Hugh O'Neill

After the disaster at Kinsale, one of the worst traits in the Irish character surfaced in most parts of the country. Many of the great Irish clans, believing the British to be the winners, threw their lot in with them in the hope of currying favour and holding on to their lands and properties.

The British exploited this treachery to the full and within a year, O'Neill found himself hemmed in on all sides with only a few hundred fighting men. British troops had devastated his lands and destroyed the crops.

Famine was rife. There are recorded cases of starving children eating the corpses of their dead mothers.

O'Donnell had gone to Spain to raise an army of 10,000 men but the British, realising what a dangerous man he was, sent one of their agents named Blake to poison him. Some say he succeeded, others say O'Donnell died of natural causes. The one thing that's certain is that he died. O'Donnell's death was a deadly blow to O'Neill. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. Old, weary and heartbroken, he decided to give up and leave Ireland forever.

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If O'Donnell had not gone to Spain, but remained behind, things might have been different. He was an intelligent, able, ruthless soldier who, like Michael Collins in later years, fully grasped that the only language the British ever understood is that which comes from the barrel of a gun. Like Collins, he would have been ruthless with the Irish who helped the English. He would have executed them one after another without mercy and in this way could have stemmed the tide of desertions, consolidated a large measure of unity, made life impossible for the British in Ulster to start with, and eventually throughout all Ireland. But that was not to happen. Instead, Ireland lay crushed and broken at the feet of the British.

There followed a campaign of extermination of the Irish people, comparable only to the Nazi extermination of an estimated six million Jews - albeit over a longer time frame.For generations, close on 10,000,000 men, women and children of the Irish race were sent to their deaths with unparalleled brutality. Unlike the Nazis however, there were no Neuremberg trials to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Today, it's a moving experience to sit on the shore at Lough Swilly, close your eyes and go back in time to that terrible day when the ship left Portnamurray Bay and took with it the battered remnants of the hopes and aspirations of the Irish people, who were to live as slaves in the fullest sense for the next three hundred years.

Their last view of home...
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