I've just been rewatching Downton Abbey — don't ask me why. The Tom Branson subplot reminded me of how much I don't know about the Irish freedom struggle.
I learned a bit about the 1916 Easter Rising because my niece cowrote an unproduced musical about it, but I had never heard of the burning of Irish country houses (1919–1923), which was a plot point in the show after Branson marries Lady Sybil Crawley.
Coincidentally, around the same time I've been watching Downton Abbey, I unearthed some character drawings I made when I was in middle school or early high school (around 1973, I think). Two of them are a brother and sister who are Irish Americans wearing T-shirts that quote the last stanza of the Yeats poem "Remorse for Intemperate Speech":
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.
I didn't even remember I knew that at the time. All the same, for a person who's one-eighth Irish and whose most recent immigrant relative was Irish, I'm pretty ignorant of the complicated history of my ancestral country.
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