TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 124

TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

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banners, on which was inscribed, not an ode to Mr. T. W. Russell, but the revolutionary watchword:

France is free, So may we, Let us will it!

These are facts of not very much less recent occurrence than the arrival of Mr. Arnold Forster in Ulster politics, and of slightly more authenticity than Mr. Arnold Forster's anecdotes. To set down as irreclaimable anti-Irish Irishmen a race of Ulstermen who could not search an old family wardrobe without finding a uniform of the Volunteers, or the thatch without finding the pike of a United man, or the family gravestone without discovering a grandfather shot or hanged in the patriot cause, is an insult to a schoolboy's knowledge of Irish history, as well as an outrage upon the memory of as stout a band of warrior patriots as ever flung the Green Flag to the winds and bade their Catholic fellow-countrymen muster hand-in-hand with them under its folds.

The fact is that, while the Irish race is of as distinctive a type as any of the great divisions of mankind, it is a type which is evolved from a dozen sources all blending in the sunheat of Irish nationality as harmoniously as the rivulets leap from the Irish hillsides in the sparkle of the all-embracing sun. Certain grand characteristics survive every mutation, and are reproduced unconquerably, whether the material added to the crucible be Gaelic, Norman, Saxon, or Palatine. But it is a race above all things assimilative, from which you could no more abstract the blood of three hundred years ago than you could distinguish the Gael from the Firbolg or the Firbolg from the Tuatha de Danaan of enchantment. If you sought the authentic doctrine of nationality accepted by all Irish Nationalists of … continue reading »

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