The Internovella - Chapter 2

that was a coded meaning for Irish Earls who raised mercenary armies to go and fight abroad. The politics and the morals were of no concern - wild geese needed to be fed only on money.

But she had read of the mist, the dew, the desparate poverty, and the cruelty of Cromwell and the English. The famines, through a reliance on an entirely rotten foreign vegetable, called the potatoe, which blighted a nation that, for thousands of years had lived on wheat and barley.

What would she find there now. In a few weeks it would be home. But there was another side that she had learnt about Ireland - her resistance, her pride but most of all the ability of this small nation to make music, to sing and to laugh. Laugh at a corpse, not to feed upon it, but to celebrate its rising from the dead into a new world where people frolicked and held hands, and cared, and looked into one anothers eyes and say I will always care for you my dearest brother or sister. In one word Ireland stood for: unity.
She went to sleep that night, not happy, but with a calmness and a certainty that things would improve. And improve they