Oliver Cromwell Ireland Quotes

The History of Ireland in two words: Ah well. The Invasion by the Vikings: Ah well. The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Daniel O’Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine, Charles Stewart Parnell, Easter Rising, Michael Collins, Éamon De Valera, Éamon De Valera again (Dear Germany, so sorry to learn of the death of your Mr Hitler), Éamon De Valera again, the Troubles, the Tribunals, the Fianna Fáil Party, The Church, the Banks, the eight hundred years of rain: Ah well. In the Aeneid Virgil tells it as Sunt lacrimae rerum, which in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation means ‘They weep for how the world goes’, which is more eloquent than Ah well but means the same thing.

What you had in the chronicle of the country then was a few centuries of a game of Rebellion-Betrayal, Rebellion-Betrayal, Uprising Put-Down, and Hope Dashed. The History of Ireland in two words: Ah well. The Invasion by the Vikings: Ah well. The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Daniel O’Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine, Charles Stewart Parnell, Easter Rising, Michael Collins, Éamon De Valera, Éamon De Valera again (Dear Germany, so sorry to learn of the death of your Mr Hitler), Éamon De Valera again, the Troubles, the Tribunals, the Fianna Fáil Party, The Church, the Banks, the eight hundred years of rain: Ah well.

The first of the Walbys to come to Ireland had been Isaiah, who in 1649 won a measure of renown as a Cromwell officer. Captain Isaiah distinguished himself during the massacre at Drogheda in which several thousand Catholics, women and children no exception, were slaughtered in holy vengeance. The Drogheda murders were sanctified by Oliver Cromwell himself, who declared it “a righteous judgment of God upon barbarous wretches.” In the three hundred-odd years that followed, this opinion of the natives remained largely unchanged by succeeding generations of Walbys.

You have read New England history, dear, but you’ve let the ugly parts slip into the back of your mind. Your forefathers hanged helpless old women as witches.” “Yes, Lanny, but they believed the devil was in them.” “The Communists believe the devil is in the capitalists, the great landlords and others who monopolize the means of life and use them to exploit the laboring masses. It is a different set of ideas, but the fundamental attitude, the type of mind, is the same. Your forefathers put men in stocks, they ducked women in ducking stools, they drove Roger Williams, a gentle mystic, out into the wilderness.” “Surely they never murdered people wholesale as the Communists have done!” “Are you sure? Just go to your public library and get a history of Ireland, and see what Oliver Cromwell did to the Irish people, the names he called them, and the wholesale ferocious slaughter. Ireland is a smaller country than Russia, but proportionately I doubt if the Communists have killed as many people in Russia as the Roundheads killed in the Emerald Isle. You and I are used to seeing social progress made by means of the ballot, but we have to bear in mind that some peoples haven’t reached that stage of development and cannot get any sort of change without violence, and a lot of it.

YOUNG NED OF THE HILL" "Have you ever walked the lonesome hills and heard the curlews cry? Or seen the raven black as night upon a windswept sky? To walk the purple heather and hear the westwind cry To know that's where the rapparee must die. Since Cromwell pushed us westward to live our lowly lives There's some of us have deemed to fight from Tipperary mountains high Noble men with wills of iron who are not afraid to die Who'll fight with gaelic honour held on high. A curse upon you Oliver Cromwell , you who raped our Motherland I hope you're rotting down in hell for the horrors that you sent To our misfortunate forefathers whom you robbed of their birthright "To hell or Connaught" may you burn in hell tonight. Of one such man I'd like to speak a rapparee by name and deed His family dispossessed and slaughtered they put a price upon his head His name is known in song and story his deeds are legends still And murdered for blood money was young Ned of the hill. A curse upon you Oliver Cromwell, you who raped our Motherland I hope you're rotting down in hell for the horrors that you sent To our misfortunate forefathers whom you robbed of their birthright "To hell or Connaught" may you burn in hell tonight. You have robbed our homes and fortunes, even drove us from our land You tried to break our spirit but you'll never understand The love of dear old Ireland that will forge an iron will As long as there are gallant men like young Ned of the hill.