Pensioners & Peers

If ever underdogs have yelped for champions, the Anglo-Irish who did not move to Britain after bloody 1920 have. The Free State has exacted a revenge for their loyalty to the Crown. These Tories get few jobs, no favors. Much of their property is gone.

Last week the die-hard survivors of the once proud Unionist Party were so emboldened by the political wrangling of the Irish as to propose a Loyalist party of their own "to assert the constitutional rights of all loyal Southern Irish subjects." Everybody knew that what they were really asserting was their desire to get on the British dole.

Since "the troubles" of 1920 the British Government has paid Loyalists some $10,000,000 in claims. The Southern Irish Loyalist Relief Association has pensioned Loyalist widows of the Royal Irish Constabulary killed in action, has helped 50,000 jobless war veterans, distributed 300 sets of second-hand clothing a week. But the British Government has now decided that "there is no penalization of Southern Irish Loyalists and hence no need of assistance."

For champions, the Loyalists have three British lords:

One is William John Arthur Charles James Cavendish-Bentinck, sixth Duke of Portland, Viscount Woodstock, Baron of Cirencester and Bolsover, Lord Lieutenant of Nottingham. This potent peer owns more than 180,000 acres and has the right to appoint two family trustees to the British Museum whose famed Portland Vase is his. His predecessor as Duke had a molelike passion for tunneling under the lawns of his Welbeck estate, mile after mile, so that he could pop up and surprise his workmen. The present Duke chose his wife when he saw her through a railway carriage window. He is president of the Southern Irish Loyalist Relief Association.

The second is John George Butcher, first Baron Danesfort, whose chief works are a bill allowing pedestrians to collect damages from automobilists without proving negligence and a tract entitled Quaternion Forms of General Propositions in Fluid Motion.

The third is a very great champion indeed, that same "sinister, august, dark-faced'' Sir Edward Henry Carson, now Lord Carson, who formidably defended the Marquess of Queensberry against Oscar Wilde's libel suit and championed the great Cecil Rhodes in the Jameson Raid inquiry. In his prime he was the greatest single foe of Irish Home Rule. He recruited Ulster armies to assert Ulster's integrity.

Even 20 years ago this would have been a mighty trio of champions for any underdog. Today the Duke of Portland is 77. Baron Danesfort is 81. Lord Carson is 80. Together these three exhausted old peers constitute the last hope of the Southern Irish Loyalists.

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