The Opposition between England and Ireland (Paul-Dubois, 1908)

1.51-53. L. Paul-Dubois, Contemporary Ireland, with an Introduction by T.M. Kettle, M.P. (Dublin: Maunsel and Company, Ltd.; New York: The Baker and Taylor Co., 1908), p.152. BL

An extract from L. Paul-Dubois, Contemporary Ireland (1908), on the opposition between England and Ireland

This extract is from Paul-Dubois’s chapter on ‘The National and Anti-English Spirit’ in Ireland, stressing the opposition between the two nations for all their long history of interaction:

Climate, surroundings, circumstances, all these forces unite in bringing together what ethnic differences seemed to have finally divided. They have, with the help of the old Celtic blood, contributed to form a national character, which is essentially different from that of the Sister Isle. Although England’s racial origins are not very dissimilar, no two human types are, at the present day, more opposed, psychologically speaking, than the Englishman and the Irishman, and this despite all that England has received from Celtic sources, and all that Ireland, in the course of her Anglicisation, has borrowed from British civilisation.