Word: fenian
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...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...
...meantime, the I.R.A. appears capable of playing its cruel, destructive patriot game to the end. For better or worse, the words that Pearse spoke in 1915 over the grave of the Fenian patriot O'Donovan Rossa now reverberate across Ireland with every gunshot and bomb blast: "They think they have pacified Ireland . . . but the fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace...
...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...
...Fenian Bastards. Paisley's chief bad-german was a blustery ex-Royal Engineers officer named Major Ralph Bunting, who had been attached to a number of far-out political causes before teaming up with Paisley a year ago. Bunting's Boys soon began laying in wait for protest marchers, first to block their path and later to knock heads. Over New Year's, they bird-dogged a line of student demonstrators on a four-day, 75-mile protest walk from Belfast to Londonderry. On the final day, they ambushed the students, who reached their goal with...