Opening paragraphs......................

For the better part of seven centuries, to be Irish in Ireland was to live in a land not your own.  You called a lake next to your family home by one name, and the occupiers gave it another.  You knew a town had been built by the hands of your ancestors, the quarry of origin for the stones pressed into those streets, and you were forbidden from inhabiting it.  You could not enter a court of law as anything but a criminal or a snitch.  You could not worship your God, in a church open to the public, without risking prison or public flogging.  You could not attend school, at any level, even at home.  And if your parents sent you out of the country to be educated, you could not return.  You could not marry, conduct trade or go into business with a Christian Protestant.  You could not have a foster child.  If orphaned, you were forced into a home full of people who rejected your faith.  You could not play your favorite sports - hurling was specifically prohibited.  You could not own land in more than 80 percent of your country, the bogs, barrens and highlands were your haunts.  You could not own a horse worth more than £5 sterling.  If you married and Englishman, you would lose everything upon his death.  You could not speak your language outside your home.  You would not think in Irish, so the logic went, if you were not allowed to speak in Irish.

-Timothy Egan,  Immortal Irishman:  The Irish Revolutionary Who Became An American Hero