THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 152

THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND

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general, or plundered them as a tithe-owning bishop, or decimated them as a Chief Justice. It is in its way a consolation for the pall of unbroken gloom which enshrouds the story of Ireland for the century after the Treaty of Limerick, that the century did not produce a single distinguished Irish renegade. It is not too much to say that our forefathers of that black age in their rags and shame earned more true glory by their mere resistance to the voice of the corrupter than the violators of the Treaty of Limerick won in battle array in all the breadth of the Low Countries.

Nevertheless, there is a piercing sadness in the thought how many a hundred thousand young lives, generation after generation, comely in limb, bright of brain, generous of heart, born to the vague immensity of Celtic aspirations, were doomed to sink miserably into the welter of desolation and despair at home, or, far from the green Irish hills and the fond Irish loved ones, court the dreary fate of the mercenary swordsman in some uncomprehended foreign quarrel. In one century the choicest youth of Ireland were either shipped to the slave-plantations of Jamaica and Barbadoes by the thousand, or were reserved for the scarcely less degraded fate at home of wearing a round black patch upon their cheeks as the badge of their belonging to the inferior race. Afterwards, they at least found the means of dying like soldiers in the armies of the Continent. The romance which has been woven around the adventures of the Irish Brigades in the service of France and Spain and Austria has in some degree lulled us into forgetfulness of the unutterable pathos of this yearly draft of the fairest youth of our nation, torn from home and love, from the broken-hearted mother or the weeping maiden, to endure the neglects and hardships of the professional free- … continue reading »

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