TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 120

TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

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mischief is found out, it is certain that the Irish dominant class have contributed most of all to their own destruction, by refusing to identify their cause with that of their own countrymen, and by failing to recognise that the old barbaric policy of loading a minority with power and riches to oppress the majority could never become English policy again. That I take to be the central folly of the Irish landed men—their wild hope that the English masses can ever again be brought to think it to be England's interest that five-sixths of the population should be ground into enemies and serfs and famine-victims in order to keep a well-fattened minority in good humour. They may as well hope to see the Imperial Parliament re-enacting the laws against an Irish glibb or outlawing Irish wives. To their own woe, they have never yet responded to the passionate appeals of generations of Irish patriots to them to trust to their own countrymen, instead of relying upon the hope of poisoning the prejudices of an English faction against the kindly children of the Irish soil. A number of years ago, in a lecture from which much might have been expected, a young Irish nobleman, Lord Monteagle, laid down, I think accurately, the two conditions on which the Irish gentry might even yet enjoy careers of honour and might in their own country. The first condition was that they should cease to be landlords, and the second was that they should cease to act as the English garrison. The conditions are by no means so onerous as they seem; and they are conditions which are, in any case, as inevitable as vote by ballot. Compulsory purchase is emplanked in Lord Frederick Hamilton's programme as firmly as it is in ours. And the man who expects the English democracy ever again to give sovereign power to an English garrison for the purpose of making enemies of the Irish race may live … continue reading »

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