LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 16

LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

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was by no means the only man who mounted cannon upon his castle to give the ministers of the law a hotter reception than they encountered at Bodyke and Coolgreany. It was the regular way of discharging honest debts in well-bred circles. The noble family of Kingston, who are at this moment so horrified by the people of Mitchelstown barricading their homes and defending them, were themselves for many a day 'Sunday men,' and kept their castles provisioned for a siege. It is, indeed, because they did so, and left their debts unpaid—the debts they incurred to pamper their own bodies and fuddle their brains—that their noble descendant is now engaged in exterminating the unfortunate tenantry of Mitchelstown, not for repudiating any honest debt, but because they will not surrender the homes in which their fathers lived and died, and the lands that are watered with their sweat, to pay for the claret and the dissipations of those old 'wolves of the Galtees.'

But, undoubtedly, the people did not like the Irish gentry the less for their contempt for the law and their way of dealing with bailiffs. Aristocracy was respected to almost adoration point. I remember, when we were young fellows long ago in my native town of Mallow, we used to think the Clubhouse there a kind of seventh heaven, inhabited by beings of quite another order from mere people who worked for a living. It seemed as much a dispensation of Providence as that the sun should rise in the heavens every day that the gentry should lord it over us and look down on us. It seemed part of the order and arrangement of the universe. Well, I think we have somewhat moderated these gentlemen's estimate of their own importance. I can hardly ever pass that Clubhouse now without thinking that there is not a cabin in the poor suburb of Ballydaheen whose inmates have not as much influence upon the current of … continue reading »

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