The impact of the Brothers on the minds that formed the state cannot be overstated. It was not just in what they taught but in the way they taught it. They stressed that the function of education was to turn raw boys into manly patriots: ‘Ireland looks to them, when grown to man’s estate, to act the part of true men in furthering the sacred cause of nationhood.’ It was not even that they invented and gave currency to a narrative of 800 years of exceptional oppression that fused Ireland’s suffering with Christ’s: ‘In the martyrology of history, among crucified nations’, said the Brothers’
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