Ireland -- Politics and government; Political parties -- Ireland -- History; Sinn Fein
they will, if wise, adopt the widest possible
franchise--give a vote to every adult man and woman of sound mind. To
restrict the franchise in any respect is to prepare the way for some
future usurpation of the rights of the sovereign people. The people, that
is the whole people, must remain sovereign not only in theory but in
fact.... It is in fact true that the repositories of the Irish tradition,
as well the spiritual tradition of nationality as the kindred tradition of
stubborn physical resistance to England, have been the great, faithful,
splendid, common people, that dumb multitudinous throng which sorrowed
during the penal night, which bled in '98, which starved in the Famine;
and which is here still--what is left of it--unbought and unterrified. Let
no man be mistaken as to who will be lord in Ireland, when Ireland is
free. The people will be lord and master." These theses are enforced by
quotations from Lalor, the most outspoken Democrat and Radical in the
tradition of Irish nationalism. The pamphlet concludes with a defence of
John Mitchel (who adopted Lalor's teaching) against the charge of hating
the English people. "Mitchel, the least apologetic of men, was at pains to
explain that his hate was not of English men and women, but of the English
thing which called itself a government in Ireland, of the English Empire,
of English commercialism supported by English militarism, a thing wholly
evil, perhaps the most evil thing that there has ever been in the world."
On Palm Sunday, 1916, the Union of Irish Labour and Irish Nationality was
proclaimed in a striking fashion. In the evening of that day Connolly
hoisted over Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Citizen Army, the Irish
tricolour of orange, white and green, the flag designed by the Young
Irelanders in 1848 to symbolise the union of the Orange and Green by the
white bond of a common brotherhood. On Easter Monday the Irish Republic
was proclaimed in arms in Dublin.
AFTER THE RISING.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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