ng off.

"Speaking generally, I think the Archbishop of Dublin and those who
agree with him may take it for granted that upon all those questions
which he grouped under the heading of Imperial Security there would be
little difficulty in arriving at an agreement with, at any rate, men
like myself.

"Now let me deal with the second group of subjects put forward by the
Archbishop of Dublin under the heading of Fiscal Security--or a
reasonable prospect of national prosperity.

"The first objection is to what is called fiscal autonomy, although,
after listening most carefully to his speeches, it seems to me that the
real objection is not so much an objection to fiscal autonomy as
establishing the full power of the Irish Parliament over the collection
and imposition of Irish taxes, as an objection to giving that Parliament
power to set up a tariff against Great Britain."

He referred then at length to the Report of the Primrose Committee on
Irish Finance, dated October 1911.[11] That Committee had for its
chairman a great English Civil Servant; three of its members were famous
English financiers; another was the Professor of Political Economy at
Oxford. Of the two names associated closely with Ireland, one was Lord
Pirrie, whose fortune had been made in Belfast, and the only Irish
Nationalist was the Bishop of Ross. They had reported unanimously for
giving to Ireland full fiscal powers. "We tried hard," Redmond said, "to
get the principle of their Report adopted in framing the Bill of 1912."
Government insisted on adhering to the plan of "contract finance" which
their own non-partisan committee of experts had explicitly condemned.

He quoted several passages from the weighty argument by which the
Committee had justified its conclusions, especially those dealing with
the contention that the power would be used to set up a tariff against
British goods.

"Ireland is not a nation of fools.

"If in framing a new Constitution you go on the assumption that every
power you confer will be abused, it would be far better to desist from
your task altogether, and instead of increasing the powers of a people
dead to all sense of responsibility and manifestly unfit for political
freedom, you had better disestablish all existing forms of
constitutional government and advocate the government of Ireland as a
Crown Colony. But none of us so distrust our people.

"Dr. O'Donnell has proposed a solution of the difficulty about imposing