LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 27

LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF THE IRISH GENTRY

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become Nationalists without ceasing to be landlords. It is perfectly possible that, if the Irish landlords had been wise enough to band themselves enthusiastically with the people at that time to win an Irish Parliament, and had flooded and dominated that Parliament with their own territorial influence, their rackrents might remain unabridged for many a day, and the enforcement of popular rights might have been indefinitely retarded. At present the Irish people can dispense with them as Nationalists, and are determined to dispense with them as landlords. I have claimed that Irish democracy is not bloodthirsty or vengeful. If those who are so fond of magnifying the deeds of violence which have blotted our history here and there for the last few years would only examine the dark story of revolution in other lands, and think of the seas of suffering and bloodshed which engulf the beaten side—if they will only remember how their own class used their victory when they tortured and trampled to death tens of thousands of the Wexford insurgents in '98—they will have to confess that there never was a revolution involving the overthrow of so rooted and so detested an oligarchy which was effected at so small a cost of bloodshed and crime as ours, and they will have to confess that, whatever crime lurked in the train of that great and memorable peaceful revolution was not the outgrowth of democracy, but was a remnant of the barbarism their own oppression had begotten. Finally, the revolutionary spirit of Ireland is not sullied by irreligion upon one side, or by sectarian bigotry on the other. It has a heart equally large and equally warm for Protestant and for Catholic—for every man who has a heart or hand for Ireland. It is, at the same time, in the highest and deepest sense religious, spiritual, and above the ignoble empire of materialism, … continue reading »

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