Redemption - Leon Uris [286]
However, I never got to present my case to Woodrow Wilson. The British case sounded good to the American president because he wanted it to sound good. The big boys weren’t going to let the little fellows screw things up, and alongside the British, the Irish were small potatoes, so to speak.
Although the Irish had come to America under the most abominable conditions, fleeing tyranny and deprivation, their support for the old country was boisterous but weak. Once the St. Patrick’s Day Parade down Fifth Avenue broke up and the pubs were drunk dry, their net effect in Ireland didn’t amount to much.
In Ireland itself, the nation had been beautifully divided by Dublin Castle’s centuries of underhanded intrigue.
The cornerstone of British power in Ireland lay with an Anglo-Ascendancy awarded vast acreages of our land for the initial conquest and colonization of the country. These were the landed gentry, the bankers and factory owners, a privileged class intent on staying privileged through loyalty to England.
Ascendancy power was supported in one province: Ulster. By the importation of a Protestant population, it was likewise rewarded with privilege.
The Catholic middle class, such as it was, didn’t want the boat rocked, and the Catholic hierarchy, protecting its own well-being, considered the Crown its benefactor. The Church did ugly work in purging generation after generation of Irishmen of their nationalistic aspirations.
Otherwise, Dublin Castle had set up a large Catholic constabulary and systems of briberies, small civil service jobs, spying, and whatever else was needed to keep the lid on the pot.
This left the Irish masses the most wretched in Europe, with more than three quarters of the population in a perpetual state of misery and subservience.
Once the Irish nation of her great Celtic chieftains had been shattered and scattered early in the 1600s, future risings from Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet on through the Fenians were paltry affairs led by enormously courageous men, dreamers who ended up on the gallows with their necks hoicked in half after making a gallant speech from the dock.
These words became our mythology.
A Gaelic revival in recent times tried to connect that glorious past to our miserable present, but lost much of its zeal with the death of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Ireland had been committed to the war with England by a discredited John Redmond and a defunct Irish Party. Sinn Fein, the new republican political entity, was starting to win the minds of Irishmen, but elections were to be a long way off.
Indeed, the British felt so secure that they called for a draft of Irish youth into the Army in early 1916. What they were telling the Irish was…“You aren’t Irish and WE OWN YOU.”
This jangled a nerve. It is one matter to volunteer for the Army, but it is quite another to be forced to serve. After centuries of trying, the British still could not understand that Irishmen did not consider it any great honor to be British.
Even though the British gingerly backed away from Irish conscription, the republican movement, led by the secret Brotherhood, knew that the Irish were being set up for yet another betrayal.
Conor Larkin had wondered if the Irish people could ever be awakened from their centuries of lethargy. Actions like Sixmilecross and Lettershambo said that there were a few good men left to keep the flame from flickering out.
What was desperately needed now was for the Irish people to make a smashing statement in the streets that our demands for freedom will no longer be deferred and that we are now ready to make the sacrifice and take the risk to win what is ours. WE WANT TO BE AT THE PEACE TABLE.
Otherwise the right of Irish freedom would again be passed over, and this time there could be a slide back into accepting underclass status in servitude to the Crown for another century or two.
Part Three: The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men Were Not Made in Dublin
The Irish have always had a surplus of opinions. Several different