‘For the great earls of Ireland /
Are the men that God [has] made / For all their wars are merry / And all
their songs are sad.’
‘The Irishman of the English farce,
with his brogue, his bouyancy, and his tender-hearted irresponsibility,
is a man who ought to have been thoroughly pampered with praise and sympathy,
if he had only existed to receive them. Unfortunately all the time that
we were treating a comic Irishman in fiction, we were creating a tragic
Irishman in fact.’ (George Bernard Shaw, Bodley Head, 1914,
p.18.)