“Sweet love of our Faith and our Country! — forever unfading they last,
Like ivy-leaves twining together round desolate wrecks of the Past,
Round abbeys whose gables have fallen, — round castles whose turrets are gone,
Round towers that stand up majestic, in valleys deserted, alone,
Round ruins of churches whose steeples oft echoed the voice of the bell,
But totter’d and crumbl’d in tempests, and rang their own funeral-knell,
And mingled their dust with the valleys’ — an emblem of patriots brave,
Who fall on the breast of their country, and find in its bosom a grave!
God’s blessing be ever upon thee, my beautiful isle far away!
May tempests ne’er shatter thy beauty, may time never bring thee decay!
But ever be noble, though fallen, and ever be lovely, though lone
If Mother of Sorrows yet smiling midst tears for her sons who are gone!
O! tyrants can never destroy thee! O! sorrows can never deface
The hope that has liv’d through the ages, and gladdened the suffering race;
Nor exile and happiness banish remembrance of days that have fled.
No! no! — by the Past and its sorrows! Ah! no, by the graves of the dead!
My children we fled from the famine — the evil that tyranny made,
And exiles o’er seas and the prairies in search of some happiness stray’d.
We found it afar from Old Ireland; — but often I think, with a sigh,
Far better to live in “the Old Land,” — far better in Erin to die!
To live on a little contented, — to manfully struggle awhile,
To go to the grave of my fathers, and sleep in the Sanctified Isle.
Far sweeter to follow old customs, and live like our fathers of old,
Than wander a stranger midst peoples, and die in the struggle for gold.”
This is an excerpt from a wonderful poem by
THE IRISH ON THE PRAIRIES
AND OTHER POEMS
By: REV. THOS. AMBROSE BUTLER
NEW YORK: D. & J. SADLIER & CO., 31 BARCLAY STREET, 1874.
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/dogtown/church/butler-prairies.html
Irish voters dealt a stunning blow to the European Union’s grand reform plans Friday by rejecting a new treaty and plunging the bloc into a new crisis.
The Lisbon Treaty, designed to replace the EU constitution torpedoed by French and Dutch voters three years ago, was rejected by 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent in a referendum, according to official figures.
Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty has again highlighted the gulf between the grand visions of Europe’s political elites and the everyday needs of its citizens.