Irish Rebellion Quotes

Stop at home. Arm for Ireland. Fight for Ireland and no other land.

The cause of the rebellion [Irish Rebellion of 1641] was the desire of the Romanists to recover the Church Revenues, worth about 110,000 per annum, and of the common Irish to get back all the Englishmen's estates, and of the ten or twelve grandees to get the empire of the whole.

The first check we met was from the Catholic clergy. Our men came to us telling that they were driven away from the confessionals, and would not get absolution unless they gave up the oath. We asked them did they think they committed a sin in taking an oath to fight for their country's freedom, and when they said they did not, we told them to tell the priests that they came to confess their sins and not their virtues, and to ask the priests if they had sworn to fight for England against Ireland, would they not get absolution? The priests were getting vexed with us, and we were getting vexed with the priests

No news, save that Great Britain is hanging the Irish, hunting the Maroons [slaves], feeding the Vendée [counter-revolutionary district of France], and establishing the human flesh trade.

The shot Irishmen will now take their places beside Emmet and the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland, and beside the heroes of Poland and Sérbia and Belgium in Europe; and nothing in heaven or earth can prevent it.

The 1916 uprising was kind of the most important rebellion in Ireland's fight for independence that had been going on for 700 years. So it's a very important moment in history for us.

Well, we know that eighteen years after that solemn declaration it was disregarded, and the Irish Parliament, which lasted for five hundred years, was destroyed by the Act of Union. Gentlemen, the Act of Union was carried by force and fraud, by treachery and falsehood.

The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton--Parnell--never a man.

The commotions in Ireland were so sudden and so violent that it was hard at first either to discern the cause or apply a remedy to that precipitate rebellion.

The so-called Boer War advertised British vulnerabilities, and these were confirmed by the Irish rising of 1916 and the subsequent creation of the Irish Free State, blows that attracted the notice and attention of colonial dissidents in Asia and Africa.

Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails upon me the penalty of death; but the history of Ireland explains that crime and justifies it.

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

… the annihilation of Ireland.

Much is said about English severity, but not a word about Irish provocation.

Holy War for the Preservation of the Faith in Ireland

Ireland is a land of poets and legends, of dreamers and rebels. All of these have music woven through and around them. Tunes for dancing or for weeping, for battle or for love.

My mother's father was from Sligo, and he used to say it was the hardest thing in the world to find a man alive in Dublin who wasn't in the GPO during the Easter Rising. Twenty brave men marched into that post office, he said, and thirty thousand marched out.

There is a nation of the Irish, the whilst, that wander abroad, most of them criminous, ail-lewdly affected people that, forth of an unjust yet habitual hatred to the English Government, delight to have it believed, and themselves pitied as persecuted forth of the country, and ravished of their means for their religion only, stirring and inciting all they can to blood and rebellion

Patrick Pearse - who set the events of 1916 in motion when he read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin - is not exactly an unfamiliar name to the Miramichi Irish.

Ireland is a place which must have so great an Army kept up in it, as may make the Irish desist from doing themselves or the English harm by their future Rebellions

It was a little bit strange as an English woman cast in 'Rebellion.' I read up about the events and, honestly, I knew very little about it to begin with it. It wasn't something that they cover in English schools at all.

…for the liberation of Ireland by force of arms

[Describing the Irish Fenians:] … prating mock-rebels

We report on the mischiefs. perils, and estate of your land of Ireland, which is on the point of being lost …. The Irish, you enemies, of one assent and covenant, commence to levy war throughout all their land, burning, destroying and preying dearly on your lieges of those parts …. As an act of charity, send a good, sufficient chieftain, stocked and strengthened with men and treasure … as a noble and generous prince is bound to do for his lieges.