December 4 1924
Informations were refused in a case heard at Tipperary in which Patrick O’Dwyer, manager of a grocery establishment in Bansha, was charged with feloniously discharging a shot-gun at Civic Guard John Lynch, stationed at Golden.
The evidence was that after the guard had passed the car in which O’Dwyer and two other men were in, a shot rang out, the pellets of which grazed his overcoat. After the shot the car drove off fast. O’Dwyer was arrested later near Bansha.
The defence was that O’Dwyer had the gun across his knee, and it went off accidentally, through a young untrained cocker dog, which was in the car, sitting against the trigger. O’Dwyer, when arrested, exclaimed – “I would as soon have shot my mother as the guard”.
A novel defence from John O’Dwyer for shots directed at a garda by claiming his dog was accidentally responsible.
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Free State Terms
Several tenant farmers have written during this week asking for “a few leading particulars of the Irish Free State Land Purchase Act of 1923, to the terms of which we have pledged ourselves as the minimum of our demand”: we quote from a County Down farmer’s letter. He adds: “All I want to know is the basis on which the Purchase Instalments are calculated in the Twenty-six Counties, as we have been furnished with statistics relating to the Percy Report Bill which will enable us to compare the proposals for ourselves”.
Section 25 of the Free State Act is –
“(1) As respects tenanted land, the price of each holding shall be a capital sum, hereinafter called the standard price, of which amount that interest thereon at the rate of 4¾ per cent per annum will be equal to the standard purchase annuity for the holding, as ascertained in accordance with the first Schedule to this Act, together with a contribution by the State to the price calculated at 10 per cent on, and added to, the nominal price”.
Another clause of the Section relates to untenanted land.
Many in Northern Ireland, unionists and nationalists alike, sought similar land purchase terms in Northern Ireland to those available through the 1923 Irish Free State Land Act.
