LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 22

LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

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history of millions plundered and degraded in their own land under the heel of a few thousand foreigners—a history of ages during which the gentry of Ireland never did an act of justice that was not wrung from them, and never did one act of unadulterated grace so long as England gave them her bayonets to enable them to refuse it.

Nemesis came at last in the shape of an Irish democracy, and it is a singular fact that democracy is a Frankenstein of their own raising. Democracy has sprung from the two very sources which England relied upon to rid her of the Irish difficulty—National education and emigration. The National system of Education was founded for the express purpose of undermining the faith and destroying the nationality of the youth of Ireland. Men like Archbishop Whately and Mr. Carlile, who devised that system, and who composed the school-books, were dead certain that they had discovered a machine for turning the youth of Ireland into soupers in faith and West Britons in politics. Things have not turned out quite to their satisfaction. Sir R. Peel relied on two instruments to denationalise Ireland—the policeman and the schoolmaster. Whatever the constabulary system did to enchain the limbs of the Irish people, his system of National Education did still more to emancipate their minds and souls. The policeman proved to be an efficient ally of England, but the schoolmaster did not turn out so satisfactorily, and the schoolmaster is the more potent man of the two when all is said and done. It is the young fellows whom the governing classes sent into the national schools to be turned into flunkeys and slaves—it is these very young fellows who have broken the power of the privileged classes in Ireland, and pushed them from their thrones, and bearded them at the poor-law boards and the municipal … continue reading »

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