It was further arranged that while contentious issues--the only ones
that mattered--should be avoided, any conclusions reached on minor
matters should be purely provisional, and contingent on agreement being
come to ultimately on fundamentals. Month after month was spent in thus
discussing such questions as the powers which an Irish Parliament ought
to wield, while the question whether Ulster was to come into that
Parliament was left to stand over. Committees and sub-committees were
appointed to thresh out these details, and some of them relieved the
tedium by wandering into such interesting by-ways of irrelevancy as
housing and land purchase, all of which, in Gilbertian phrase, "had
nothing to do with the case."
The Ulster group raised no objection to all this expenditure of time and
energy. For they saw that it was not time wasted. From the standpoint of
the highest national interest it was, indeed, more useful than anything
the Convention could have accomplished by business-like methods. The
summer and autumn of 1917, and the early months of 1918, covered a
terribly critical period of the war.
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