The Young Ireland Movement

Justin McCarthy
1903
Chapter XI

A NEW life was growing up in Ireland—a life of literature and patriotic movement. Ireland had had no literature peculiarly her own since the native language had ceased to be the tongue of the majority among her people. There had been Irish literary men at all times, but they wrote in English and in the mode of that English literature to which they belonged. O'Connell's movement brought for the first time a genuine Irish literature, inspired by the feelings, the traditions, and the very atmosphere of the country, although written in English.