Ireland -- Politics and government; Political parties -- Ireland -- History; Sinn Fein
After five months Mr. Arthur Griffith was again able to start a paper. The
Dublin printers could not be induced to take the risk of printing for him
again: but Belfast supplied one with the necessary enterprise. On June 19,
1915, _Nationality_ appeared as a penny weekly paper and continued to
appear until the Easter Rising in 1916. In tone _Nationality_ was a
reproduction of its predecessors and as the main characteristic of Sinn
Fein propaganda was its directness and simplicity two extracts from its
columns will suffice. An editorial (signed C.) on "The Fenian Faith"
written towards the end of 1915 contains the following: "The Fenians and
the Fenian faith incarnated in Allen, Larkin and O'Brien were of a
fighting and revolutionary epoch. They can only be commemorated by men of
another fighting and revolutionary generation. That generation we have
with us to-day. For we have the material, the men and stuff of war, the
faith and purpose and cause for revolution.... We shall have Ireland
illumined with a light before which even the Martyrs' will pale: the light
of Freedom, of a deed done and action taken and a blow struck for the Old
Land"; and a month or so later: "The things that count in Ireland against
English Conscription are national determination, serviceable weapons and
the knowledge of how to use them." Under the stress of circumstances Sinn
Fein seemed to have abandoned the policy of the days of peace and to have
come round in time of war to the policy which, even two years before the
war, had been enunciated in _Irish Freedom_: "Ireland can be freed by
force of arms; _that_ is the fact which ever must be borne in mind. The
responsibility rests with the men of this generation. They can strike with
infinitely greater hopes of success than could their fathers and their
grandsires: but if they let this chance slip ... if they strike no blow
for their country, whilst England herself is in handgrips with the most
powerful nation in Europe, then the opportunity will have passed and
Ireland will be more utterly under the heel of England than ever she was
since the Union." This was written in September, 1912. But the task of
putting the policy into practice, of welding the (at times) discordant
elements of anti-Parliamentarian Nationalism together and making possible
a united effort was reserved for other hands and another mind than those
of the founder of Sinn Fein.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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