Retro: ‘Perils of splitting the party in Ulster’ fears (1924)
Mr J Blair, chairman of Victoria Unionist Association, speaking at a meeting of the Saunders Street and Dee Street polling stations of the association held in the Drumming Club Rooms on the Newtownards Road, Belfast, during this week in 1924, made a strong reference to unionists who “put personal motives before national matters” and were endangering the position of Northern Ireland.
He declared: “We are threatened with prohibitionist candidates supported by those who we have locked upon as stalwarts of the Unionist cause. If they are going to make private piques the test as to how they are going to vote in the coming Ulster general election then I would no longer call them Unionists.”
Referring to the narrow margin of safety in the Northern Parliament, Mr Blair alluded to people who said they were going to “vote temperance, anti-prohibition, or Socialist”, and who thought that “the Union was all right”. He said: “It was very far from being all right.”
He continued: “The moment you lose seats you are done for, and into the Free State you will go. You voted yourselves out of it, but remember you can be voted in again. It is up to the clergymen and every one to see that the government is given a chance to carry out its progressive policy. If we have local option or prohibition, who is going to prevent the importation of spirits across the border and from the sea, or illicit distillation in the mountains. Every man will have to be a policeman.”
He concluded with an appeal to all Loyalists not to split the party and endanger the government, “which has the utmost sympathy with the interests of the working classes”.
Mr G B Hanna, MP, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Home Affairs, replied to criticism of the government. He pointed to the de-rating measure which was to be introduced for the benefit of agriculture and commerce, and he recalled that the Minister of Commerce (the Right Honourable J M Barbour, DL), had sounded “a very encouraging note in making reference to shipbuilding”, and expressing the opinion that the linen industry might get “back to the healthy condition it was in at one time”.