Irish- American Anger

Posted By: July 24, 2017

On This Day [in Irish History]
Irish News, July 24, 1917

Eamon Phoenix. Irish News.  Monday, July 24, 2017

The Daily Chronicle’s Special Correspondent, writing from New York, says: Mr. T P O’Connor [Nationalist MP for Liverpool], after several weeks in America, has given his impression on the Irish race here.   ‘I find Irish-America of 1846, not of 1917; that is to say, the Ireland of the awful epoch which immediately followed the Great Famine with its enforced exile of five million Irish who are in America today. I should add to these factors all the actions of British Ministers since the war. You cannot get it out of their heads that England never meant to give Ireland Home Rule…. I must tell the painful truth: never did I find hatred of England so furious, blind, concentrated as it is among the Irish in America today. I do not know that the Irish anywhere are pro-German but they are anti-English and the common hatred bridges many differences. … A large majority of sane men among our people regard an Irish Republic as not practical politics and would accept a large measure of autonomy within the British Empire.

 ‘The Convention [convened by Lloyd George in July 1917] has been assailed with some virulence here, as in Ireland. Sane people are ready to await its decision but on these terms – that there is no partition and that there is fiscal autonomy, that, in short, there should be something like Colonial Home Rule.’