Jacks & Contracts

To Dubliners last week Armistice Day was just another unpleasant reminder that Great Britain and the Irish Free State are still parts of the same Empire. They showed their feelings by dynamiting an obelisk on Bray Head erected to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. On Armistice Eve the Irish Republican Army and the Laborites paraded and tiraded through Dublin streets to College Green. There they poured kerosene on two Union Jacks, brandished the blazing banners until only charred staves remained. Leaders howled at the crowd, "Destroy every poppy in Dublin tomorrow and burn every Union Jack and every emblem of British imperialism." They excoriated President Eamon de Valera for not having made it a crime to fly the British flag in Dublin on Armistice Day.

Taking his own time and way of annoying Britain, de Valera last week let to non-Britons the biggest batch of Free State contracts since the great River Shannon hydro-electric project eight years ago. Part of his long-range program to make Ireland self-sufficient, they called for -L-600,000 worth of machinery for beet-sugar factories at Mallow, Thurles and Tuam. German and Czechoslovak companies got the contracts in exchange for promises to buy more Irish farm products. When the three new plants are operating next autumn, the Free State need import no more sugar. Next problems: grain, clothing, paper, machinery, chemical products. Insoluble: tea.

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