Five Years in Ireland, 1895-1900
by Michael John Fitzgerald McCarthy (9781150217173)

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1902 Original Publisher: Simpkin Subjects: Ireland History / Europe / Ireland Travel / Europe / Ireland Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: FIVE YEARS IN IRELAND CHAPTER I WHY THE AUTHOR WROTE THIS BOOK " Sure, He that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused." -- Hamlet. During the splendid June of 1895, I sat one evening on the pier at Howth, looking across the full tide at Ireland's Eye. The glow of sunset reddened the sky from West to North, from Portmarnock and Malahide to Lambay Island. The scene and the time were favourable to meditation. Beneath that arch of purple and gold lay the plains of my native land, stretching westward to the great rampart of rock and cliff which protects Ireland from the stormy Atlantic. I thought of the centuries of strife and misery, of darkness, misunderstanding, and ignorance, through which the inhabitants of our Island have passed, since the Normans landed in 1172. The grandfathers of those Normans who came here in 1172, had conquered England in 1066, only a century before; and at the period when their grandsons landed in Ireland, the Saxons were still kept down by them as "an oppressed race " in England. I then thought of the determined patience with which those Saxons bore that oppression, and how they ultimately absorbed the Normans without ever coming to a conflict of arms, so that the Norman race is no longer spoken of now, but the Saxon race is the dominant race in England. Had the Saxons " treasured up " the memory of the wrongs inflicted on them by the Normans, what would have been the condit...

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