July 22 1924
The visit of the Duke and Duchess of York to the six counties area legally known as Northern Ireland is not their first experience in state duties of the kind. They have already been welcomed in various parts of Great Britain, not alone as royal envoys bearing the king’s message of paternal solicitude but as gracious personalities appealing irresistibly to the affections of the public.
With this intimate acquaintance with their congenial task, they may have in their visit to this part of the king’s dominions sensed the absence of something which had perhaps been so familiar as to be taken for granted in their civic welcomes on the other side of the Channel.
That something is unity. We do not say unanimity, because there is no-one who would raise a voice against extending to the royal visitors the genuine Irish welcome and kindly Irish hospitality due to a distinguished and amiable couple despatched on a courteous mission to our shores.
Apart from that general feeling, the reception is not the reception of a people but of a party, and so far from displaying the goodwill of a united community it only serves to emphasise the one-sidedness of all demonstrations of the kind in existing circumstances in Northern Ireland.
The unity that binds the people of Great Britain together in loyalty to its symbol and its safeguard is unknown here, because it is not permitted to exist. Such a unity must depend upon fair and equitable conditions all round. These conditions do not prevail in the north-east of Ireland.
There can be no feeling of unity in a people the majority of whom are taught to hate and distrust the minority, to steal its rights of representation in parliament and in the councils, to treat it in fact as well as in theory as an inferior race.
And from that bullied and contemned minority it is mere hypocrisy to pretend to expect a show of participation in the “loyalty” which the leaders of the majority have always taken good care to monopolise for their own use when required.
