FROM THE ARCHIVES:The Irish Times took some satisfaction from the details of the Government of Ireland Bill, the Home Rule Bill, when it was finally published in 1912, seeing it as a sore disappointment for nationalists.
WE PLACE before our readers to-day the eagerly-awaited text of the Asquith-Redmond Home Rule Bill. The Bill’s essential features have been already described by the Prime Minister [Herbert Asquith] and the Postmaster-General.
Their speeches filled Irish Nationalists with acute disappointment, and a study of the text of the Bill will strengthen rather than mitigate this feeling. The text emphasises the complete and minute control of the Imperial Parliament and the British Treasury over every aspect of what it has now become ironical to call Irish “self-government.”
The Parliament which is to open on the first Tuesday of September, 1913, will be in no sense an independent institution. Ireland will enjoy the paraphernalia, without the reality, of two legislative Assemblies . . .
So far as we can see, the Irish Parliament will have no real control over the legislative matters which are nominally reserved to it. The Lord Lieutenant is to give, or withhold, the King’s assent to Bills passed by the Irish Chambers. Acts of the Irish Parliament dealing with matters which are dealt with by Acts of the Imperial Parliament shall be read subject to those Acts, and, in so far as they may be repugnant to them, shall be void.
Questions of the validity of Irish Acts or Bills may, on the Lord Lieutenant’s motion, be referred to, and decided by, the Judicial Committee of the English Privy Council. Similar questions may, by the decision of the Irish Court of Appeal, be referred to the same tribunal.
The Parliament will have no power to make laws affecting “trade with any place out of Ireland”. From the first day the new Irish Parliament will be acutely conscious of “its place”. The charm of power, the glamour of independence, will cast no beams upon “the old House in College Green” . . .
The Bill gives no real self- government and no substantial prospect of it to the Nationalist majority. It offers no real safeguards to the Unionist minority. Mr. Asquith made a fine parade of the solid representation which the Bill gives to Ulster in the Irish House of Commons; but Clause 9 authorises the Nationalist majority, after three years from the passing of the Act, to change the whole constitution of the Irish House of Commons, including the qualification of electors, the mode of election and the constituencies themselves.
Finally, the Bill will not bring peace or relief to the Imperial Parliament. The third Clause, with its provision against the “direct or indirect” endowment of any religion, is pregnant with possibilities of bitter strife at Westminster. We cannot believe the Unionist Party will have a very difficult task in convincing the English people that this Bill is ill-conceived, unworkable, and unjust.