LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 19

LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

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noble fault to believe everyone to be as open-hearted and as chivalrous as himself. He actually wrote letters anticipating that the gentry would be found heading the insurrection at the very moment when these same gentry were entreating Dublin Castle to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act; and only a few weeks before his own brother, Sir Lucius O'Brien, denounced and disowned him as a traitor on the floor of the House of Commons. Every opportunity the Irish aristocracy ever got of identifying themselves with the people, of winning their affections, of becoming their leaders, they spurned with insult and disdain. They repaid their popularity in the Volunteer times by their murderings and burnings and floggings in '98. Their answers to all the melting appeals of the orators and singers of Young Ireland was to seize the crops for the rent while two millions of people were dying of famine, and then to exterminate a million more of them between 1848 and 1853, when all national spirit was extinguished, and when the country lay gasping and helpless at their feet. Even in our own day, in the midst of the angry rush and roar of the revolution which their own folly brought about their ears, the Irish gentry obtained at least three separate opportunities of harmonising their interests with those of the country of their birth and the people from whom they derived their living. It is one of the most astounding facts in the history of human fatuity that the immediate and proximate cause of the Land League movement in the County Mayo was a confederacy of four of the greatest landowners in the county—Lord Lucan, Sir Roger Palmer, Sir Robert Blosse Lynch, and Lord Sligo—to refuse a wretched abatement of only 10 per cent. to a tenantry on the brink of starvation. They kept their 10 per cent., and they founded the Land League. I re- … continue reading »

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