October 28 1924
At the meeting of the Tyrone County Council in Omagh yesterday, the secretary said that at the last meeting one of three University Scholarships was granted to Mr Alan A Buchanan, who now wrote that he was going in for a divinity course at Trinity College, at which the scholarship was not tenable. It was now necessary to give the scholarship to another boy. The fourth on the list presented by the Selection Committee was a boy named McGeown, but, he (the secretary) made a mistake in the figures at the time, and the boy who should be placed fourth was a boy named Sweeney.
The Chairman (Captain Herdman) – Then the scholarship goes to this boy.
Mr Bennett – Protestants are paying three-fourths of the rates in the Co. Tyrone and they are getting no benefits from this scheme. The Protestant boy (Buchanan) merely got in by the skin of his teeth, and now he loses it.
The Secretary – If a Catholic boy has got more brains than a Protestant boy, why shouldn’t he get the scholarship?
Mr Bennett – Well, I would not give it to him no matter what brains he has.
The scholarship was granted to the boy Sweeney.
One disgruntled Unionist councillor on Tyrone County Council, by then a Unionist-controlled council, was annoyed that all the council university scholarships went to Catholics and not Protestants.
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The North
The Northern Government have arrested Mr [Éamon] De Valera under the provisions of their own Act of Parliament which empowered them to make prisoners of men without warrants and hold them in jails without charge or trial. The Act is extra-Constitutional; it is practically identical with martial law, which has been described as “the negation of law”. All Ireland knew that the Act existed and that it had been utilised; the Government openly proclaimed their intention of utilising it in connection with Mr De Valera’s journey to the Six Counties: therefore nothing unexpected happened at Newry and Derry. Northern Nationalists stand outside this little quarrel.
