Speeches
Transcribed speeches by famous Irish politicians and figures in Irish history will feature here.
Speech written by Countess Markievicz in 1909. "The first step on the road to freedom is to realise ourselves as Irishwomen - not as Irish or merely as women, but as Irishwomen doubly enslaved and with a double battle to fight."
On Thursday, November 26, 1998, Tony Blair made history by becoming the first British Prime Minister ever to address the Irish Parliament. That Parliament had been created 80 years earlier in open defiance of the British government which Blair now headed. Ireland had won its independence from Great Britain after a bloody insurrection in the early 1920s, marking the beginning of decades of intense animosity and outright violence. In this speech, Blair recalls his own Irish roots and declares an end to more than 800 years of enmity between England and Ireland.
Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847) was a great Irish statesman, called the Liberator of Ireland. He led a movement that successfully forced the British to pass the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, allowing Roman Catholics to become members of the British House of Commons.
"I am determined wherever I go ... to speak with grateful emotions of Mr [Daniel] O’Connell’s labours. [Cheers] I heard his denunciation of slavery. I heard my master curse him, and therefore I loved him." [Great cheers] - Frederick Douglass: Cork speech, 1845.
If our affection to your Majesty could digest an abuse that proved so fatal to the prerogative, we should rejoice at the defection of England that lent us the opportunity of kissing your hand in this loyal kingdom of Ireland.
The following act was passed by the Irish Parliament of King James II.
A selection of John F. Kennedy's pre-presidential speeches.
And has Ireland no monuments of her history to guard, has she no tables of stone, no pictures, no temples, no weapons? Are there no Brehon chairs on her hills to tell more clearly than Vallancey, or Davis, how justice was administered here?
Gentlemen, I am now about to surrender the office which you intrusted to me. Its duties, up to the last night of the session, may be well discharged by any man of common courtesy and firmness.
Men, are ever valued most for peculiar and original qualities. A man who can only talk commonplace, and act according to routine, has little weight.
I am asked what I have to say why sentence of death should not be pronounced on me, according to law. I have nothing to say that can alter your pre-determination, nor that it will become me to say, with any view to the mitigation of that sentence which you are to pronounce and I must abide by.
Twelve months before Wolfe Tone expired in his prison cell, one of the bravest of his associates paid with his life the penalty of his attachment to the cause of Irish independence.
The first step on the road to freedom is to realise ourselves as Irishwomen - not as Irish or merely as women, but as Irishwomen doubly enslaved and with a double battle to fight.
Speaking at a meeting in Dublin, Sunday, August 30, 1914, to commemorate the deaths of James Nolan, John Byrne and Alice Brady, killed during the Dublin Lockout, 1913-14, Connolly said ...
It has seemed right, before we turn away from this place in which we have laid the mortal remains of O’Donovan Rossa, that one among us should, in the name of all, speak the praise of that valiant man, and endeavour to formulate the thought and the hope that are in us as we stand around his grave.