THE IRISH AGE OF GOLD

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 147

THE IRISH AGE OF GOLD

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It was the three centuries of invasion by the Danish barbarians that brought all this fair civilisation to ruin and interrupted the natural evolution of the five States into one. No country in Europe resisted the Vikings so effectually as Ireland. No country, consequently, suffered so bitterly from their ravages. Nevertheless, it was only a disastrous accident that prevented Ireland from being consolidated into a united kingdom on the field of Clontarf. Brian was monarch of Ireland that morning—in a far more real sense than any of his contemporaries was monarch of England, or France, or Germany, or Italy, or Spain. He was a man of wisdom and firmness. His son was no less famous as a warrior and statesman. His grandson was singled out by popular enthusiasm for a future more glorious still. All three—father, son, and grandson—fell together on the same day and in the arms of victory. The invasion of Ireland was at an end, but so was its unity as a kingdom. In all Ireland's ill-starred history there is no more pathetic mischance. It might well have been the subject of a national epic, if the eight centuries of unbroken warfare, oppression, and intellectual darkness which followed did not give the Order of Poets its coup de grace. The cause of Irish nationality does not depend upon whether the Ireland of the twelfth century was, what no other country in Europe was, a perfectly homogeneous State, policed like a modern English shire. But at least let us not make fun of the most incontrovertible evidence of its exceptionally good record. I hope Englishmen for the future, at least, will be ashamed not to know something of the glory and tragedy enacted upon the day of Clontarf. By-and-by they may find the story fascinating enough to lead them on to the discovery that even a century and a half alter that fearful blow, when Strongbow and his … continue reading »

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