Irish Nationalists

"Lieutenant Colonel Malone––was it necessary, in order to carry out the raid, to-ransack the nursery, and to wake up the children?"

"This Irish war, small as it may seem now, will, if it is persisted in, will corrupt and eventually ruin not only your army, but your Empire itself. What right has England to torment and demoralise Ireland?"

"Drunk with triumph, I cuddled in my rocking cradle and ransacked every unvisited chamber of the memory....to see the residue take life and meaning in the light of the great revelation."

"A keen wind from the west struck our faces, and as swiftly as it had come the fog rolled away from us, in one mighty mass, stripping clean and pure the starry dome of heaven...."

"Juist, by jove!"

"What the devil do you mean Carruthers?"

"I do not know how I stand this parting from Molly, save that by a paradox we are so absoultely one that in the sense we never part, but talk to one another and watch one another and commune night and day, and grip fast the same ideals. The North Star is our only meeting place, in this manner. We both look at it every night."

"Being shot with volcanic suddenness into the Navy at an hour's notice is a queer experience, but I am beginning to get used to the life and to forget that I ever had a moustache or a tweed suit."

"The cavalryman, is for practical purposes a compound of three factors; man, horse and rifle. The lance should go altogether."

"First let us rid our minds of the fallacy that guerrilla war is a wholly distinct thing in kind from regular war. It is nothing of the sort. War is a science whose fundamental principles are constant however wide or numerous the variations...."

"An artillery man is not made in a month, nor an officer in a year; and unless we had had educated men as keen as mustard, and no trouble about discipline, I doubt if the battery in South Africa would have been much good for a long time."

"Everything had been new and strange : the lean and ragged foot-soldiers who marched alongside of us, toughened, stained and blasés after months of service; the turmoil of encampment in the dark, with the shrill yells of black drivers, and the hassle and crush of crowding wagons, the twinkle of hosts of camp-fires, and the hot glow of a distant veldt-fire; and, finally the ghostly ride of two miles to water the horses...."

"One of the charms of Africa, is the long settled periods of pure unclouded sky, in which the sun rises and sets with no flaming splashes of vivid colours, but by gentle, imperceptible gradations of pure light, waning or waxing."

"Most of England's wit and manhood scintillated in the sunlight, while British matrons and England's fairest maids lit up with looks of proud affection; bosoms heaved in sympathetic unison with the measured tramp of the ammunition boots...."

"...the Dulcibella had begun to move in her sleep, as it were, rolling drowsily to some faint send of the sea, with an occasional short jump, like the start of an uneasy dreamer."

"...to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing..."

"I leapt into my boots, trousers and jacket, tumbled all my gear, lying ready laid out, into my bag, donned helmet and goggles, seized charts and rushed to the upper deck....the sea was calm under a heaving swell. Engadine towered above my cockle-shell."

"The only complaint I have heard from nationalists or anti-unionists is that he was not shot 40 years ago."

"I have no involvement in terrorist activity."

"There haven't been any attacks by the IRA on Protestants."

"That ageing geriatric whizz-kid seems intent on starting World War III."

"The Brighton bombing was an inevitable result of the British presence in this country. Far from being a blow against democracy it was a blow for democracy."

"You've spoken about British rule of Ireland, and ending British rule in Ireland. I want to ask you this. Do you see Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom for the foreseeable future? Isn't that the truth of it, it's going to? Everybody knows it's going to. So why don't you level with your supporters and with the Irish people and say, 'it is going to remain part of the United Kingdom for the foreseeable future and now let's talk about how it can be made into a just society.' Why don't you face up to reality?"

"I've been listening to a phrase, Internment Without Trial. And I keep thinking of the people that were murdered without trial. I'm not talking about the police, I'm not talking about the army. I'm talking about people that were shot dead on their doorsteps, through windows, in the presence of their children, their parents and their wives. These people in their graves are crying out for retribution and it's not going to come anymore. And there are people who are not in their graves. They're in hospitals. They're in wheelchairs. There are girls who thought they were going to grow up, and never will. And young women who thought they were going to get married, and they never will, and they'd rather they were dead. And there are people too that... they don't want to be dead because their brains are destroyed, they're vegetables and they're going to be vegetables forever. And you are morally responsible for that! Morally, you are a murderer! And not only are you a murderer, but now you add the extra dimension by saying 'I want peace' and you're a hypocrite as well!"

"I was a released internee; I was off the run. One of the reasons I had been chosen to be on the republican delegation for the talks was because I wasn't a wanted man... I played very little part in the meeting myself."

"The government, with its bayonets, will learn in a single Winter how powerless are armed forces against the will of a united determined, and self-reliant nation."

"Why should Ireland be treated as a geographical fragment of England, as he had heard an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer call it some time ago. Ireland was not a geographical fragment, but a nation."

"The law gave those landlords extensive power at the present time, and unless they went in for a revolution he confessed he did not see how they were going to bring about a radical reform of the system of land tenure in this country."

"You can never have civil liberty so long as strangers and Englishmen make your laws and so long as the occupiers of the soil own not an inch of it."

"[Y]ou have an expenditure of five or six millions of pounds sterling—nearly all of it paid by the English taxpayers, and all for the purpose of screwing rack-rents out of the Irish tenants. I am very sure that that sort of thing will not be allowed to go on. Would not it be a very wise thing for the Irish landlords to recognize the situation in time, to see that if they do not be reasonable they will be chucked overboard altogether?"

"Fellow citizens:The hour to try your souls and to redeem your pledges has arrived."

"Stand together in face of the brutal, cowardly enemies of your race!"

"Bring English tyranny to its knees."

"Pay no rent under any pretext!"

"Do what is beyond your strength even should you fail sometimes."

"Without the help of the people our exertions would be as nothing."

"No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation."

"No man has the right to say to his country "Thus far shalt thou go and no further"."

"While we leave those things to time, circumstances and the future, we must each one of us resolve in our own hearts that we shall at all times do everything which within us lies to obtain Ireland the fullest measure of her rights."

"I would not have taken off my coat and gone to work had I not known that we were laying the foundations by this movement for the recovery of our legislative independence."

"Richard Barry O'Brien: Every Irish Nationalist would go for separation if he thought he could get it; we are all Home Rulers because we do not believe separation is possible. Charles Stewart Parnell: I have never gone for separation. I never said I would. The physical force men understand my position very well. I made it clear to them that I would be satisfied with a Parliament, and that I believed in our constitutional movement; but I also said that if our constitutional movement failed, I could not then stand in the way of any man who wished to go further and to try other means. That was the position I always took up. I have never changed, and I still believe in our constitutional movement. I believe that with our own Parliament, if England does not meddle, we can build up our country."

"Parnell's death is as unexpected as most of his proceedings. I don't think you and I ever quite agreed in our estimate of him. I still regard him—measured by his opportunities and his achievements—as one of the half-dozen great men of action of this century. Napoleon stands by himself; he has in our time—in many respects in all time—neither equal nor second. But the only others of this age that I would rank higher than Parnell are Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck, and (perhaps) Cavour. Of course you understand that I am not speaking of the goodness (in any of the cases) of the result, but of the width and depth of the changes brought about by personal initiative. Like Bismarck, and Napoleon himself, Parnell lived too long, and the later part of his life was an anti-climax. I think myself that his mental and moral equilibrium was at all times very delicately poised, and once lost, he never regained it."

"Parnell was not eloquent, much less an orator. Possessed of singularly handsome features, he was slovenly in dress and untidy in appearance. He used to speak with one of his hands buried deeply in a front pocket of his trousers. He had no great command of language. But as he hissed out his sentences of concentrated passion and scorn, scattering his notes as he proceeded upon the seat behind him, he gave an impression of almost dæmonic self-control and illimitable strength. When he spoke for his party, in the tremendous moments of the crisis, Mr. Gladstone would move to the end of the front bench, and with his hand held behind his ear, listen to the freezing but impressive display with rapt attention. Either in the House or outside of it, Parnell appeared an isolated figure; "remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow," he came in and out without exchanging a word with anyone: the utmost concession that he appeared to make to companionship was when he would be met tramping the lobbies in earnest conversation with one of the few associates whom he deigned to consult."

"He had statesmanlike qualities; and I found him a wonderfully good man to do business with, until I discovered him to be a consummate liar."

"Accident made him a parliamentarian, but he was a cold-blooded tactician, amenable to liberal considerations but utterly immune from liberal sympathies. The romantic notion of the “brotherhood of man” disgusted Parnell."

"[T]he one man in politics for whom I was ever able to feel a genuine respect."

"Home Rule apart, he was himself a Tory."

"Mr. Parnell has proved to the world the kind of leader the Irish nation is on the point of losing. He is a man of iron determination, inflexible will, matchless courage and audacity and of peerless skill as a leader, but a man who will not allow even the demands of conscience and honour to stand in the way of his purposes, 'who neither fears God nor respects man'. ... Who can withhold his meed of admiration from the old fallen commander and who can help feeling compassion at the ruin of such grandeur!"

"Mr Butt was a lawyer, and believing that he could persuade Parliament of the justness of his cause, he attempted to effect a revolution by argument. ... Parnell appreciated the situation more correctly, but he was hampered by the crimes that clung round the Land League, and by the opposition of the landlords, naturally exasperated by attacks on their property."

"Mr. Parnell showed himself acute, frank, patient, closely attentive, and possessed of striking though not rapid insight. He never slurred over difficulties, nor tried to pretend that rough was smooth. On the other hand, he had nothing in common with that desperate species of counsellor, who takes all the small points, and raises objections instead of helping to contrive expedients. He measured the ground with a slow and careful eye, and fixed tenaciously on the thing that was essential at the moment. Of constructive faculty he never showed a trace. He was a man of temperament, of will, of authority, of power; not of ideas or ideals, or knowledge, or political maxims, or even of the practical reason in any of its higher senses, as Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson had practical reason. But he knew what he wanted."