SECRET COURTMARTIAL OF A DEPUTY. - RESOLUTION OF PROTEST.
The ACTING-PRESIDENT called the attention of the House to the arrest and the trial by a secret Courtmartial, and sentence to a term of imprisonment by the English Government, of the Teachta for Cavan West—Mr. P. Galligan. An elected representative of the country was tried and sentenced in secret. That proceeding was contrary even to English Law. He moved that
"The Elected Representatives of Ireland assembled in Session in the Mansion House on the twentieth day of August, 1919, call the attention of the Elected Representatives of the United States and of all other free countries to the fact that persons duly elected for Irish Constituencies are now being seized by the English Army of Occupation, secretly arraigned before English Courts Martial and secretly condemned to terms of imprisonment as ordinary criminals.
"On the night of July 14th, Mr. Paul Galligan, the unanimously Elected Representative for West Cavan, in the Province of Ulster, was arrested by a section of the English Armed Forces, conveyed to the Victoria British Military Barracks, Belfast, where he was arraigned in secret before a tribunal of English Military Officers which ordered him to be imprisoned for twelve months with hard labour as an ordinary criminal. The charge preferred against him was that he had drilled a body of young men.
"The Member for West Cavan is at present in solitary confinement in a flagged basement cell in Belfast Prison."
The motion was put and carried.