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254 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
between 1692 and 1792. Amongst them was Patrick Sarsfield, who died in 1693 of wounds received at the Battle of Landen, also called Neerwinded, in present-day Belgium: his op- ponent on the day was King William. Tradition maintains that Sarsfield’s dying words were ‘Would to God this wound had been for Ireland.’
When writing of the ‘Wid Geese’, Professor Edmund Curtis stated:
“Seldom in history have a few thousand men, departing into exile represented as these did almost the whole aristocracy, the fighting force, and the hope of the nation. But they still thought themselves bound in honour to James and hoped to return one day with him. Such devotion to a king who was hardly worth it does honour to them, but we may regret that they did not put Ireland and the national cause first.”
Not long after these particular Wild Geese had departed Ireland for foreign shores, and when the country was again at the mercy of the English, the Parliament, restored as it then was to a substantial Protestant majority, refused to ratify the Treaty. This was done, in spite of the fact that the ratification had been guaranteed, “on the faith and honour of the Brit- ish crown,” to protect the Irish people’s lives, liberties and properties, and to ensure them in “the free and unfettered exercise of their religion.”
Ireland had lost again-the third time in one disastrous century. Once more, thousands of Irishmen were outlawed and robbed of their property-about one million acres on this occasion; persecution of Catholics was renewed with vigour, and in addition to those cruel decrees already on the Statute Book, new Penal Laws, or ‘Popery Laws,’ as they are often called, were introduced, imposed, and enforced. As one wit of the day remarked, ‘the Trea- ty of Limerick was broken before the ink wherewith it was written was dry.’ It was estimated that, after these new and treacherous confiscations under William, only one-twentieth of the land of Ireland remained in the hands of the Irish people. Emily Lawless wrote:
Gone the light of our youth, Gone forever, and gone
Hope with the beautiful eyes, Who laughed as she lured us on; Lured us to danger and death, To honour, perchance to fame,- Empty fame at the best,
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