Militant nationalism needed regular transfusions of young blood to keep it alive, because it led a kind of vampiric half-life, imaginatively and emotionally draining but not visible in any mirror held up to contemporary Irish reality. This was nothing as simple, or as stable, as mere hypocrisy. There were people – a small but potent minority – who fully shared the belief that the purpose of life was to free Ireland, speak Irish and be a pious and puritanical Catholic. There were people – a larger but more tacit minority – who thought all of this to be obscurantist nonsense. But most people
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