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Admiral is coming down the Grand Canal to examine all the turf-boats, and look into their potato-lockers to try if they have any hidden cannon on board. . . . And a lieutenant of the navy has been sent by the fly-boat on the Royal Canal to find out what became of the army of 15,000 men that the Rev. Mr O'Higgins had hid in his back parlour!"
The Kilkenny meeting, like all the other meetings, dispersed in perfect order and tranquillity; but O'Connell pledged them to come back to that spot whenever he might want them.
Undoubtedly this sort of procedure from week to week, and O'Connell's ridicule and vituperation, poured out upon every one who opposed "the repeal," was extremely provoking to the government and their party; yet no great progress was made. O'Connell, indeed, knew the law: he knew how far he could go with safety; and the people had full confidence that he would accomplish all he promised, "without the shedding of a drop of blood;" but all the while the enemy was in actual occupation and full possession of the whole country, its revenues and resources; and intended so to continue. Some of our friends about the Nation office began to ask themselves how long this was to go on. When all Ireland shall have paraded itself at monster meetings, they said, what then? What next?
Notwithstanding the very resolute countenance shown by the government, however, O'Connell still believed that they must yield at last, as they had done upon the Catholic Emancipation question; and, certainly, the impetus and volume which his movement was daily acquiring, would have seemed to make almost anything possible to him who wielded such a wondrous machine. He moved to tears, or convulsed with laughter, or excited to suppressed rage, hundreds of thousands of people every week; and his loud defiance to the Saxon made men's hearts burn within them as they prayed that he would only give them the word.
One of his great meetings was at Baltinglass, in Wicklow county. The proprietor of most of the land thereabouts was Lord Wicklow: and his lordship had posted over his estate a placard exhorting, or almost commanding, his tenants to stay home at their work, and not to be flocking to a meeting "only to minister to the vanity of an individual." They all disobeyed; and O'Connell, when he rose up to address them, opened a copy of the placard. He read it, and the hills re-echoed the laughter of a hundred and fifty thousand throats. "I know whom he means by an individual," he exclaimed. "He means me. Individual in his teeth! I'm no more an individual than Lord Wicklow's mother!" ...continue reading »
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Page 25
The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)
by John Mitchel
Truelove's Journal: A Bookshop Novella
From a sad, comfortless childhood Giles Truelove developed into a reclusive and uncommunicative man whose sole passion was books. For so long they were the only meaning to his existence. But when fate eventually intervened to have the outside world intrude upon his life, he began to discover emotions that he never knew he had.
A story for the genuine booklover, penned by an Irish bookseller under the pseudonym of Ralph St. John Featherstonehaugh.
FREE download 23rd - 27th May
Annals of the Famine in Ireland
Annals of the Famine in Ireland, by Asenath Nicholson, still has the power to shock and sadden even though the events described are ever-receding further into the past. When you read, for example, of the poor widowed mother who was caught trying to salvage a few potatoes from her landlord's field, and what the magistrate discovered in the pot in her cabin, you cannot help but be appalled and distressed.
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger
This book, the prequel to Annals of the Famine in Ireland cannot be recommended highly enough to those interested in Irish social history. The author, Mrs Asenath Nicholson, travelled from her native America to assess the condition of the poor in Ireland during the mid 1840s. Refusing the luxury of hotels and first class travel, she stayed at a variety of lodging-houses, and even in the crude cabins of the very poorest. Not to be missed!
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
Henry Ford Jones' book, first published in 1915 by Princeton University, is a classic in its field. It covers the history of the Scotch-Irish from the first settlement in Ulster to the American Revolutionary period and the foundation of the country.
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
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