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Irish History
Thursday 8th December 2011 @ 10:45 am
I’ve recently been reading a book that came out of a Methodist symposium in 1931 – a really interesting read … and sad in parts. It is incredible to read some of the pages and see the same questions still being asked 80 years later! It is also inspiring to see how people were trying to bring fresh thinking to the Irish Methodist church during moments of social, political and military turmoil that marked the first 40 years of the last century. Their hope is palpable.
Here is a comment where one writer, speaking of the relationship between England and Ireland, quotes John Wesley. Fascinating observation from the Englishman …
“is it any wonder that those who are born Papists generally live and die as such, when the Protestants can find no better ways of converting them than by penal laws and Acts of parliament.”
Wesley wrote that after is first visit to Ireland 17th August 1747.
The writer, Rev James Alley, goes on to write …
“Cromwell’s sternly, often brutally, repressive measures after his conquest of the country; his completion of the work begun by the Tudors, of taking the land in Ireland from the chieftains who owned it and giving it to the English proprietors; penal laws of great severity; the suppression of the Irish language; the deliberate ruin of the Irish cloth trade in the interests of the English manufacturers; the forbidding of the import of Irish cattle into England at the behest of English agriculturalists, combined to sow in the hearts of the majority of the Irish people that seemingly unreasoning hatred of England, which has so often been a puzzle to Englishmen in later days, and which has persisted in spite of the generous efforts of British statesmen in the last half century to wipe out the bitter memories of the past, to reconcile the Irish people, and to secure Ireland’s prosperity. British rulers in bygone centuries sowed the wind, their successors in recent days reaped the whirlwind.”
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A state of confusion arises in me as I\'m half Irish and half English so should I be feeling guilty or angry?
Name: Carol
Added: Thursday 8th December 2011 @ 5:31 pm