West and United Ireland Party — Personnel of New Executive

The Connacht Tribune, 16th September, 1933

The following manifesto setting forth the aims and future policy of the United Ireland Party was issued on Friday by the new Party, following a meeting of the Party Executive.

(1) The United Ireland Party stands for the voluntary reunion of the Irish Nation as the paramount constitutional issue in Irish politics and considers that to achieve this end the first essential is solidarity of purpose among the citizens of the Free State. It maintains the fundamental right of the Irish people to decide for themselves at all times their own constitutional status.

(2) It rejects as fatal to Irish unity and in every way disastrous the Government's double—faced policy of retaining the present constitutional position and at the same time discarding its advantages. The people are being brought to beggary and defrauded of all hope of getting rid of partition by a sham Republicanism, which only uses the name republic as a pretext for self—glorification, for claiming a monopoly of patriotism and for perpetuating discord.

(3) The present Government gained power by reckless and impossible promises. They have not merely failed to fulfil these promises, but have sunk the country into a state of degradation from which they are wholly incompetent to raise it.

(4) United Ireland has been founded to enable all patriotic citizens to co—operate in remedying the situation so created, to save the farmers by restoring and extending their principal market, to help industries, to reduce unemployment by developing instead of destroying the buying power of the community, to give the workers not merely an uncertain subsistence, but secure employment and a reasonable measure of comforts and amenities to protect individual liberty and rights of citizenship to work constantly for peace and goodwill between all creeds and classes, and to build up for the whole of Ireland a worthy and distinctively Irish civilization.

(5) With these aims two political parties have decided to combine, and with them is joined a youth movement which the Government revived the Public Safety Act to proscribe. Having tolerated violence, intimidation and military parades by their own associates, they were not ashamed to pretend danger in the State from a body which had neither interfered nor threatened to interfere with the liberty of anyone and which will now renew a vigorous existence as an element in the United Ireland Party inspiring our young men with love of their country and the spirit of voluntary and disciplined public service. Upon that spirit more than upon Government action depends the emergence of our country as a nation with its own language, taking pride in the past and neglecting no opportunity in the present.

(6) United Ireland, looking to the future while rooted in the best traditions of the past, will stand for the wiping out of party animosities arising either from the Anglo—Irish war or from civil conflict.

(7) The nation is in danger. To avert that danger we call upon all men and women who love their country and who desire to work for Ireland's honour and wellbeing, to do their part in helping us to end the present policy of ruin, and to build up an Ireland — one prosperous and great in spirit and achievement.

(Signed) Eoin O'Duffy, President, United Ireland Party. September 8, 1933.