TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 117

TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

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Elizabeth's troops had more Fitzgeralds, Butlers, Barrys, Bourkes, and Fitzmaurices of English blood to encounter than Gaelic chiefs. A new English garrison took possession of the lands and privileges of the old one. Religion was erected as a new and impassable boundary of the Pale. Bigotry was to a large extent set up as a protection against identification with the Irish enemy, which was more likely to generate savage ferocity between the two nations than the Statute of Kilkenny's fulminations against Irish dress and Irish sweethearts. But its Protestantism did not preserve the English colony from the whims of its London masters. Still another English garrison which was Royalist was swept aside by a fresh English garrison which was Roundhead; and the English Parliament was dividing the lands and chattels of Anglo-Saxon Castlehavens, Prestons, and Bellings among its latest Cromwellian favourites. There came other lurches of English opinion from Puritan gravity to Congreve's plays, and from the restoration of one king to the chasing of another; and once more the English garrison in Ireland fared ill on both sides. Walker's death was the subject of a sneer from King William while he was actually crossing the Boyne; and the most illustrious names in the opposite camp were those of Sarsfield, the Anglo-Irish Protestant, Talbot the Englishman, and Sir Richard Nagle, the Norman. It would seem as if the last precaution that diabolical ingenuity could suggest to dissever the English garrison from Irish sympathies was taken when the Penal Laws were devised for the purpose of giving the colonists a power over the goods, bodies, and souls of the subject Irish more debasing and minute than was claimed by any modern code of slavery. But the unconquerable assimilative force of Irish patriotism was too strong even for the Penal Laws. … continue reading »

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