BY ALICE STOPFORD GREEN Author of “The Making of Ireland and its Undoing” “Irish Nationality,” &c. DUBLIN M. H. GILL & SON, Ltd. LONDON MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1912   Some Irish friends have asked me to print certain lectures concerning Ireland to which they had listened with indulgence; and to reprint also former papers in a manner more convenient for country readers. This volume is the answer to their request. It will be seen that I have not attempted to alter the lecture

To prevent mistake I may add a word of explanation that the map, or rather diagram, which is entitled Scandinavian Trade Routes, contains not only those lines of sea-commerce, but also an indication of the ways across Europe which were used by Irish travellers from earlier times. The difference between these routes is clearly indicated in the text. ALICE STOPFORD GREEN. April 25, 1912. IN MEMORY OF THE IRISH DEAD THE OLD IRISH WORLD THE WAY OF HISTORY IN IRELAND IN all the countries of Europe th

“... people the steep rocks and river banks, Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul, Of independence and stern liberty.” Rulers and commanders have known this well. When they have wanted to exalt peoples or armies under them, they have opened out to them the glories of their history, and called on them to admit into their souls the spirit of their fathers. “Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed From dead men to their kind.” When they have wished to depress and subjugate a race they have slam

In the time of the Roman Empire therefore Irish trade with Europe was already well established. Tacitus ( a.d. 98) tells that its ports and harbours were well known to merchants; and in the second century the geographer Ptolemy of Alexandria gave a list, very surprising for the time, of the river-mouths, mountains, and port towns of Ireland, and its sea-coast tribes—a knowledge he may have gained from Marinus of Tyre, or the Syrian traders who conducted the traffic from Asia Minor to the Rhone,

The family were bitter Irreconcilables; since the days of an older Calvagh, the “Great Rebel,” who a hundred years before (1307), had been invited with thirty of the Offaly chiefs to dine at Castle-Carberry on Trinity Sunday with “the treacherous baron,” Sir Pierce Bermingham, the “Hunter of the Irish”; and were deceitfully murdered, the Great Rebel and all, as they rose from table. This new Calvagh fought the invaders for over sixty years, from youth to old age, with scarcely a pause—a man of h

Lecale was soon filled with religious settlements and schools. Lying at the entrance to Lough Cuan of the hundred islands, now Lough Strangford, where a busy population tilled the fertile slopes, and sent out innumerable boats for the celebrated salmon-fishing, or for traffic, Lecale was as it were the guardian of their sanctuaries. Close to Downpatrick lies Crannach Dún-leth-glaisse, “the wooded island of Dún-leth-glaisse,” now known as Cranny island; there Mochuaróc maccu Min Semon, whom the R

The permitted belief about Ireland has been summed up dogmatically by Mr. Dunlop in the Dictionary of National Biography , the Cambridge Modern History , and elsewhere. Of the inhabitants of Ireland “two-thirds at least led a wild and half nomadic existence. Possessing no sense of national unity beyond the narrow limits of the several clans to which they belonged, acknowledging no law outside the customs of their tribe, subsisting almost entirely on the produce of their herds and the spoils of t