Irish Nationality

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Irish Nationality" by Alice Stopford Green. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Excerpt from Irish Nationality Ireland lies the last outpost of Europe against the vast flood of the Atlantic Ocean; unlike all other islands it is circled round with mountains, whose precipitous cliffs rising sheer above the water stand as bulwarks thrown up against the immeasurable sea. It is commonly supposed that the fortunes of the island and its civilisation must by nature hang on those of England. Neither history nor geography allows this theory. The life of the two countries was widely separated. Great Britain lay turned to the east; her harbours opened to the sunrising, and her first traffic was across the narrow waters of the Channel and the German Sea. 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.

Originally written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Constitution of Ireland, this book is an account of how the Constitution's requirements have been implemented by the legislature and interpreted by the courts. In this way it provides an integrated and contextual account of constitutional law in Ireland. It goes as far as to place it in context of some foreign constitutions, especially the Constitutions of the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, as indeed the Irish courts refer frequently to other countries for guidance in interpreting the Constitution. The book largely falls into four parts. The first few chapters are introductory and cover the drafting and adoption of the Constitution, some features of the State and its citizens, and the judicial review of laws. The next few chapters deal with the various institutions of government and with the activities of the State in the international arena and in relation to fiscal matters. Then following on from this there are a number of chapters which consider what may be termed the various civil liberties and rights. There is a final brief section, towards the end of the book which deals with the various legal breaches of the Constitution. This new edition has been extensively rewritten to account for the enormous to take into account the tumultuous changes in Irish Constitutional Law in the intervening years. Challenges to articles, referenda, new legislation, and cases are all judicially considered. Michael Forde and David Leonard offer the reader everything they need to know on this complex subject.

When Mrs. Green's "Irish Nationality" was published, a writer in a Dublin paper began his review of it with the words: "By God, this is a book!" That sentence suggests, a little violently, the Irish opinion of Mrs. Green's place as a historian. No lover of the cold (or, if you like the word better, the inanimate) facts of history ever broke out into an exclamation like that in book-review. It was obviously written by one who regarded Mrs. Green, not as a bloodless chronicler of events but as the champion and vindicator of a nation. If anyone doubts that Ireland needed a champion in the historical even more than in the political sphere, he will do well to read Mrs. Green's own short essay, "The Way of History in Ireland." It is an exposure, at once impassioned and wittily contemptuous, of the way in which the historians, instead of setting themselves to open up new fields of knowledge in Irish history, have successively contented themselves with muddying the pedigree of the Irish people. "History does not repeat itself," said either Wilde or Mr. Max Beerbohm; "historians repeat each other." And the witticism is seriously true of most of the Irish history that has been written. One after another, the historians have leaped through the gap of tradition, like a rout of sheep, and pastured on the old fables that represent the seven-hundred-years duel between England and Ireland as a duel between civilization, on the one hand, and barbarism on the other. This was scarcely questioned in collegiate circles. One accepted it as one accepted the superiority of Abraham Lincoln to Sitting Bull, of Queen Victoria to the Queen of the Baganda. To contend that the quarrel between England and Ireland, so far from being a quarrel between civilization and barbarism, was a quarrel between one civilization and another, would have been regarded as a paradox of which only an irresponsible Irishman would be capable. More than that, it would have been to challenge the whole world of political and social ideas in which the historians of Ireland had hitherto lived and moved and had their being. It would even have been to question the ethics of Imperialism. For Irish history has been written for the most part, not in the service of truth but in the service of Empire. In Ireland, as Mrs. Green says, "history has a peculiar doom. It is enslaved in the chains of the Moral Tale-the good man (English) who prospered, and the bad man (Irish) who came to a shocking end." If an Irishman ventured to cast doubt on the political tract that resulted-whether on its ideas or its instances-he was dismissed in a scholarly and judicial manner as a politician, a biassed and querulous person, and any references to massacres and murders perpetrated by Elizabethan civilizers were discountenanced as peculiarly unpleasant examples of "the Irish whine.'' In this way the Irish people were slowly being drained of that self-respect which comes of being conscious heirs to a fine tradition. More and more of them were coming to say, in tones of self-pity and resignation: "Ah, where would we be without England?" Irish history before the arrival of Strongbow "came to be looked on as merely a murky prelude to the civilizing work of England-a preface, savage, transitory, and of no permanent interest, to be rapidly passed over till we come to the English pages of the book." Clearly a nation which accepted such an account of its ancestry as this without question would be on the road to spiritual slavery.... -"Ireland a Nation" [1920]

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.