The Project Gutenberg eBook, Ireland and the Home Rule Movement, by
Michael F. J. McDonnell, et al

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Title: Ireland and the Home Rule Movement

Author: Michael F. J. McDonnell

Release Date: November 9, 2004 [eBook #13998]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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IRELAND AND THE HOME RULE MOVEMENT

by

MICHAEL F. J. McDONNELL

With a Preface by John Redmond, M.P.

1908

_Matri dilectissimae_

PREFACE

Without agreeing with every expression of opinion contained in the
following pages I heartily recommend this book, especially to Englishmen
and Scotchmen, as a thoughtful, well-informed, and scholarly study of
several of the more important features of the Irish question.

It has always been my conviction that one of the chief causes of the
difficulty of persuading the British people of the justice and
expediency of conceding a full measure of National autonomy to Ireland
was to be found in the deep and almost universal ignorance in Great
Britain regarding Irish affairs present and past--an ignorance which has
enabled every unscrupulous opponent of Irish demands to appeal with more
or less success to inherited and anti-Irish prejudice as his chief
bulwark against reform. It was this conviction that led Mr. Parnell and
his leading colleagues, after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill in
1886, to establish an agency in England for the express purpose of
removing the ignorance and combating its effects, and no advocate of
Irish claims in England or Scotland has failed to find traces down to
this day of the good effects of the propaganda thus set on foot, the
discontinuance of which was one of the lamentable results of the
dissensions in the Irish National Party between 1890 and 1900.

This book carries on the work of combating British ignorance of Irish
affairs and the effects of that ignorance in a manner which seems to me
singularly effective. The writer is no mere rhetorician or dealer in
generalities