342 Timehra 
foundation on which to build for a future which is bound to have serious 
problems of its own. For both nations, moreover, those years were not 
wholly years of shame. They have also golden memories of valour, self- 
sacrifice and glory. Nowadays a typical advocate of the extreme Irish view 
in replying to William Watson can write :— 
** And when you make your banquet and we come, 
Soldier with equal soldier must we sit, 
Closing a battle not forgetting it, 
We keep the past for pride 
And so must this fight end. 
Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease: 
Free, we are free to be your friend.” 
* 
THe DrsmMonps. 
The reigns of Mary and Elizabeth are the turning point in Irish history, 
inasmuch as in those days the systematic policy of colonization was begun 
which had as an inevitable corollary the extirpation or exile of the original 
inhabitants. That a Roman Catholic instead of a Protestant queen issued the 
edict did not turn the blow for the slaughtered O’Mores or O’Connors of the first 
plantations in Leix and Offaly, which we know from the colonizing vigour of 
those Catholic sovereigns Philip and Mary as King’s County and Queen’s 
County. Protestant Elizabeth then wasted Munster and most of Leinster 
and Connaught in the great Desmond wars and received them ready for 
colonization from her Raleighs, Binghams and Greys as carcasses and 
ashes in 1581, when, we are told, not the lowing of a cow nor the voice of a 
herdsman could be heard from Youghal to Kilkee nor from Kerry to Cashel. 
But there is no reason to suppose that her strong-minded Catholic sister would 
have held back her deputies from the design of crushing the Desmonda, 
the elder and southern house of the Geraldines, in the interest of the accepted 
policy of the Government and to please the great rival clan, the Butlers of Or- 
monde, allied in blood to and loyal as ever to the English royal line. The 
Earls of Desmond stood for what in later times, when ideas tend to become more 
coherent and less fluid, is termed nationality, which at this stage became 
identified in Ireland with the Catholic cause as against that of the Reformation, 
remaining so for two hundred years of blood and flame. As the oppressive laws 
were only occasionally put in force the identification of the struggle against the 
Crown with the cause of the old religion wag for a long timeimperfect. Triba 
jealousies accounted for much of the rebellious spirit : the desire to maintain 
the old chaotic independence from organized authority accounted for more. 
Hence we find that even at the summa dies et incluctabile tempus of Ki sale the 
Ulster dynasts, fighting for independence under a papal banner, with the aid 
of Catholic Spain, were beaten by an army whose better portion were Irish 
Catholics led by the High Queen’s Norman and Gaelic Irish Catholic Lords. 
To many what remains in political life of that identification causes difficulties 
now, especially in Belfast and Portadown on July 12th, when the dog star 
rages. “ Quid-quid delirant reges plectuntur Achivi.”” But even in ancient 
Ulidia the refuges of the spirit of the Thirty Years War are crumbling inch 
by inch and year by year. 
