The pen can be an explosive weapon, too. At the time of the Famine no one wrote with more passion than John Mitchel, the Young Irelander. "No wonder" wrote Denis Ireland, another Northern Senator of this State, "no wonder the English government of the day was afraid of a man who could write like that, and having arrested him for `treason felony,' saw to it that he spent all but the last year of his life either in captivity or exile . . . So John Mitchel was arrested and imprisoned for the crime of asserting publicly that Ireland in time of famine had a right to the produce of her own soil."
The first example Denis Ireland gives is that familiar, gruesome passage . . "you stood in the presence of a dread, silent, vast dissolution . . . human passion there was none, but inhuman and unearthly quiet. Children met you toiling on stone heaps, but their burning eyes were senseless, and their faces cramped and weazened like stunted old men. Gangs worked without a murmur or a whistle or a laugh, ghostly, like voiceless shadows to the eye. Even womanhood had ceased to be womanly . . . The very dogs, hairless, with the head down and the vertebrae of the back protruding like a saw of bone, glared on you from the ditchside with a wollish, avid eye, and then stunk away . . . it seemed as though the soul of the land was faint and dying, and that the faintness and death had crept into all things of heaven and earth.
He also quotes a pen picture of Dublin Castle, during what Denis Ireland prefers to call the Starvation. Mitchel wrote of the Castle: "In the light of that mock throne on the hill over the Liffey there vibrate now all the dizened atomies of happy Ireland. Glittering Captains, silvered Lieutenants, epauletted puppyism in every grade and phase and fashion, wigged debasement fresh from a public hanging the gowned simony flock around, delighted at the `flourishing condition of the state.' No whisper of death, no shadow of desolation breaks over the crowd . . . and so begins a third year of uninterrupted famine.
All this is not just an anti English diatribe by Den is Ireland, using the words of Mitchel, son of a Northern Unitarian Minister. Ireland is trying to work out the possible evolution of a better understanding between the peoples of these islands. From Eamon de Valera Doesn't See It Through, a small booklet published by the Forum Press in Cork in 1941.