Ireland on the Make

Smiddy Reports. "The inferior types of Irish bulls are being rapidly eliminated under the Livestock Breeding Act." Thus, at Chicago last week spoke Timothy A. Smiddy, Minister from the Irish Free State to the U. S.

Of Irish bulls Mr. Smiddy spokes not facetiously but in deadly earnest. He spoke moreover of the River Shannon, not with a gushing Irish tear but as a businessman interested in hydro-electric power. "The Shannon," said Minister Smiddy, briskly, "is the largest river in Ireland and larger than any in England. . . . An hydroelectric installation is being effected in two stages. With completion of the first stage there will be available in 15 months 90,000,000 horsepower at a cost of $26,000,000, thus ultimately bringing light and cheer into every Free State village of a population above 500."

Minister Smiddy's large Irish audience must have recalled the vile, unlighted, peat-huts in which some of them were born. Into these, electric light! The old Ireland passes. . . .

Mr. Smiddy, dynamic, told convincingly that new Ireland is rushing forward much in the manner of new Italy. "Forty-nine new factories have been created within 24 months. . . . Fourteen thousand houses have been built or are building, and $7,500,000 has been expended to better housing conditions ... By the Land Act of 1923 very many farmers were enabled to purchase the land they had been working under favorable terms. Thus the last vestige of landlordism has been removed."

"It comes to this," concluded Minister Smiddy. "If one of the tests of self-government is the ability to insure stability and to lay the foundation for an economic and cultured development that will create for the average citizen the appurtenances for a full life, the people of the Irish Free State have already during the last five years amply justified their claim to be allowed to govern themselves."

President Elected. The legislators of the Irish Free State were, indeed, governing it and themselves very well last week, when they assembled in the first parliament to sit since the recent election (TIME, June 20, 27). Disorder seemed likely as the Fianna Fail ("Republican") deputies, led by famed Eamonn De Valera, appeared, and, for the first time, threatened en masse to take their seats--while persisting in their refusal to take the oath of fealty to George V without which no deputy elected to the Dail can sit therein.

For a time the Fianna Fail deputies milled about in committee rooms and moped in the corridor of the Dail. Policemen were numerous. The Fianna Fail's 44 members drifted gradually, nonviolently away.

Soon President William T. Cosgrave was re-elected to that office by a vote of 68 to 22--his own party numbering but 46. His speech of acceptance was long, reluctant, full of reproaches to the Fianna Fail for not taking the oath and their seats.

As everyone knows, Mr. Cosgrave is "President" only of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State. He is thus, actually, the "Prime Minister" of a "Cabinet" His office is deliberately misnamed "President" to give Irishmen a sense of greater freedom. They, no fools, are prone to remember that the similarly misnamed "Irish Free State" is presided over by His Britannic Majesty's Governor-General, Timothy Michael Healy, author of the tract "Why Ireland Is Not Free."