It’s funny but the above question seems not to bother the ordinary English, Scots or Welsh person at all, but exercises the renegade Irishman and Irishwoman quite a bit. In that way those Irish renegades most clearly demonstrate their distance from the vast majority of aboriginal Britons who are quite happy in their own skins and tolerant of others.
An aboriginal Irishman, a world renowned writer in English, George Moore, after much study and thought, renounced his Catholicism and embraced the Church of England. He wasn’t content to do so quietly but cried –“When will my unfortunate country turn its eyes from Rome -cause of all her woe?” and reportedly described racial hatred of England as “the dominant strain of Irish nationalism,” aman who ” who could insist that England and Ireland belonged together as part of a European, English-speaking culture.”
The words quoted were uttered in 1903 when there were enough survivors about to realise that the depopulation of Ireland, during the previous 60 years, and not least of Moore’s native Mayo, the starvation, and the coffin ships, owed little to Rome, unless it could be blamed on one prominent Papist who declared that he was proud of a people who’d rather see their children die than deprive their landlords of their rents. And it was not Roman Legions that
descended on Mayo to protect scabs harvesting Militia Ensign Boycott’s crops. And there were also people, still alive, speaking Irish in Mayo and other places as their ancestors had done when St Columbcille and St Aidan took Christianity to Britain, St Columbanus to Italy and scholars to the Court of Charlemagne before what later became “England” had a name, a language or a literature. It no disparagement of English literature to remark on England’s great achievements once Englishmen had been taught to read by St Aidan and his Irish compatriots. Bede’s History of the English Church and People did not stint in its praise of those men.
I’m indebted to an article in HISTORY IRELAND for the quotation from George Moore. Its author says
“Some celebration of George Moore on the centenary of ‘The Brook Erith’ might leaven the unhealthy diet of guns, martyrs and narrow materialism that has characterised 2016 so far. There must be in Ireland today, somewhere, an appreciation, warmer than in 1916, of a man, who could ask , in 1903…”
and the writer gives the passage already quoted.
The writer, Dennis Kennedy, (no relation, Deo Gratias!) is a Belfast man employed by the IRISH TIMES from 1969 to 1985, retiring as Deputy Editor. Thus he worked under the editorship of Douglas Gageby, amongst others, and under the paper’s Dictator for Life (British) Major Tom McDowell. I found many of his contributions at the time insulting and offensive.
To make Dennis happy, all Papists should turn Prod, all Republicans become Empire Loyalists, eschew militancy, and demonstrate our pacific natures by festooning ourselves with poppies.
As Peadar Kearney sang in Whack Fol The Diddle – “Won’t Mother England Be Surprised?”
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