THE Irish boundary question is the third insistent problem that the Ministry has had to face at the end of a long and trying Parliamentary session. Ulster flatly declines to negotiate. President Cosgrave demands that the consideration of the boundary, provided for in the Treaty, shall no longer be postponed. His own political position probably depends on a settlement favourable to Southern ambition. Unless the British Government helps him to a position where he can flaunt some sort of territorial gain before the electors, it is generally anticipated that his Government will soon give place to a frankly Republican administration. After a hurried visit to Dublin, Mr. J. R. Thomas has announced the Government’s intention to bring in a bill empowering negotiations without an Ulster representative, and the House of Commons is to meet a month earlier to discuss the proposal. As a matter of fact, England is weary of Ireland and resentful at again being bothered by her affairs. As Mr. Philip Guedalla said on Tuesday, we have all enjoyed our rest from Irish problems and are not looking forward to further worries. The experienced political observer anticipated nothing but trouble from the multiplication of small States effected by the Versailles Treaty. But futile and retrograde as such a policy always is, there has never in the history of Europe been a political arrangement so absurd as the cutting of a small island like Ireland into two separate nationalities. It was supposed in England that the good sense of the North and the South would discover some method of arriving at a united Ireland in which Protestant Belfast and Catholic Cork would both exist in peaceful prosperity. Unhappily, neither the mood of the North nor the mood of the South is making at the moment for peace.
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