March 17 1925
“First and last, the Boundary Question is the question of this General Election”, said the Northern Government’s official organ yesterday morning.
Will anyone explain how the Commissioners’ decision on the “Boundary Question” could be affected by the return of 52 pledged supporters of Sir James Craig by the people of the Six Counties on April 3rd?
The Commissioners are, as Sir James Craig ruefully remarked, “now seeking evidence actually within the Ulster area”. Sir James’s failure to secure recognition for his “consistent policy…refusal both to recognise the Commission and to appoint a member”, is positively ignominious. “Unionists” are toppling over one another in their eagerness to tell the solemn trio what they think of the situation. It’s a far cry from Newry and Derry around the crooked “Boundary”; but all the Partitionists in Newry have discarded Sir James Craig’s brilliant “policy”, and at Derry City only one member of the Corporation objected to the proposal that a full statement should be submitted to Messrs [Richard] Feetham, [Eoin] MacNeill and [Joseph R] Fisher: the solitary objector was a Nationalist TC who, quite properly, did not believe that a Corporation elected through a shameless process of gerrymandering were entitled to talk for Derry over the heads of a great majority of its people. Mr Justice Feetham and his two friends are calmly pursuing the even tenor of their way. They will ultimately produce a Report; that Report will not be influenced in the slightest degree – not to the extent of a comma – by any electoral manoeuvres: but the rights and liberties and the general welfare of multitudes of people in the Six Counties will be very seriously affected for the worse if Sir James Craig and the band of nepotists and pledge-breakers who surround and control him are sent back to the Assembly’s College with another unchallengeable majority.
The General Election was “rushed” because the Ministers and their masters and advisers were at the end of their tether. After a long struggle, after proclaiming again and again that they never would alter a syllable in their Education Act, and after inducing the Episcopalian Archbishop of Armagh to separate himself from his own people on an important issue, the Government behaved after the manner of the American politician described by Russell Lowell:
“A merciful Providence fashioned him holler
On purpose that he might his principles swaller”.
Irish News editorial claiming that the Northern government was using the pretext of calling the general election to the Northern parliament as being one about the boundary question as it had no achievements to boast about.
