TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 126
TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND
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and those of the farmer by the banks of the Lee, or between the future of Labour as pictured on the Limerick Dockers' quay and as pictured in the workshops of the Queen's Island. By the tie of common suffering in a common national cause, too—for there is scarcely an Ulster Protestant towards whose grandfather's Volunteer corps the hearts of the Southern Catholics did not go out, and there is scarcely an Ulster Presbyterian whose grandfather did not hear of the battles of the Wexford Insurrection with eye as bright and blood as throbbing as if he were encamped on the victorious crest of Oulart Hill. It is idle to suppose that interests so vast and associations so sacred as these can be effaced from Ulster breasts by a political tour of Mr. Chamberlain, or by a screed of riotous poetry from Lord Randolph Churchill.
The points of juncture between Catholic and non-Catholic sentiment are all of honest Irish growth; the points of divergency are all either the creation of infamous English policy in the past, or the invention of out-of-work English politicians in the present. Even the brand-new and pinchbeck Ulster sentiment which is the latter-day Tory stock-in-trade has no real abiding place in Ulster. The very Irishmen who conceive themselves bound to fight the anti-Irish battle have their own kindly smack of Irishism, which imparts to their most blood-stained declamations against their own countrymen a certain Pickwickian sense. Colonel Saunderson is, at the worst, an amusing man in a dull world; and nobody who knows Mr. Arthur Johnson of Ballykilbeg at close quarters can doubt that he will be one of the most popular personages in an Irish Parliament in College Green, Orange sashes, Boyne water, insurrectionary rifles, and all. The venom of the Ulster combat comes not from native hearts, but from a bitter-blooded Scotch- … continue reading »
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