United States or Niger ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Barrie referred, who believe that the co-operation of Ulstermen is necessary for a prosperous and free Ireland, and there are no lengths consistent with common sense and reason to which I would not go to satisfy their fears and doubts and objections. "The special case of Ulster as put before us was this: 'We are contented under the Union, we have prospered under the Union.
Side by side with them on the other flank was the Fourth Division, containing two battalions of Dublin Fusiliers, in one of which John Redmond's son commanded a company; so that he and the Ulstermen went over shoulder to shoulder. He came back unwounded; all other company commanders in the battalion were killed.
But for all that, the pluck and tenacity of Ulstermen are undeniable. Their cause is good, and left to themselves they would win hands down.
Then answered the stranger, 'I shall not depart hence, no, not until the son of Concobar be slain in the dust'; and thereupon he rushed upon the King's son, and with one stroke of the blue blade severed his head from his body. So he departed, and soon the son of Fergus also lay dead. And now the Ulstermen surrounded the House of the Red Branch and set fire to its walls.
He told the Ulstermen that he had come to them as the leader of the Unionist Party to give them the assurance that "that party regard your cause, not as yours alone, nor as ours alone, but as the cause of the Empire"; the meeting, which he had expected to be a great gathering but which far exceeded his expectation, proved that Ulster's hostility to Home Rule, far from having slackened, as enemies had alleged, had increased and solidified with the passing years; they were men "animated by a unity of purpose, by a fixity of resolution which nothing can shake and which must prove irresistible," to whom he would apply Cromwell's words to his Ironsides: "You are men who know what you are fighting for, and love what you know."
His speech was a masterpiece; its candour and its lucidity commended itself to all hearers, but most of all to the Ulstermen, who applauded at once Lord Oranmore's comment that the odium theologicum had been replaced by divina caritas; and at a very late stage in our proceedings, Mr. Barrie referred back to this speech of the Bishop's as one of the things which they would never forget.
It is a question upon which there will be something to be said when the narrative reaches the events of that date. Here it need only be stated that, in the eyes of Ulstermen at all events, constitutional orthodoxy is quite a different thing from loyalty, and that true allegiance to the Sovereign is by them sharply differentiated from passive obedience to an Act of Parliament.
Decisions lay with Ulstermen in Belfast, not in the Convention that is to say, not subject to the daily, hourly, prompting to remember that they were not only Ulstermen but Irishmen, which arose from friendly intercourse with their fellow-delegates. The Grand Committee of twenty, representing all groups, met on October 11th.
But when the available evidence is pieced together it leads almost irresistibly to the conclusion that in March 1914 the Cabinet, or at any rate some of the most prominent members of it, decided to make an imposing demonstration of military force against Ulster, and that they expected, if they did not hope, that this operation would goad the Ulstermen into a clash with the forces of the Crown, which, by putting them morally in the wrong, would deprive them of the popular sympathy they enjoyed in so large and increasing a measure.
Twenty thousand Ulstermen, it is estimated, left Ireland for America in the first three decades of the eighteenth century. More than six thousand of them are known to have entered Pennsylvania in 1729 alone, and twenty years later they numbered one-quarter of that colony's population.
Word Of The Day