September 3 1924
About 30 members of the British parliament are due in Belfast early next week. They will travel to Derry city and we are semi-officially informed that from Derry “they will set out on a tour of the border area. Captain Dixon and Mr AW Hungerford will play the part of escorts, but at intervals during the tour they will be joined by other Ulster members”.
So these English tourists have chosen their company. Apparently there are a few nationalists here and there who think Captain Dixon and Mr Hungerford are not good enough as companions for Viscount Curzon and his “tail” – that an effort should be made to meet those honest Britons and deliver speeches at them – while a distinct tendency to “boost” the carefully-prepared tour and the personally-escorted tourists is visible in some sections of the Dublin press.
The Englishmen want to be let alone. It is intimated in the official organ of the northern government that: “The visit is an entirely private one, and no public meetings… are in contemplation.”
But if “the visit” was as “public” as the falling Albert Memorial, and if as many “public meetings” as there are officials of the Unionist Association and northern government combined were “in contemplation”, would not the instinctive promptings of ordinary self-respect induce nationalists on both sides of “the border” to give the rovers a wide berth?
Does anyone really believe that Viscount Curzon and his followers are open to conversion?
Not a man amongst them will change his mind. Eight or nine of them have fallen into line behind the Dde-hard Viscount just to provide themselves with a sort of excuse when they make public announcements of the tergiversation upon which they have already decided.
A degree of importance might easily be attached – artificially and stupidly – to the excursionists if nationalists were silly enough to approach them and ask their permission to “state the case” from the nationalist viewpoint. It would then be proclaimed that, despite all the nationalists could say, Viscount Curzon, Mr DP Pielou, and 27 other persons who are nonentities to their bootlaces remained profoundly convinced of Sir James Craig’s wisdom and of the justice of his cause’.
