THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 165
THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND
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would be a word of beauty to the poorest toiler whose little ones now cower in the darkness and wither out of the sun; there are the beauties of a hundred unknown mountain glens to be disclosed to the stranger's eye; there are spreading grassy wastes to be cut up into trim fields, and blue-smoked cottages for the disinherited children of the soil whom the curse of Cromwell drove to the habitations of wild animals and plundered even amidst their rocks. There is the fame of learning to be reawakened in an island which gave learning to half Europe; there are careers to be opened out in music, in painting, in artistic design and invention—in those arts which haunt the Celtic genius as naturally as thrushes quire in an April Irish glen. Above all, there is the education which touches a nation's permanent happiness more nearly than the learned smatterings of the schools or the attractions of a mere broadcloth life—I mean the learning which teaches a man to love his trade as an artist loves his canvas; which animates him with the beauty, the dignity, the exhilaration of manual labour well performed; which leads young Irish men and women to be prouder of the knowledge of soils and crops, of the dairy and the cookery class, than of the indigestible book-lumber with which they are crammed for intermediate examinations; in a word, the education which teaches them to look for a living with trained hands and buoyant hearts in their own land; to realise that here, and not elsewhere, is to be their home; to appreciate its beauties, its advantages, its associations, at their own very doors, and to find in its clement green bosom the rich elements of a peaceful and happy life, and the pleasant passage to a happier and brighter one.
We have only to eliminate those varying moods of fatalist despondency and hot impetuosity with which centu- … continue reading »
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