Darrell Figgis

“ It became a shame among Irishmen not to speak their own language, not to delight in their own music, not to dance their own dances, and not to make their national past, especially the past of the days of glory, their intellectual possession. For, as was inevitable, the awakening had passed out of spontaneity into an organised intellectual effort, as the spontaneous hours of youth pass into the discipline of intellectual manhood. Yet neither is artificial, for both partake of the growth that is part of life. ”

“ On an average it took a man 250 days of the year to clear his rent; and this meant that the people could only live on the dregs of the land and on sorrel and cattle-blood. Yet still they clung. When Pestilence and Starvation stalked through the land, and the young men and girls had to fly over-seas, the families still clung to their holdings. Those young men and girls lived in penury in America in order that their earnings should be sent home to maintain the grip on the land. The Nation was holding its old property, and meant to win it back. ”

“ In other words, they could become stateships awaiting their final integration into a State that would equally be a translation into modern conditions of the old Irish State. Though they are social units their social life is stagnant, because (again for what are called "political" reasons) those who control their guidance are afraid to guide it into the only cultural life any nation can know and within which can find liberty: its own. ”

“ If there were greater courage and clearer thought, together with the freedom within which thought and courage could act, such communities, instead of being, as they now are, only economic and social units of the national life, could also become the recognised political units of that life. ”

“ When it became, as it finally did, an absentee landlordry, that State-idea did not voice any of the desires, expectations or intuitions of the resident population. In fact, it outraged them at every point. The more truly was this the case when, under the Penal code, the submerged layer of the rent-paying tenantry was denied every right in the existent State. ”

“ The liberty that Grattan had won had been the liberty of the English State in Ireland; the liberty, that is to say, of the State-idea of the uppermost layer. The overwhelming mass of the population was comprised of the old Nation with its own and separate State-idea. ”

“ When an Irishman threw the co-operative idea among farmers as a means by which they could combat the great organised farming of the Americas, the people took slowly to the idea as a foreign economic theory. ”

“ They would elect their own administrative heads, and, under their presidency, would meet in their own assemblies to order and control, not only their business transactions, but all the life contained within them. ”

“ Most of them, as the fruit of the Land War, were now beginning to own their farms, and that gave them the foundation of which the stateships had been built. In the central hall of the co-operative society the economic business of the community was discussed, and around it its artisans and artificers collected. ”