FROM THE ARCHIVES:Tensions grew in Belfast during the summer of 1912 against the background of the Home Rule Bill with both sides outraged by the misdeeds of the other, notably the intimidation of Catholic workers in the shipyards and an attack by members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians on a Sunday school outing at Castledawson. The Irish Times had this to say about nationalist complaints over the shipyard violence.
Yesterday the House of Commons discussed the responsibility for the origin of the Belfast disorders. Mr Birrell [chief secretary for Ireland] said truly that “Who began it?” is the most unprofitable of all questions.
The debate will not change a single Irishman’s opinion on the subject, though it may have enlightened some English members as to the sincerity of the Nationalist agitation.
Our own view of these disorders is on record. We think they are a disgrace to Belfast, that they ought to be promptly and firmly suppressed. But we are not going to allow Mr [Joe] Devlin [nationalist MP for West Belfast and Grand Master of the AOH] to make party capital out of them, or to use them for the purpose of vilifying honest men.
The disturbances are bad enough, but he has grossly exaggerated their nature and extent, and Mr Birrell has been a willing conspirator. To describe the Belfast outrages as “unparalleled atrocities” is a grotesque abuse of language.
The rioting in the Port of London yesterday [clashes between strikers and scabs] was far worse than anything which has happened in Belfast, yet we do not hear of regiments being sent to the docks. We agree that all necessary force should be employed in Belfast, but we have a strong suspicion that the dispatch of three whole regiments is a piece of political melodrama.
For years Mr Birrell has been callous to the complaints of persecuted men and women in the “retired and solitary places” of Ireland. He has dismissed the authentic tale of their sufferings with a quip.
Today he is another man. The sufferings of the Belfast minority have caused him “sleepless nights”. The performance is too obviously artificial . . .
The Belfast disorders are inexcusable. But they are not inexplicable, and, in order to explain them, it is not necessary to regard the Protestant workers in the shipyards as angels of virtue or demons of cruelty . . .
The lower class Protestants of Belfast have had to listen to the taunts and threats of Mr Devlin’s Hibernians, a body organised under the forms of religion. They have been warned of the servitude and hardship which await them under Home Rule.
The element of disorder has been just kept under in recent months, and the Castledawson affair brought it to the surface.
It is useless for Mr Birrell to try to minimise the effect on uneducated Belfast opinion of this Hibernian outrage. His pose of holy horror could only deceive a Radical Nonconformist [a Liberal Party member].
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