Erskine Childers Quotes

And here again, what does the King mean? The functions of a King as an individual, are very small indeed. What the King means, is the British Government, and let there be no mistake, under the terms of this Treaty the British Government will be supreme in Ireland.

One of the charms of Africa, is the long settled periods of pure unclouded sky, in which the sun rises and sets with no flaming splashes of vivid colours, but by gentle, imperceptible gradations of pure light, waning or waxing.

An artillery man is not made in a month, nor an officer in a year; and unless we had had educated men as keen as mustard, and no trouble about discipline, I doubt if the battery in South Africa would have been much good for a long time.

First let us rid our minds of the fallacy that guerrilla war is a wholly distinct thing in kind from regular war. It is nothing of the sort. War is a science whose fundamental principles are constant however wide or numerous the variations....

The British can sign and find a way to repudiate their signatures. They've done it over and over again. You need to go back to the Treaty Of Limerick. You have Malta and Egypt, for instance. They can always find high moral reasons for such repudiation. They are opportunists. Griffith, however, having given his word, would stick to it whatever the consequences, even though it meant the disaster of a civil war. They knew that.

....death stills the bitterest controversy.

I want you to shake the hands of every Minister in the Provisional Government ( Irish Free State )who's responsible for my death. I forgive them and so must you, Erskine. The second will apply if ever you go into Irish politics. You must not speak of my execution in public.

...to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing...

Drunk with triumph, I cuddled in my rocking cradle and ransacked every unvisited chamber of the memory....to see the residue take life and meaning in the light of the great revelation.

Take a step or two forward lads.....it will be easier that way.

What the devil do you mean Carruthers?

From this farcical Belfast, where anti-Catholic pogroms are occurring daily and where 30,000 Catholics are out of work because of their religion, and where the religious test is imposed on civic and private employment, we have cut ourselves off from as entirely as we have severed British connection. We will never recognize the partition of Ireland. When the time comes, Dail Eireann will be summoned by President Eamon De Valera and it will meet as an all Ireland parliament, independent of England.

In this supremacy of tragedy, we find it only in our hearts, to wish that God's curse may overwhelm the treacherous...

I wish to make this statement in view of the mass of prejudice which has gathered about me owning to false statements, calumnies and innuendos which have been made about me in the press and elsewhere for a year past and to most of which I have been unable to reply. I am making no appeal. Let that be clear. Whatever befalls me I shall suffer gladly and happily, but I think it is due to me and the cause I represent, which has been traduced and slandered through the agency of attacks on me, to make some refutation to these attacks. I have been constantly called an Englishman, who, having betrayed his own country, came to Ireland to betray and destroy Ireland––a double traitor. In the alternative, I have suffered the vile charge of innuendo; instead of betraying England I have been acting as a spy or agent provocateur of Englishmen, trying to destroy Ireland in England's interest.

...the Dulcibella had begun to move in her sleep, as it were, rolling drowsily to some faint send of the sea, with an occasional short jump, like the start of an uneasy dreamer.