TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 121

TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

« previous page | book contents | start of this chapter | next page »

in hopes of seeing rewards published once more for schoolmasters' or friars' heads. Nevertheless, I have never heard Lord Monteagle's voice raised since to preach his wholesome gospel to his class; and his class, instead of hearkening to the warning, place all their hopes for the future in being able to persuade genteel English audiences that their own fellow-countrymen are a race of knaves and cutthroats, and that the business of an English garrison is to hold them down in bonds of steel. I only desire at this moment to mark that the Irish dominant class have no right to blame their own countrymen for their misfortunes. They must place them to the account of English folly of the past, and of their own folly in the present in imagining that they can revivify in the broad nineteenth century the discarded English policy of the Dark Ages. There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent their being more honoured figures in an Irish Parliament than in an English Primrose Habitation. The choice lies with themselves. They have to opt between the status of Irish citizens and of disbanded English mercenaries. One honest act of identification with their own countrymen, and they will have turned ' old rusted hates into the gold of love.'

If that is true of the class with whom the Irish masses have had to wrestle in long and bloodstained fight for the bare right to live, how immeasurably more artificial and unreal are the barriers which divide the Irish Nationalist majority from the Presbyterian farmer toiling on the hills of Tyrone, or from the Orange Trade-Unionist in Belfast, nursing his dreams of a brighter future for Labour! The bond of a separate nationality which Tory politicians have constructed, for the past twelve years, between the landlords and the Protestant farmers of Ulster, between the capitalists and the Orange workmen of Belfast, is an inven- … continue reading »

« previous page | book contents | start of this chapter | next page »