25 Quotes About Irish-history

Banshee cries?”“You know, those creatures that cry really loud when someone from an important Irish family is about to die?

The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.

If history belongs to the winners, legend belongs to the losers.

Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident—and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

In the 1870s it was estimated that a third of all the money in the Irish economy came from money sent by kindhearted Irish servant girls to their families. The Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in New York alone would send more than $30 million to Ireland between 1850 and 1880. Many families in Ireland owed their survival to what they gratefully called the "American Letter," a lifeline that helped them cope with brutal poverty and lack of opportunity.

Cork-born Mother Jones was renowned as a dramatic orator who relished props, curses, and all kinds of attention-getting tactics--sound at all Irish to you? She exaggerated her age, referring to strikers not too much younger than herself as "my boys" and donning frumpish costumes to emphasize her "motherly appearance.

Both sets of sectarians held each other in grim embrace, opposing each other but at the same time absolutely dependent, one upon the other. The real fear of both Unionists and the right-wing Nationalists was that this sectarian tango would come to an end and that the working class would vote and act along class and not religious lines.

I am a war man in the day of war, but I am a peace man in the day of peace.

It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can endure the most who will conquer.