Robert Holmes Quotes
The Irish light as been extinguished by the foulest means that sword and tyranny ever practiced …. Any attempt to rekindle it is to be treated as sedition.
Robert Holmes, *, Irish Lawyer, Defense of the United Irishmen at their treason trial, 1798
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Chile with help from San Martin had ejected the Spanish. O’Higgins, the Chilean leader had joined up with San Martin and served under his command. The sectional rivalry bothered men like Carrera. Instead of seeing all the South Americans fighting the Spanish as allies as O’Higgins did, Carrera and his brothers refused to join a government of unity and they and their troops were just as dictatorial and cruel as the Spanish had been. O’Higgins gave Indians and Blacks equal rights with whites which distressed the aristocratic Carrera’s. Finally the Carrera’s tried to set up their own government, and the new Chilean government disarmed their militia and executed two of the three Carrera brothers who were leading the militia troops who were little more than thieves and brigands.
The Chief Secretary, Lord Castleregh, had put forward a resolution to bring about the unification of Great Britain and Ireland under the single British Parliament at Westminster. He and his allies had bribed a number of the Irish MPs to support the union. With Union some Irish MPs would then be able to win seats representing Ireland in the British Parliament. Although Grattan and most of the Orangemen opposed the Union, 4 months later, the bill passed comfortably. Ironically, Grattan was one of the Irish MPs whose popularity won a seat in the unified British Parliament.
British colonial economics imported raw materials to England which then exported them back to the colonies as manufactured goods. Gandhi correctly calculated that by minimizing purchase of English cloth, colonial control of India would not be as profitable. Gandhi not only called for the boycott, but called on Indians to spin their own cloth, set an example be spinning himself, and his Congress party adopted the spinning wheel as its logo and symbol which continues today. Narcotics, was at the time not only legal, but British economic interests controlled much of the world narcotics trade. Gandhi’s call for a boycott of narcotics was as much an economic tactic as it was a health measure.
Marion was the initiator of Guerilla Warfare and he and his men traveled lightly spending much time in the South Carolina swamps. They had few supplies and when chased by the British could not stop to hunt. The British called him the “Swamp Fox”. The American colonists at this point still thought of the British as “their countrymen.”
In most revolutionary settings leaders have to persuade people who have voted with no success to turn to the rifle. In Ireland at this point, almost all the nationalsits knew that the rifle would help them but they were not sure that a vote would have the effect of a bullet.
The Congress was encouraging all men volunteer for the military and defend the new nation now that the British were landing in force to put down the revolution. By modern language standards, this is a little “over the top” but it shows not only the passion felt by the Congress but the importance they placed on the struggle.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising.
At this point in the convoluted history of Irish-English politics, the majority of the Irish upper class and members of Parliament were large landholders whose estates had been accumulated and legalized under English
The first sentence of this quotation was a favorite of Paine's. He had earlier used it in Common Sense in 1776. See {635451}.
The organization sent 2,100 volunteers to fight for South American independence from Spain.
The IRA had just murdered Lord Mountbatten with a bomb on his small boat. Mountbattten, then a 79 year old, elderly man in retirement was a member of the Royal Family. His grandson was also murdered. Mountbatten had not had anything to do with Ireland but to the IRA he was a symbol of British imperialism since he had been the British Viceroy of India. Actually, it was he who had organized and presided over Indian Independence.
