THE IRISH NATIONAL IDEA
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 9
THE IRISH NATIONAL IDEA
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the Romans had done before them. The Scottish highlands are peopled to this day with an Irish colony as strongly marked with the characteristics of their origin as if the lamp of St. Columbkille still shone from the cliffs of Iona, and the footsteps of the saints and scholars who formed the Irish army of civilisation may still be tracked in lines of light into the heart of the Swiss Alps and to the furthest shores of Sicily. The marvel is not that Irish Civilisation after struggling manfully through three centuries of Danish barbarism should have been unable to face seven centuries more of English savagery, but that a book, or a man, or even a ruin, of the race should survive to tell the tale after ten centuries of unceasing battle for the bare life.
But not only has the Irish race survived that black deluge of suffering and plunder which for seven hundred years submerged the land. It emerges from that long eclipse with youth renewed, with strength redoubled, with hope undimmed, and with all the mental and moral capacities of a great nation, only braced and rejuvenated by sufferings that would have broken the spirit and debased the soul of any other nation. This second youth and vigour more robust than the first, after so horrifying an abyss of years, is a phenomenon of which history gives us no other example. The restored Greece of to-day is to the Greece of Pericles what the prowling Arabs who pilfer the Egyptian Pyramids are to the magnificent monarchs who built them. The creatures who dwell around the ruins of the Coliseum still call themselves Romans, and masquerade in the grave-clothes of their august ancestors; but nobody expects new Ciceros to arise among the degenerate chatterers of the Corso, or new Caesars to shake the world from the puny throne of … continue reading »
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