FROM THE ARCHIVES:With Home Rule the main topic of the day, it was inevitable that politics should underlie a debate on nation and nationality at the College Historical Society in TCD, despite the society's "no politics" rule. Trinity polymath John Pentland Mahaffy concluded it with this speech.
HE COULD not agree with all the statements he had heard on that platform; least of all did he agree with Dr. [Douglas] Hyde’s statement, which he said he had verified by historical research, that in ancient times Ireland was the most cultivated, civilised, and splendid nation in the world.
The Irish history he had read from the Four Masters on told a different tale. (Hear, hear.) In discussing the whole question, weight had been put very justly by Mr. [A.M.] Sullivan on the difficulty of defining what the spirit of nationality was. The first thing he found when he came to think of it was that a nation did not mean nationality, and nationality did not mean a nation. (Hear, hear.)
The Auditor suggested several factors in connection with nationality – one was race, one language, one religion, and another people living together. There was no pure race which pretended to nationality on the ground of race, except the gypsies or the Jews, and neither of these was a nation. (Hear, hear.) All the other nations of Europe were made up of different nationalities. They could not talk of French nationality. The French was a great nation, but it was not a great nationality. And so also of the Germans, which was of a composite nationality, but of all the composite nationalities that Europe had shown, the Irish was the most composite, and it was very hard indeed to tell now what a pure Irishman was and what an Irish nation was.
Of all the great failures of the world, Parliaments was the very worst. That being so, when he saw respectable and great nations like Turkey and China starting up and talking of Parliaments, he looked with horror upon the future of those nations. A Parliament might be a success in a country like England, where there was an aristocracy and a particular kind of people, but all the other Parliaments in Europe were the most corrupt, the most time wasting, and the most disimproving forms of government there could be. (Laughter.)
When every nation started its own Parliament he declared that the whole condition of the world would become incredibly worse than it was now. (Laughter.) He knew that these truths would not be palatable to some people on that platform. They might ask him what he was going to substitute for Parliaments. It was not an unfair question, and he was quite prepared to answer it; but they would not, he was sure, like to see the answer put so that it might appear as the last joint in the tail of his speech. (Laughter.)
But let there be discussion, and let them not be told that the way of salvation to nations was by having distinct nations and distinct Parliaments.
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