LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 18

LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

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I venture to think that, though the present Geraldine is a duke, and the old Geraldines used sometimes to have a head chopped off, most of us would prefer to take chance with the valiant old chiefs who died with their faces to the foe and with their clans around them, fighting for their God and for their native land. If ever men were petted as leaders, and besought to become leaders of the Irish people, it was the Irish gentry. It was one of the foibles, perhaps one of the vices, of the Irish people, their fondness and yearning for leaders of birth and station. The. aristocrats who led the Volunteers of '82, with the exception of Grattan and half a dozen others, were bigots and rack-renters, who had very little to recommend them except their volunteer uniform; yet their popularity knew no bounds. O'Connell tried to keep the Catholic lords and aristocrats in the van of the Emancipation movement, until his heart was sick of their cowardice, and meanness, and sycophancy—they have never to this day been emancipated in their souls. The Young Ireland movement was very largely a movement with aristocratic aspirations. Mitchel and Lalor, indeed, knew the stuff the Irish gentry were made of, but most of the generous-hearted young-men who sang and spoke in those days did not despair of bringing the gentry into the National ranks, and building up a nation in which landlord and tenant would clasp hands and blend as harmoniously as orange and green. One of the most amazing things we learn from Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's book, 'Four Years of Irish History,' is that up to the very eve of the revolt of '48 Smith O'Brien and some of his colleagues nourished the extraordinary delusion that the Irish gentry were meditating going over en masse to the young men who were counting their pikes and guns for an insurrection. It was O'Brien's … continue reading »

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