government in Ireland will take up the challenge in the published letters of Messrs. Darrell Figgis and J. J. O'Kelly, and Dr. MacCartan, to put the deportees on trial before even a packed jury of one of the counties proposed to be excluded from the Home Rule Act; and, if there is no charge against those men which the Government can venture to submit to such tribunal, whether they will be forthwith released, compensated, and allowed to return to their homes and business?