Tá Séarlas Óg ag traill thar sáile / Béidh siad leisean, Franncaigh is Spáinnigh / Óglaigh armtha leis mar gharda / ‘S bainfidh siad rinnce as éiricigh!
(Chorus)
Óró, sé do bheatha abhaile, / B’fhearr liom tú ná céad bó bhainne, /Óró, sé do bheatha abhaile / Anois ar theacht an tsamhraidh.

This loosely translates as :
When Young Charles comes over the sea /The men of France and Spain will accompany him / Armed warriors to guard him / and then the strangers will dance.
(Chorus)
Oro, Your welcome to your home / I’d rather you returmed than I had a hundred head of cattle / Oro, Your welcome to your home / And now it will be summer again!

As in Scotland, Jacobite only turned to become Jacobin when despair seemed to close any hope of a restoration.

One last point, I cannot understand how the 1970-98 ‘war’ has achieved anything for the ‘defence’ of even an Irish republic. I thought it was simply a way in which the last tatters of 1916 could be absorbed finally into its natural home, the Whig assembly at Stormont. I also fail to see how the ideals of 1916 could have any recognizable place (other than as a snazzy graphic) in a post De Valera Ireland. And the shift from an Ireland controlled by the Bank of England (pre 1990) to an Ireland controlled by American banking has never felt like ‘independence’ to me. True sovereignty seems to have left Ireland with James II and has yet to return.

The Coalition of the Willing as Bush called the Allies in Iraq (I prefer to think of them as the Coalition of The Stupid) never included Irish Defence Forces.
Oddly and I consider stupidly we have SEVEN (7) personnel in Afghanistan. No doubt this looks good on paper but (good though the Irish Army is) I cant see our seven soldiers making a great difference.
The 1798 Rebellion alluded to above…..did come within a decade of the French Revolution and the Terror against CatholicChurch in France…..naturally the Irish Bishops were against 1798. The British had after all just set up Maynooth Seminary in 1795 and were making strides (slowly) towards Emancipation.
Whether the Pope in Rome (especially an English one) has any “right” to gift Ireland to England is a bit irrelevant.
Even if endorsed by GOD himself, I would never accept its legitimacy.

(Incidentally, if the war in Afghanistan is because of an attack on New York, then why aren’t the Irish Republic’s own Armed Forces fighting it? This has nothing to do with neutrality: any number of Irish citizens must have died on 9/11.)

The Irish Republic is growing up, and duly adopting a more mature attitude both to her neighbour and to her own history, an attitude which should include accession to the Commonwealth without delay.

After all, it was the Pope who gave the Kings of England the Lordship of Ireland in the first place, and a Papal Blessing was sent to William III when he set out for Ireland. The Lateran Palace was illuminated for a fortnight when news of the Battle of the Boyne reached Rome.

Into the nineteenth century, Catholics joined in the annual celebrations of the Relief of Derry; into the late eighteenth, Catholic priests even took part in the prayer service at the Walls of Derry.

The professors and seminarians of Maynooth published a declaration of loyalty to the King during the 1798 Rebellion, and those extremely few priests who had adhered to that Rebellion were excommunicated, the bishops calling them “the very faeces of the Church”.

Prominent Belfast Catholic laymen chaired rallies against successive Home Rule Bills, with prominent Catholic priests on the platforms. There were numerous Catholic pulpit denunciations of Fenianism, which is unlike any of the three principal British political traditions in being a product of the French Revolution. Hence its tricolour flag. And hence its strong anti-clerical streak, always identifying Catholicism as one of Ireland’s two biggest problems.

Jean Bodin’s theory of princely absolutism, held by the Stuarts and by their anti-Papal Bourbon cousins, was incompatible with the building up of the Social Reign of Christ, subsequently the inspiration for all three great British political movements. Likewise, ethnically exclusive nation-states deriving uncritically from the French Revolution do not provide adequate means to that end.

By contrast, the absence of any significant Marxist influence in this country has been due to the universal and comprehensive Welfare State, and the strong statutory (and other, including trade union) protection of workers and consumers, the former paid for by progressive taxation, and all underwritten by full employment: very largely the fruits of Catholic Social Teaching, especially via Diaspora Irish participation in the Labour Movement here as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

And such fruits have been of disproportionate benefit to ethnically Gaelic-Irish Catholics throughout the United Kingdom; even in the 1940s, Sinn Féin worried that they were eroding its support.

All very well worth fighting for (if only it were in fact what the British Armed Forces were currently fighting for, of course).

As more and more people in the Irish Republic clearly agree.

I had your blog appear as an autoposted link beneath the blog that I posted at the following URL:

http://troyspace2.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/the-papal-power-behind-the-irish-potatoe-famine/

You might find these email exchanges which was posted to me by the author of “Vatican Assassins”, now in its 1800+ page third edition, Eric Jon Phelps to be of some interest. In the first email Phelps is in red and his questioner in grey.The second one is a little hard to follow as it comprises of two email exchanges interspersed with each other. In that one Phelps is in lilac and red, his correspondent is in blue and grey.

Any questions, please direct them to Eric Phelps, as this is based on his research, although from my studying his work and analysis on parapolitical matters I do support his conclusions.

Thank you -

Troy Space

You pose the question of why Ireland moved away from Jacobitism. I suggest that one answer is that Jacobitism simply faded from the Irish historical consciousness, with the passing of years, the lack of practical interest of the dynasty in re-establishing itself, the arrival of new de facto political arrangements, and the development of new ideologies.

The Wild Geese don’t necessarily disprove this notion, since the “pull” of the Jacobite cause mingled with the “pushes” of economic necessity and the ban on Catholics serving in the British Army. Thereafter, from the 19th century up to the First World War a considerable number of Irish Catholics served under the (Hanoverian) British colours. Indeed, the large-scale enlistment of Irish Catholics up to the very eve of the 1916 Rising is one of several embarrassing secrets of Irish republicanism, though enlistment no doubt had more to do with economic need than allegiance to the British monarch (and also, in the case of WWI, with the pro-enlistment political manoeuvring of John Redmond and others).

I would question how far it was republicanism that did for Jacobitism. As you indicate, republicanism was not a consistent or predominant strand of Irish nationalism until very, very late in the game (1918, perhaps). It competed with nostalgia for Grattan’s parliament, with Home Rule-ism, and with the idea (originally endorsed by Sinn Fein) of an Austrian-style dual monarchy.

I find it odd that many Jacobites/legitimists hold any real hope of rewinding the History of Europe (and incredibly North America) to a different era. Although you observe that county boundaries (ironically much loved by modern Irish) are English inventions, Irish people also happily live with Royal Irish Academy, Royal Dublin Society and indeed the very place names in Dublin.
Am I talking myself into an acceptance of a place in the Commonwealth? Perhaps.

I think there could be more than just a conventional modern post-Enlightenment justification for vesting the sovereignty of Ireland in her people; if one considers the nature of Irish society and Irish land ownership prior to the Norman and Plantagenet invasions it was based on clan ownership rather the inheritance of individuals. The disruption of Irish society by English intervention has been so great since that the clans have been scattered and, for someone who does not recognise the imposition of English institutions on Ireland, the sensible option could be to say that Ireland must be a republic since the old land-rights and the old lines of kingship are broken. So many relics of English rule of Ireland remain today even in the Republic – the imposition of county boundaries and an English legal system among them.

The key question that needs to be answered by historians, it seems to me, is whether such a thing as ‘Irish nationalism’ can be said to have existed as a meaningful thing before the Young Irelander rising of 1798. If, as you say, Irish opposition to England since 1688 was a coalition of nationalists and Jacobites this would need to be demonstrated.

As a Jacobite, I am sympathetic to Irish nationalism (and indeed Republicanism) but I am reluctant to acknowledge that the House of Stuart was complicit in violations of the ancient constitution of Ireland that I prefer to blame on the Hanoverians and the Act of Union of 1801. Ireland was a separate Kingdom in 1688 with its own legislature, but Poynings’ Law subjected that legislature to England in a manner that was unacceptable. One could argue that Ireland began to function as an independent Kingdom only in the period of Grattan’s Parliament (1782-1801) once Poynings’ Law had been repealed.

I believe that it is crucial that Ireland be entirely independent of Westminster and that Ireland be united; everything else (including the question of whether Ireland should be a Republic) is secondary to this. For that reason I have always found the Free State solution of 1921 an attractive one and I have struggled to understand Republican opposition to it. I am not sure how history will view the war of 1969-98 but I believe the real issue in the north of Ireland has always been the British government’s reluctance to cut loose the Unionists, who are after all Irishmen who self-define as British. The British government’s problem has been that it has pandered to that fantasy, and the Republican movement is to blame as well for failing to put forward the constitutional, rather than the nationalistic case for a united Ireland.