TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 128

TOLERATION IN THE FIGHT FOR IRELAND

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outer darkness of Opposition in which the Irish people have lain straggling sombrely for ages, they are about to pass to those Ministerial Benches of a nation which impose their awful responsibilities as well as glorious powers. It becomes us all to cast our gaze forward to the time when it will be the first duty of patriotism, not to combat any portion of our countrymen, but to combine them all. We will have to measure our words. We will have to soften our judgments. We will have to think tenderly of the points in which we differ, and be tenfold more eager to soothe than in the clangour of battle we were ever to strike them. In famous words, we will have to prove that we ' love with all our hearts the whole of Ireland, not merely one of its parties or one of its creeds.' Differences of opinion there are, and will be, and ought to be, in every vigorous and healthy state. Once we are agreed upon the initial principle that all mankind within this island form one heavenly designed national community, in which the will of the majority must prevail; we can never too often reflect that the will of the majority is not the property of any clique or party, immoveable, unchangeable from age to age, that the will of the majority is a force which varies, which ponders, which responds to the energies, to the arguments of every man or body of men whose action springs from devotion to the common good. While the cause has always remained the same, the particular plans or methods of Irish Nationality have changed according to the circumstances of the hour, to a degree in which no school of Irish thinkers or soldiers—parliamentarians or conspirators—can claim a monopoly of national trust. At one moment, it is O'Connell's words that thrill the nation; at another, it is Emmet's sword. The United Irishmen began their work with earnest devotion to constitutional reform; they ended … continue reading »

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