Mercury with a Fork

London's tall, unarmed, polite police are adequate to deal with Englishmen, Scotsmen or Welshmen. But last week a heavy guard of Bobbies at Euston Station were swept aside like chaff by a crowd of grinning Irishmen who were more than willing to punch the nose of any officer who resisted. With shouts of "WE WANT DEV!", the Irish captured a platform up to which rolled a train bearing President Eamon de Valera. They clawed and climbed their way to the roof of the train --something which in England "isn't done" --cheered and waved Irish flags while the President of Eire was distinctly of two minds. Should he come out, certain to be acclaimed but possibly to be assassinated (as so many Irish leaders have been killed by Irish fanatics for coming to negotiate with England),* or should he duck through the corridor of the train and slip off unobserved by taxi at the far end of the platform? This wiser course the President took, explaining afterward that he was "sorry."

Meanwhile it transpired that during the past few months Eamon de Valera, while ostensibly traveling between Dublin and Geneva on League business, has been making little stopovers in London, negotiating on the quiet with Britain's Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, Malcolm MacDonald, the earnest, able, bespectacled, innocent-looking son of Scotland's late great Ramsay. Since 1932 the United Kingdom and the Free State have been engaged in a bitter tariff war, each deliberately rigging its schedules to hurt the other as much as possible. Another old sore is Free State resentment at the United Kingdom's continuing to maintain British harbor defenses, "on Erin's sacred sod."

Recently Eamon de Valera secured the adoption of a new Constitution which has changed the Free State into Eire (TIME, July 12 et ante). The new Constitution is so drawn that the "territory" of Mr. de Valera's nation "consists" of the whole island, and yet its "jurisdiction" today is only over what was formerly the Free State and not over Northern Ireland (see map).* Not only does Eire have to be mapped as two areas at once, but the whole conception is of a Catholic Irish nature, recalling that the new Constitution opens with the words: "In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority."

To the Protestants of Northern Ireland, this authority seems not only insufficient but provocative. They were boiling mad last week, and Viscount Craigavon, their Premier, was playing host in Belfast to new United Kingdom's Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha. If there should be fighting as a result of the new Constitution, Secretary Hore-Belisha will have well surveyed the Irish ground.

The whole point of Eamon de Valera's scheduled talks in London this week with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Mr. MacDonald is of course to attempt conciliation. Success will be hard to achieve, but optimists recalled that away back in 1921 the British Government, then headed by Prime Minister David Lloyd George, declared that "any effort to induce Ulster [Northern Ireland] to unite with the rest of Ireland will have our benevolent neutrality." After Mr. Lloyd George had had a little more contact with Mr. de Valera, the Welshman observed: "Negotiating with that Irishman is like trying to scoop up mercury with a fork."

*Even the chairman of the provisional Government of the Irish Free State, Michael Collins, was assassinated by Irishmen for having negotiated in England the treaty which made it.

*Full text of the articles of the Constitution concerned: Article Two: "The national territory consists of the whole of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas." Article Three: "Pending the re-integration of the national territory, and without prejudice to the right of the Parliament and Government established by this Constitution to exercise jurisdiction over the whole of that territory, the laws enacted by that Parliament shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws of the Free State and the like extraterritorial effect." Article Four: "The name of the State is Eire."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.