Catholic Bishop found not guilty of sedition

James Liston, the assistant bishop of Auckland, was found not guilty of sedition following a high-profile court case. He found himself in the dock following a St Patrick’s Day address in which he allegedly described the Irish Republican ‘martyrs’ of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin as having been ‘murdered by foreign troops’.

Many New Zealanders staunchly loyal to Britain took offence at these comments. The New Zealand Welfare League believed that the speech had engendered ‘bitterness and strife amongst our people’ and encouraged ‘those who efforts are directed to the destruction of the Empire’. But the New Zealand Irish Catholic community, including groups such as the Hibernian Society, was united in its defence of the bishop. Their support was as much for the church as for the Irish nationalist cause. In the end an all-Protestant jury found Liston not guilty of sedition, with the rider that he had committed a ‘grave indiscretion’.

The Irish migrants who had settled in New Zealand had brought with them the controversies that divided their countrymen at home; there had been many cases of sectarian conflict in this country prior to 1916. The fallout from the Easter Rising saw some of New Zealand’s minority Irish Catholic community express sympathy and support for the republican cause in Ireland. In 1917 Dr James Kelly, a former Irish priest and editor of the New Zealand Catholic newspaper, the Tablet, caused outrage with a number of anti-British Empire comments. On one occasion he referred to the deceased Queen Victoria as ‘a certain fat old German woman’. The solicitor-general urged Kelly’s arrest and prosecution for sedition, but the government – perhaps hoping to calm the situation – took no action.

Sectarian tensions intensified after Howard Elliot, an Auckland Baptist minister, founded the Protestant Political Association (PPA) in 1917. The PPA soon claimed to have 200,000 members; it certainly had enough political clout to oust the prominent Catholic politician Joseph Ward (a former prime minister) from his Awarua seat in 1919.

Following Liston’s acquittal, much of the bitterness surrounding the ‘Irish issue’ in New Zealand gradually dissipated, although its effects lingered. Over the next two decades the Catholic Church seemed to isolate itself from the rest of the country and what it regarded as ‘institutional bigotry’.

Image: James Liston (Te Ara Biographies)