LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 21

LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

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to Mr. Gladstone's scheme, a wise and capable and patriotic Conservative party might not only have been a potential minority, but might have found their way to an Irish Treasury Bench. And all this upon the one simple condition of fusing their interests and sympathies with those of the body of their countrymen, instead of for ever fevering and distempering their country like an angry pustule or like a poisoned spear-point. Did the Irish people look surly or haggle about the price? On the contrary, they pined and yearned for peace and brotherhood, in the great task of building up a happy Irish nation. And the Irish gentry? With a few noble exceptions, such as Lord Powerscourt and Lord Greville, their answer was to smite the hand that was extended to them. Their answer was to summon the demons of religious bigotry from their den, and to circulate eleven millions of scurrilous libels on their fellow-countrymen through the printing-press of the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union.

They complain a great deal nowadays of our setting class against class. It was they themselves, in their blind arrogance and folly, in spite of the prayers and the warnings and the entreaties of Irish Nationalists—it was they themselves who first set class against class, or rather set up their own selfish and pampered class against the interests and sympathies and the aspirations of every other class in the nation. They never, as a class, established one idea in common with the people upon whose industry they lived. They remain to this day as distinctly foreigners in race and language and sympathy as when their ancestors came over, throat-cutting and psalm-singing, with Cromwell. They had three hundred years of unbroken power to make history, and the history they made was a history of famines and rack-rents and penal laws and misery—a … continue reading »

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