T. W. Rolleston’s Ireland through a Polish Prism

Abstract

Abstract A founding member of the Irish Literary Society, an early member of the Gaelic League, and a leading figure in the Irish Co-operative Movement, Thomas William Rolleston was one of the most notable figures in movements for Irish cultural and economic revival during the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Rolleston also had a keen interest in German literature and culture, developed originally from the four years that he lived in Wiesbaden and Dresden between 1879 and 1883. This experience granted him some appreciation of conditions that obtained in Germany prior to the outbreak of the First World War, including Prussian-Polish relations. In 1917, Rolleston published a significant pamphlet assessing Irish-British relations during the decades preceding the 1916 Rising in Ireland as compared with relations between Prussia and Poland over the same period. Rolleston rejects a widespread view in Ireland that the moral authority, which the British Government had accorded to itself as a defender of the rights of small nations in the war against Germany, had been fatally compromised by its willingness to countenance Polish independence while continuing to oppose Irish independence. This essay considers the contrasts that Rolleston draws between Ireland and Poland in 1917 in the light of his general views on the Irish language question and Irish politics during the 1900s.