Aspects Of The Irish Question

Excerpt from Aspects of the Irish Question No attempt to interpret the Ireland of to-day can be helpful, can even be intelligible, without a constant throwing-back to the past. Other countries, Macedonia, for instance, and southern Italy and Sicily, have behind them a historical development as tortuous and mournful, as blood-soaked and convulsive; but with no country have fate and nature and human perversity dealt more harshly than with Ireland, and in none is it so indispensable that an ever-present consciousness of what has been should be the starting-point of any effort to elucidate what is. The unhappy legacy of the past culminates in the tragedy of the Irish present. You find the mark of its ravages wherever you turn, in all departments of Irish life, in the social and economic sphere as much as in the political and religious, in the mind and instinctive outlook of the people not less than in their material conditions. The resultant cannot be understood without some knowledge of the processes that have shaped it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

From 1800 to 1922 the Irish Question was the most emotional and divisive issue in British politics. It pitted Westminster politicians, anti-Catholic British public opinion, and Irish Protestant and Presbyterian champions of the Union against the determination of Ireland's large Catholic majority to obtain civil rights, economic justice, and cultural and political independence. In this completely revised and updated edition of The Irish Question, Lawrence J. McCaffrey extends his classic analysis of Irish nationalism to the present day. He makes clear the tortured history of British-Irish relations and offers insight into the difficulties now facing those who hope to create a permanent peace in Northern Ireland.

Reproduction of the original: Irish History and the Irish Question by Goldwin Smith