THE IRISH NATIONAL IDEA

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 4

THE IRISH NATIONAL IDEA

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is the whispered poetry of our cradles. It is the song that is sung by every brook that gurgles by us, for every brook has been in its day crimsoned with the blood of heroes. It is the weird voice we hear from every graveyard where our fathers are sleeping, for every Irish graveyard contains the bones of uncanonised saints and martyrs. When the framers of the penal laws denied us books, and drew their thick black veil over Irish history, they forgot that the ruins they had themselves made were the most eloquent schoolmasters, the most stupendous memorials of a history and a race that were destined not to die. They might give our flesh to the sword, and our fields to the spoiler, but before they could blot out the traces of their crimes, or deface the title-deeds of our heritage, they would have had to uproot to their last scrap of sculptured filagree the majestic shrines in which the old race worshipped; they would have had to demolish to their last stone the castles which lay like wounded giants through the land to mark where the fight had raged the fiercest; they would have had to level the pillar towers, and to seal up the sources of the holy wells. And even then they would not have stilled the voice of Ireland's past; for in a country where every green hill-side has been a battlefield, and almost 'every sod beneath our feet a soldier's sepulchre,' the very ghosts would rise up as witnesses through the penal darkness, and to the Irish imagination the voices of the night winds would come, laden with the memories of wrongs unavenged, and of a strife unfinished, and of a hope which only brightened in suffering, and which no human weapon could subdue.

The Celtic race is a race ruled by its spiritual instincts rather than by those more ravenous virtues which we share with the hogs and the wolves, and a race clad in the … continue reading »

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