From The Times: March 24, 1922
Mr Michael Collins sent the following statement for publication to the Dublin Correspondent of The Times: “My attention has been drawn to an editorial entitled ’The Peril of Ireland’ in The Times of yesterday’s date. This editorial is so inaccurate and one-sided that it is astonishing that any creditable journal would stoop to such tactics. One can only conclude that it is the launch of a campaign to whitewash the partisan administration of Sir James Craig’s Government, and to conceal the infamies and crimes of his supporters, many of them members of his special constabulary. The leading article declares not only that the sympathies of the British people will be with ‘Ulster’ in resisting any attempt at ‘her’ coercion, but that ‘they will be with her, too, in objecting to any change being made in her boundary except by mutual agreement’. This is a pro-Craig interpretation of Article 12 of the Treaty, and is completely at variance with the best legal opinion of both countries, including Mr Lloyd George’s own statement.
“The article then states that the British people do not yet know the truth about the Belfast outrages: ‘No official return has been made public as to whether the victims of the murders are preponderatingly Protestant and Orange or Catholic and Sinn Fein.’ Why Catholic and Sinn Fein? What about the very considerable number of Northern Catholics who are not Sinn Feiners, many of whom have been done to death? From February 11 to March 6, 39 persons were murdered in Belfast. Of these 22 were Catholics and 17 Protestants. When it is remembered that in Belfast there are 92,243 Catholics and 294,704 non-Catholic, this proportion of Catholic deaths is very high indeed.
“The article commends the Bill going through the Belfast Parliament for ‘the restoration of peace’. Everyone in Ireland knows how this Bill will be administered. The suggestion that it will be carried out impartially is fantastic. The officers of ‘law and order’ in the North are the so-called Special Police. There are close upon 30,000 of them, with little or no discipline, all open members of the Orange Society and fanatical partisans. How can peace be restored with this notorious force to restore it?”