A blessed St Patrick’s day to you all!
If you haven’t checked out Joe’s latest post on Patrick Pearse, then please give it a read, it’s a wonderful, little window into the life of one of the great heroes of Irish culture and tradition.
This following post, a quote from Éamon de Valera, Ireland’s first Taoiseach (in short, the president of Ireland), is short and sweet, although, in retrospect, it marks a tragic spiritual collapse in Ireland during the last century. Nevertheless, the quote is beautiful and inspiring for those who remember such an Ireland. Such an Ireland is still alive today, at least in the hearts and minds of such people as my great Auntie Maureen, my uncles and my father, my siblings and I, in the memory of our dear Grandpa Sean O’Reilly, and all those who still dream of what Ireland was and still can be. I take the quote from de Valera’s "Ireland Among the Nations” speech. God bless and enjoy your St. Paddy’s Day.
Ireland Among the Nations
“I have spoken at some length of Ireland's history and her contributions to European culture, because I wish to emphasize that what Ireland has done in the past she can do in the future. The Irish genius has always stressed spiritual and intellectual rather than material values. That is the characteristic that fits the Irish people in a special manner for the task, now a vital one, of helping to save Western civilization. The great material progress of recent times, coming in a world where false philosophies already reigned, has distorted men's sense of proportion; the material has usurped the sovereignty that is the right of the spiritual. Everywhere to-day the consequences of this perversion of the natural order are to be seen. Spirit and mind have ceased to rule. The riches which the world sought, and to which it sacrificed all else, have become a curse by their very abundance.
In this day, if Ireland is faithful to her mission, and, please God, she will be, if as of old she recalls men to forgotten truths, if she places before them the ideals of justice, of order, of freedom rightly used, of Christian brotherhood—then, indeed, she can do the world a service as great as that which she rendered in the time of Columcille and Columbanus, because the need of our time is in no wise less. You sometimes hear Ireland charged with a narrow and intolerant Nationalism, but Ireland to-day has no dearer hope than this: that, true to her own holiest traditions, she may humbly serve the truth and help by truth to save the world.”