election. After returning to London from Wallsend, he attended a full meeting of Labour MPs to decide who would become the Party Chairman. This effectively meant choosing the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, because Labour was the largest opposition party in the House of Commons. The two candidates were Ramsay MacDonald and J. R. Clynes, and Hastings, who supported MacDonald, persuaded six new MPs to support him. MacDonald was elected by a margin of only five votes, and Hastings later regretted his support. Hastings was indeed Labour's only experienced barrister in the House of Commons at that time, and immediately became a frontbencher and the party's main spokesman on legal matters. He made his debut speech on 22 February 1923 against the Rent Restrictions Bill, an amendment to the Rent Act 1921. He attacked it as "a monstrous piece of legislation", and was repeatedly shouted down by Conservative MPs as a "traitor to his class". As a result of this and the slow workings of Parliament, Hastings quickly became frustrated by politics. Internment orders Following the Irish War of Independence the Irish Free State was set up as an independent British Dominion covering most of the island of Ireland. After a brief civil war between the pro-Free State forces and members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who wanted any independent nation to cover the entire island, the status of the Irish Free State was confirmed, and the IRA was forced underground. The IRA had supporters in the United Kingdom, working openly as the Irish Self-Determination League (ISDL), and the Free State government shared the names of these supporters with the British authorities, who kept a close eye on them. Between February and March the Free State government provided information on individuals that they said were part of widespread plots against the Irish Free State being prepared on British soil. On 11 March 1923 the police in Britain arrested IRA sympathisers living in Britain including Art O'Brien, the head of the ISDL. Sources disagree on numbers, giving either approximately eighty or approximately 100. The arrested men were placed on special trains and sent to Liverpool, where they were transferred to Dublin via a Royal Navy destroyer. It later transpired that not only were many British citizens (Art O'Brien himself had been born in England), at least six had never even been to Ireland before. The next day the arrests