‘My father remembered the people dropping by the roadside on their way to the Big House for help, the coffin ships going from Galway bay. Those emigrants who reached America alive, were to establish a race sworn to implacable hatred of England. He remembered the smell in the air that foretold the blight, and sometimes when he stood looking at the land without seeing it, he would lift his head, sniffing for a warning which he would understand were it to come again. [25]

In my childhood the people were terribly poor, and bore their poverty with apparently complete resignation. They were deeply religious, and accepted literally the teaching that this world was only a road to the next. [25]

[Danesfield] the front of the house seems to have had a blank look, the windows staring across the country, like blind eyes. It is a look that the widows of Irish country houses often have, as though indeed that was the spirit inside them, the spirit of the colonists and conquerors, looking out across the country they possessed, but never owned. [29]

... before the power of the landlords was broken ... we remained feudal, even when the revolutionary wind had begun to stir elsewhere ... we had an extra hour and a half of that chapter which I saw, and which Parnell was to end for ever. [35]

The good landlords and the bad went down together, as was inevitable. They had no grievance. Nine out of ten of them had chosen to live as colonists. Lennox Robinson has said truly of them in his brilliant little life of Bryan Cooper, ‘They were merely a colony, and colonists have no rights, a theory which was to cost England America. Had the Irish planter been of the same religion as the native Irish, Ireland would have won independence before America ... But because of the monstrous iinjustice of the plantation, the two civilisations were to remain separate and antagonistic for nearly three hundred years.’ ...
  The Irish landlords continued to be colonists. The very building of their houses, the planting of their trees, the making of the high walss about their estates (raised by incredibly cheap labour of the natives whom their ancestors had tried to exterminate) declared their intention. [37 ...] But these had chosen to remain colonists; and colonists have no rights. their children were to pay the price when they discovered themselves to belong to no country, the world their ancestors had built within their walls lying now in ashes. And England abandoned her colony, with her colonists, when it suited her. [38]

The day of the landlords is almost over. Evern the greatest recluse among them, locked up within his strong walls or behind his high thick woods, must be aware of the battering on the gates. Parnell may be in Kilmainham, but he will not remain there, and there is the Land League outside. [45]

There was a crowd about the gates of the Castle. The Dublin poor always turned out to see any sight that there was. They shivered on the pavement in their thin, rgged clothes, waiting for hours sometimes, so that they might see the ladies in their silks and satins and furs step from their carriages into the warmth and light and gaiety that received them. the poor were incredibly patient. Even then I was dimly aware of that appalling contrast between their lives and ours, and wondered how long they would remain patient. [62]

When Winston Churchill addressed a Dublin audience about his experiences in Pretoria, he forgot to mention the Irish regiments. [275]

Ireland again. More dreams of Ireland. It seems that, for most of my life, people talked of nothing else. And now one rarely talks of Ireland at all and a long dream seems to be ended in a rather chilly and grey dawn of awakening [149]

The end of the Rebellion left the greater part of the country still unstirred; and once again England blundered. Sir John Maxwell had been sent over as Commander-in-Chief - a soldier used to dealing with such situations, according to his ideas, in Egypt and India. The Rebels were tried by court-martial, with scrupulous justice, each case given full trial on its merits, although there was no plea for the prisoner and no doubt ever of the verdict. Then there were the slow executions. So many each morning. Sixteen in all. ... To the Irish people, being told of these executions in barrack yards, it was, as someone wrote, “As though they watched a stream of blood coming from beneath a closed door.”’ [375; note that the author of the phrase used here is James Stephens in Insurrection in Dublin, 1916.]

See also her comments on Horace Plunkett, W. B. Yeats, Michael Collins, et al.