The School of John O’Leary

Abstract

‘Our intellects at twenty’, wrote Yeats, ‘contain all the truths we shall ever find.’ ¹ He was in his twentieth year when he met the old patriot John O’Leary, and committed himself to Irish nationalism. Although his early allegiance to the cause underwent complex modifications, all his subsequent political attitudes were affected by his first political choice, and at the end of his life he still called himself a nationalist of the school of John O’Leary. He wrote to Ethel Mannin: ‘Some day you will understand what I see in the Irish National movement and why I can be no other sort of revolutionist — as a young man I belonged to the I.R.B. and was in many things O’Leary’s Pupil.’ ²