The Fools, The Fools, The Fools
"A French writer has paid the English a very well-deserved compliment. He says that they never commit a useless crime. When they hire a man to assassinate an Irish patriot, when they blow a Sepoy from the mouth of a cannon, when they produce a famine in one of their dependencies, they have always an ulterior motive. They do not do it for fun. Humorous as these crimes are, it is not the humour of them, but their utility, that appeals to the English. Unlike Gilbert's Mikado, they would see nothing humorous in boiling oil. If they retained boiling oil in their penal code, they would retain it, as they retain flogging before execution in Egypt, strictly because it has been found useful."
- Patrick Pearse, The Murder Machine, January 1916
Mr. Pearse, for his role in the insurrection of April 1916 and his services rendered to Irish liberty and language, is often seen as the greatest son Hibernia ever spawned (bar one). The fact that his father was an Englishman originally from Birmingham has been overlooked in the past, unsurprisingly. It appears that even as a youth Pearse was very self-conscious of his Saxon blood: swearing an oath to die for his country, he threw himself into nationalist politics and the Gaelic revival in a desperate effort to redeem himself of his own ancestry and become a true native son. James Joyce, his pupil, apparently complained of his denigration of the English language during Irish lessons and he, like many then and now, unswervingly used the term England/English in substitute for Britain/British. In spite of his heritage, he opened the door to an Irish Republic.
Or maybe even because of it.
- Patrick Pearse, The Murder Machine, January 1916
Mr. Pearse, for his role in the insurrection of April 1916 and his services rendered to Irish liberty and language, is often seen as the greatest son Hibernia ever spawned (bar one). The fact that his father was an Englishman originally from Birmingham has been overlooked in the past, unsurprisingly. It appears that even as a youth Pearse was very self-conscious of his Saxon blood: swearing an oath to die for his country, he threw himself into nationalist politics and the Gaelic revival in a desperate effort to redeem himself of his own ancestry and become a true native son. James Joyce, his pupil, apparently complained of his denigration of the English language during Irish lessons and he, like many then and now, unswervingly used the term England/English in substitute for Britain/British. In spite of his heritage, he opened the door to an Irish Republic.
Or maybe even because of it.
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