BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE INDESTRUCTIBLE NATION: A Survey of Irish History from the Invasion. The First Phase: The Overthrow of the Clans. JOHN MITCHEL: An Appreciation. With some Account of Young Ireland.   IN PREPARATION : ULSTER: A Brief Statement of Fact....

MAUNSEL & CO., LTD., DUBLIN AND LONDON 1919...

I was a member of the “National Council” formed in 1902 by Mr. Arthur Griffith on the occasion of the visit of the late Queen Victoria, and of the Executives of “Cumann na nGaedheal,” the “Dungannon Clubs,” and the “Sinn Fein League,” by the fusion of which the old “Sinn Fein” organisation was formed. I was a member of the Sinn Fein Executive until 1911, and from 1903 to the present time I have been closely connected with every Irish movement of what I might call the Language Revival current. Th

When Pitt and Castlereagh forced through the Act of Union, they forged a weapon with the potentiality of utterly subjecting the Irish nation, of extinguishing wholly its civilisation, its name, and its memory; for they made possible that policy of peaceful penetration which in less than a century brought Ireland lower than she had been brought by five centuries of war and one century of almost incredibly severe penal legislation. In the history of the connexion between England and Ireland the vi

It is not easy to say whether the policy of peaceful penetration which was pursued in Ireland in the nineteenth century was planned beforehand, whether Pitt actually carried the Union with a comprehensive assimilating policy in his mind. The probabilities are against that, and in favour of the supposition that, the one vital step of the Union having been taken, the rest of the policy followed inevitably. At any rate, once it did get going, its operations continued and developed logically and met

It may be asserted with truth that the youth of Ireland, in every generation, are by instinct Separatist, that “their dream is of the swift sword-thrust,” and that therefore in every generation there is the full material for a Separatist Movement. The question, then, of the adhesion of any given generation to a Separatist Movement resolves itself practically into the question of the formation, at the right time, of a Separatist Movement with an open policy ; and practically any generation of Iri

“The policy of Sinn Fein purposes to bring Ireland out of the corner and make her assert her existence to the world. I have spoken of an essential; but the basis of the policy is national self-reliance. No law and no series of laws can make a Nation out of a People which distrusts itself.”— Arthur Griffith (1906). While the immediate inspiration of the Sinn Fein policy may be held to be Mr. Griffith’s study of Hungary, it is no less undeniable that the roots of the policy are already in National

A small man, very sturdily built, nothing remarkable about his appearance except his eyes, which are impenetrable and steely, taciturn, deliberate, speaking when he does speak with the authority and the finality of genius, totally without rhetoric, under complete self-control, and the coolest and best brain in Ireland. Griffith is not alone the ablest Irishman now alive, but the ablest Irishman since John Mitchel, and the only political thinker since Mitchel who has displayed the statesman’s min

The Sinn Fein movement may be said to have begun in 1905 with, the general adoption by the Separatist organisations in that year of the “Sinn Fein Policy” as a basis of operations, and with the combination of all the organisations into one, and a consequent more effective distribution of energy, it made rapid progress. Branches of Sinn Fein were quickly formed in all the larger towns, and more slowly in the smaller towns and in some country districts. But at first it did not cause much flutterin

The English people, either collectively or individually, do not want to give Ireland freedom. Some of them are willing to concede the name of freedom whilst reserving its machinery, but they are few. Most of them do not understand the Irish question, which is an international one, as being a dispute between two Sovereign Nations, and not an Imperial or Domestic one, and none of them want to understand it. Similarly with English political parties. Neither the Liberal Party nor the Tory Party desi

The promoters of the Volunteer movement had not contemplated insurrection, nor had they identified themselves with any extreme or physical force policy. They were not committed to Separation, to Sinn Fein, or to Parliamentarianism, but to the defence of Irish rights, and to the obtaining of arms and ammunition for that purpose. Each of them had his own idea of what exactly the movement stood for, as had the rank and file, but all were content to sink differences and subscribe to the simple formu