THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 162

THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND

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hustings, a British Prime Minister whose one remaining object in existence is the establishment of an Irish Legislature, and a British Ministerial majority who have for the past nine months surrendered every claim to British business in order once for all to ratify the charter of Irish national autonomy.

There are men who would have us depreciate, ignore, and even reject all these priceless advantages for our country; who would throw up allies, Parliamentary weapons, and progress transcending our wildest hopes, and reduce the young men of Ireland once more to the bleak alternative of dreaming of an insurrection which could never come off, or of flying from a doomed, hunger-bitten, and bloodless country. I have never given up, and will never give up, the right of insurrection for the oppressed. But you will generally find that it is the men who were most ready to dare the worst when there was no better resource for Ireland than the grim glory of the Forlorn Hope, who are also first to embrace the prospect of realising the aspirations of our race by paths of happiness and peace. The one man who was sentenced to death for the Cork rising of '67 is as enthusiastic in extending a friendly hand to-day as he was in pointing a gun in those not ignoble days at the power of England; and it is not a reproach, but the richest tribute to the brave men who went out in the darkness to Ballyknockane to congratulate our people upon the fact that the Forlorn Hope of that 6th of March has become the assured certainty of this September night. It is not an exaggeration to say that young Irishmen who are in the morning of their lives to-day are facing the future with advantages immeasurably beyond those of any generation who have trodden this land during many centuries of its storm-tossed history. They start with liberties un- … continue reading »

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