Word: fenian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...three major periods of his life. The publication in 1917 of his first long poem, "The Vengeance of Fionn" set the mood for his early narratives based on the saga cycles of ancient Ireland. These include the Fiannaigheacht, a series of stories about Fionn MacChumhall and his young, unmarried, Fenian warriors, 2000-year-old stories that were lost to the mainstream of Irish consciousness but survived and multiplied among the peasantry; and the Ulster cycle, another series whose central epic, the Tain, relates the deeds of the mighty hero, Cuchulain, and the fights between king Conchobor's Ulster and other...
...senior year at N.D.). This was the night before a football game, and the atmosphere was something like a cross between ancient fertility rites and classical Bacchanalia. After O'Brien's speech several thousand wine-besotted "Fighting Irishmen" stormed off in vain pursuit of fisticuffs reminiscent of the Fenian invasion of Canada. Ronald Reagan plays the part of the dying George "Gipper" Gipp wonderfully...
...1880s, the Fenian movement boldly bombed the House of Commons. In 1903 the Irish waged another bombing campaign, and again, in 1939, they went on a 15-month spree of dynamiting elegant shops, theaters, mailboxes and railway cloakrooms. Joseph Conrad's protagonist in The Secret Agent schemed to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, just as the hero of a novel recently published in London, The Patriot Game, plans to blast the headquarters of the British secret service...
...cross on a white field, with a red hand upraised in the center. For many Protestants, the British army has become something foreign, and the hostility is mutual. Across barbed-wire peace lines, the soldiers are as likely to mutter about "Protestant bastards" as they do about "Fenian bastards...
...cause was also pushed along by the nationalist zeal of the romantic, rambunctious Fenians, who eventually fathered the I.R.A. Their principal organization was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was founded on St. Patrick's Day, 1858, to carry on Wolfe Tone's dream of independence. Vaguely socialist in doctrine, the Brotherhood specialized in random bombings and produced its share of patriotic heroes for Ireland to keen over. Among the most famous?although hardly the most successful?were "the Manchester Martyrs," Michael Larkin, William Allen and Michael O'Brien, who were hanged in Manchester in 1867 for shooting an English constable...