Ireland Quotes
Two protesters were killed. The demonstration so affected the government that they pressured the Belfast local authorities to announce substantial increases in relief. The economy and the employment picture got no better that year.
During the Irish Potato the official who was in charge of the relief program was a highly religious, fundamentalist Christian who believed that the famine was God’s retribution.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Actually learning psychology has demonstrated that learning can take place with success or failure, the learning is faster and more effective if the reinforcement is positive—not negative.
This quotation shows the unique relationship that the Irish Republic has had with the Catholic Church. There was probably no other non Muslim country in the world where a political leaders could get elected avowing this kind of loyalty and control by a religious heirerchy. See {639726} for an even more Irish, drastic departure from the concept of separation of church and state.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising.
Plunckett was the last Roman Catholic martyr to be executed in Britain. He was accused of conspiring against the state by allegedly plotting to bring 20,000 French soldiers into the country, and for levying a tax on his clergy to support 70,000 men for rebellion. The English have always feared ever since Henry VIII severed England from the Roman Catholic Church, that the Papacy was plotting to restore Catholicism to England and sponsor an invasion of Ireland. And indeed that was true in several cases, but nowhere near as many as the English imagined. In this case, paranoia prevailed, and the trial was pretty much a farce, but he was convicted and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered which he was.
Historically, in the first half of the 20th century, nuclear scientists discovered that probability governed and was necessary for understanding quantum mechanics—the laws of physics governing tiny objects like atoms, electrons, protons and even quarks. To many, this seemed a contradiction in that it was hard to conceive particles following laws and yet behaving randomly at the same time. However, it did not take long before all the scientists adjusted their thinking and learned to live and work with that was then a type of contradiction but is no longer thought so as men and women have learned to think in a new way. This quotation illustrates that the greatest scientists in the world, in a very short period of time, had to change their entire mode of thinking. There were no real holdouts or “conservatives” who wanted to maintain the older values. This would never happen in politics, where change is not accepted very quickly.
This hatemonger’s writing against the Freemasons and the Jews where used by the American Catholic demagogue, Father Coghlen as a model. In Ireland, he could not obtain many supporters for his hateful and absurd ideas. His own Archbishop John Charles McQuaid said him: “He is not regarded as a man of balanced judgment.” Ireland was the first country to recognize the rights of minority faiths such as Judaism as equal with the majority faith in its constitution, but Fahey tried to organize a movement to change the constitution but could find few followers. Fahey was far less influential in Ireland than he was through Cather Coghlen in America.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising. His observations seem even more prescient as later theocracies like Iran ruined their societies and progress and twisted the Islamic religion. Ireland’s independence did not separate the state from the control and influence of the Roman Catholic Church despite the warnings of Connolly and others. However, conflict with the Church in 2010 over the church sexually assaulting children and impeding the civil authorities from investigating and protecting the criminals led to a reexamination and a diminution of the role of the church in Ireland.
