February 7 1925
Most Rev Dr [David] Keane, Bishop of Limerick, in a letter to Rev G Carroll, Limerick city, refers to the report of extraordinary happenings at a public dance hall recently, and adds: “It is difficult to believe that some of the incidents of which reports speak did really happen. They recall rather the revels of Pagan Bacchantes than the proceedings of a Christian community, and I cannot but feel that there is an increasing danger of the utter demoralisation of some of our people. The time has come to invoke the aid of the law. Furthermore, the people themselves must be called on to help, public opinion must express itself in no uncertain fashion in such circumstances”.
His Lordship concludes: “The old penalty of social ostracism might well be revived that all might know that every person admitted to live on equal terms to the members of a Christian community must conform to the requirements of Christian decency”.
The Catholic Church crusaded for years against the holding of modern dances, such as jazz, which it saw as morally repulsive.
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Liberty of the Press
The following editorial article appeared in yesterday’s issue of the “Derry Journal”: -
“The Northern Government has succeeded in the criminal charges against the proprietors of the Irish News and the Editor of that paper, but the success is sustaining a prosecution is not a victory upon which the Government can pride itself. In all the circumstances as revealed in the course of the original hearing and the appeal before the Recorder, we think that members of the Government and its supporters with the slightest leaning towards liberality and fair-mindedness should feel thoroughly ashamed that the proceedings were instituted. That section of the public actuated by sectarian and political prejudice against the Irish News will, no doubt, approve the action of the Government, ignoring the fact that almost daily there appear in certain organs which support the Ministry reports and statements which could be as readily construed as being calculated to engender bitterness and stir up religious ill-feeling as the impugned report of the “explosion or great noise” heard outside the door of a Tyrone Catholic farmer.
Publication of Derry Journal editorial which condemned the prosecution of the Irish News as an attack on the freedom of the Press by the Northern government.
