TOM BROADBENT: ‘A robust, full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life, sometimes eager and credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish, sometimes portentously solemn, sometimes jolly and impetuous, always buoyant and irresistible, mostly likeable and enormously absurd in his most earnest moments.’

[of Haffigan:] ‘An Irishman, and not very particular about his appearance.’

‘[...] I noticed he was rather Irish.’

‘I’m Irish sir; a poor aither, but a powerful dhrinker. [...] the national wakeness.’

‘I am a lover of liberty, like every true Englishman, [...] My name is Broadbent. If my name were Bretistein, and I had a hooked nose and a house in Park Lane, I should carry a Union Jack handkerchief and a penny trumpet, and tax the food of the people to support the Navy League, and clamour for the destruction of the last remnants of national liberty -.’ ‘Where else can I go [than Ireland]? I am an Englishman and a Liberal; and now that South Africa has been enslaved and destroyed, there is no country left to me to take an interest in but Ireland. [...] But what sane man can deny that an Englishman’’s first duty is his duty to Ireland?’ You know the English plan, Mr Haffigan, don't you?.’ Tim: ‘Bedad I do, sir. Take all you can out of Ireland and spend it in England: that's it.’

‘What I say is, why not start a Garden City in Ireland?.’ ‘When I first arrive in Ireland I shall be hated as an Englishman. As a Protestant, I shall be denounced from every altar. My life will be in danger. Well, I am prepared to face that.’ ‘I saw at once that you are a thorough Irishman, with all the faults and all the qualities of your race: rash and improvident but brave and good-natured; not likely to succeed in business on your own account perhaps, but eloquent, humorous, a lover of freedom, and a true follower of that great Englishman Gladstone [...] hope me break the ice between me and your warm-hearted, impulsive countrymen.’

[to Doyle:] ‘There you go! Why are you so down on every Irishman you meet, especially if he’s a bit shabby? Surely a fellow-countryman can pass you the top of the morning without offence, even if his coat is a but shiny at the seams.’

‘Man alive, don't you know that all this top-o-the-morning and broth-of-a-boy and more-power-to-your -elbow business is got upon in England to fool you, like the Albert Hall Concerts of Irish music? No Irishman ever talks like that in Ireland, or ever did, or ever will. But when a thoroughly worthless Irishman comes to England, and finds the whole place full of romantic duffers like you, who will let him loaf and drink and sponge and brag as long as he flatters your sense of moral superiority by playing the fool and degrading himself and his country, he soon learns the antics that take you in. He picks them up at the theatre or the music hall. Haffigan learnt the rudiments from his father, who came from my part of Ireland. I knew his uncles, Matt and Andy Haffigan of Rosscullen. [...].’

‘Of course you have the melancholy of the Keltic race -.’

‘When people talk about the Celtic race, I feel as if I could burn down London. That sort of rot does more harm than ten Coercion Acts. Do you suppose a man need to be a Celt to feel melancholic in Rosscullen. Why, man, Ireland was peopled just as England was; and its breed was crossed by just the same invaders.’

‘True, all the capable people in Ireland are of English extraction. [...] Not to mention the solemnity with which it [the IPP] talks old-fashioned nonsense which it knows perfectly well to be a century behind the times. That’s English if you like.’

‘Tom, you only need a touch the Irish climate to be as big a fool as I am myself [...] your wits can’t thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the dreaming! The dreaming! The torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! [Savagely:] No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalised an Englishman can take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman’s imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he cant face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and [bitterly to Tom Broadbent] be “agreeable to strangers”, like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. It’s all dreaming, all imagination. He cant be religious. The inspired Churchman that teaches him the sanctity of life and the importance of conduct is sent away empty; while the poor village priest that gives him a miracle or a sentimental story of a saint, has cathedrals built for him out of the pennies of the poor. He cant be intelligently political: he dreams of what the Shan Van Vocht said in ninety-eight. If you want to interest him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Houlihan and pretend she’s a little old woman. It saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except imagination; and imagination’s such torture you can’t bear it without whisky. [With fierce shivering self-contempt.] At last you get so you can bear nothing real at all: you’d rather starve than cook a meal; your rather go shabby and dirty than set your mind to take care of your clothes and wash yourself; you nag and squabble at home because your wife isn’t an angel, and she despises because you’re not a hero; and you hate the whole lot round you because they're only poor slovenly useless devils like yourself. [Dropping his voice like a man making some shameful confidence] And all the while there goes on a horrible, senseless, mischievous laughter. When you’re young, you exchange drinks with other young men; and you exchange wild stories with them; and as you're too futile to be able to help or cheer them, you chaff and sneer and taunt them for not doing the things you daren’t do yourself. And all the time you laugh! laugh! laugh! Eternal derision, eternal envy, eternal folly, eternal fouling and staining and degrading, until, when you come at last to the country where men take a question seriously and give a serious answer to it, you deride them for having no sense of humour, and plume yourself on your own worthlessness as if it made you better than them.’

‘Home Rule will work wonders under English guidance [...] We English must place our capacity for government without stint at the service of nationals who are less fortunately endowed in that respect. [... W]e owe Home Rule not to the Irish, but to our English Gladstone.’

‘The poor silly-clever Irishman takes his hat off to God’s Englishman.’ [ On his father]: ‘What with land courts reducing rents and Land Purchase Acts turning big estates into little holdings, he’d be a beggar if he hadn't take to collecting the new purchase instalments instead of the old rents. [...] He’s a nationalist and a Separatist. I’m a metallurgical chemist turned civil engineer. Not whatever else metallurgical chemistry may be, is not national. It’s international. And my business and yours as civil engineers is to join countries, not separate them. The one political conviction that our business has rubbed into us is that frontiers are hindrances and flags confounded nuisances [...] I want Ireland to be the brains and imagination of a big Commonwealth, not a Robinson Crusoe island. My Catholicism is the Catholicism of Charlemagne, or Dante, qualified by a great deal of modern science and folklore which Father Demspey would call the ravings of an Atheist.’

[Comparing the Englishman to a caterpillar and a leaf]: ‘He instinctively makes himself look like a fool, and eats up al the real fools at his ease while his enemies let him alone and laugh at him for being a fool like the rest.’ [On Nora Reilly:] ‘I was romantic about her, just as I was romantic about Byron’s heroines or the old Round Tower of Rosscullen; but she didn’t count any more than they did. I've never crossed St George’s Channel for her sake [...] .’ ‘[W]hen you go to Ireland, just drop talking about the middle class and bragging of belonging to it. In Ireland you're either a gentleman or you're not. If you want to be particularly offensive to Nora, you can call her a Papist; but if you call her a middle-class woman. Heaven help you!.’

‘To be rebuked by an Irish priest for superstition is more than he can stand.’

[on Patsy:] ’sure he’d say whatever was the least trouble to himself and the pleasantest to you, thinking you might give him a thrupenny bit for [it]

‘When I went to those great cities I saw wonders I had never seen in Ireland. But when I came back to Ireland I found all the wonders there waiting for me. You see they had been there all the time; but my eyes had never been opened to them. I did not know what my own house was like, because I had never been outside it.’

‘Can’t you tell the difference between your priest and any old madman in a black coat?’ [Note: Broadbent is unaware that he ‘unconsciously entertains Aunt Judy by his fantastic English personality and English mispronunciations.’]

[after Broadbent has proposed to her]: ‘I suppose people are different in England, Mr Broadbent; so perhaps you don’t mean any harm. In Ireland nobody’d mind what a man’d say in fun, nor take advantage of what a woman might say in answer to it. If a woman couldn’t talk to a man for two minutes at their first meeting without being treated the way you're treating me, no decent woman would ever talk to a man at all.’

[on the Irish:] ‘Well, sir, they're all right anywhere but in their own country. I’ve known lots of em in England, and generally liked em. But here, sir, I seem simply to hate em. [...] My mind rises up against their ways, somehow: they rub me the wrong way all over.’

[on Haffigan’s labour:] ‘An Irish peasant’s industry is not human: it’s worse than the industry of a coral insect [...] an Irishman will work as if he’d die the moment he stopped.’ Aunt Judy: ’sure never mind [...] there's hardly any landlords left; and there'll soon be none at all.’

‘On the contrary, there’ll soon be nothing else; and the Lord help Ireland then! [To TB:] [Y]ou were evidently in a state of blithering sentimentality.’ [ On Nora:] ‘Aristocracy be blowed [...] You compare her with your Englishwomen who wolf down from three to five meals a day; and naturally you find her a sylph. The difference is not a difference of type: it’s the difference between the woman who eats not wisely but too well and the woman who eats not wisely but too little.’

[on the present MP:] ‘We.’re tired on him. He doesn’t know where to stop. Everyone cant own land; and some men must own it to employ them. [...] what man in his senses ever wanted to give land to Patsy Farrell [sic] and the like o him?.’

‘Am I to be compared to Patsy Farrell that doesn't hardly know his right hand from his left?. [...] ’

‘Round here we’ve got the land at last; and we want no more Government meddlin.’

‘I have strong opinions which wouldn't suit you. [...] I always thought it was a stupid, lazy, good-for-nothing sort of thing to leave the land in the hands of the old landlords without calling them to a strict account for the use they made of it, and the condition of the people on it. I could see for myself that they thought of nothing but what they could get out of it to spend in England; and that they mortgaged and mortgaged until hardly one of them owned his own property or could have afforded to keep it up decently if he’d wanted to. But I tell you plump and plain, Matt, that if anybody things things will be any better now that the land is handed over to a lot of little men like you, without calling you to account either, there mistaken.’

[On Patsy being misused:] ‘He will be, if ever he gets into your power as you were in the power of your old landlord. Do you think, because you're poor and ignorant and half-crazy with toiling and moiling from morning noon and night, that you'll be any less greedy and oppressive to them that have no land than old Nick Lestrange, who was an educated travelled gentleman that would not have been tempted as hard by a hundred pounds as you’d be by five shillings? Nick was too high above Patsy to be jealous of him; but you, that are only one little step above him would die sooner than let him come up that step; and well you know it. [... I]t was by using Patsy’s poverty to undersell England in the markets of the world that we drove England to ruin Ireland. And she’ll ruin us the moment [...] we trade in cheap labour.’

‘Is Ireland never to have a chance? [...] If we cant have men of honour own the land, lets have men of ability. If we cant have men of ability, let us at least have men with capital. Anyone’s better than Matt [...] I am a Catholic intelligent enough to see that the Protestants are never more dangerous to us than when the are free from all alliances with the State. The so-called Irish Church is stronger today than ever it was. [...] Look at Father Dempsey! His is disestablished; he has nothing to hope or fear from the State; the result is that he’s the most powerful man in Roscullen.’

‘I blush for the Union. It is the blackest stain on our national history.’

‘You Airish people are too well off: thes wots the metter with you. You talk of your rotten little fawn cause you mide it by chackin a few stown dawn a ill! Well, wot prawce maw grenfawther, Oi should lawk to knaow, that fitted ap a fust clawss shop [...] and then was chacked aht of it on is ed at the end of is lease withaht a penny for his goodwill. [...] Gawd! When Oi think of the things we Englishmen as to pat AP wth, and eah you Awrish ahlin abaht your silly little grievances [...] .’

‘This world, sir, is very clearly a place of torment and penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing, and the weak in character are put to the horrible torture of imprisonment, not for hours but for years, in the name of justice. It is a place where the hardest till is a welcome refuge for the horror and tedium of pleasure, and where charity and good works are done only for hire to ransom the souls of the spoilers and the sybarite. Now, sir, there is only one place of horror and torment known to my religion; and that place is hell. Therefore it is plain to me that this earth of ours must be hell, and that we are all here, as the Indian revealed to me - perhaps he was sent to reveal it to me - to expiate crimes committed by us in a former existence.’

‘He [Broadbent] will take more than that from me before he is done.’

[On Tom Broadbent:] ‘Oh no he won't: he’s not an Irishman. he’ll never know they're laughing at him; and while there laughing he’ll will the seat.’ [...] ‘“Let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth.” [...] I learnt at Oxford that this is the secret of the Englishman’s strange power of making the best of both worlds.’ [Note phrase: a ‘German Jew.’]

[To Tom Broadbent:] ‘The Conquering Englishman, sir. Within 24 hours of your arrival you have carried off our only heiress, and practically secured the parliamentary seat.’

‘I have great faith in Ireland.’

‘And we have none, only empty enthusiasms and patriotisms [...] you have the excuse for believing that if there be any future, it will be yours; our faith seems dead, and our hearts cold and cowed. And island of dreamers who wake up on your jails, of critics and cowards whom you buy and tame for your own service [...]

[To Broadbent:] ‘You will drive Haffigan to America very efficiently; you will find a use for Barney Doran’s foul mouth and bullying temper by employing him to slave-drive your labourers very efficiently; and when at last this poor desolate countryside becomes a busy mint in which we shall all slave to make money for you, without Polytechnic to teach us how to do it efficiently, and our library to duffle the few imaginations your distilleries will spare, and our repaired Round Tower with admission sixpence, and refreshments and penny-in-the-slot mutoscopes to make it interesting, then no doubt your English and American shareholders will spend all the money we make for they very efficiently in shooting and hunting, in operations fro cancer and appendicitis, in gluttony and gambling; and you will devote what they save to fresh land development schemes. For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But it will come.’

‘Too true, Mr. Keegan, only too true.’

‘Sir, when you speak to me of English and Irish you forget that I am a Catholic. My country is not Ireland nor England, but the whole mighty realm of my Church. For me there are but two countries: heaven and hell, but two conditions of men: salvation and damnation. Standing here between you the Englishman, so clever in your foolishness, and this Irishman, so foolish in his cleverness, I cannot in my ignorance be sure which of you is the more deeply damned; but I should be unfaithful to my calling if I opened the gates of my heart less widely to one than to the other.’

‘In either case it would be an impertinence, Mr Keegan, as your approval is not of the slightest consequence to us. What use do you suppose all this drivel is to men with serious practical business in hand? [...] Fine manners and fine words are cheap in Ireland: you can keep both for my friend here, who is still imposed on by them. I know their value.’

‘You mean you don’t know their value. [...] I only make the hearts of my countrymen harder when I preach to them: the gates of hell still prevail against me. I shall wish you good evening. I am better alone, at the Round Tower, dreaming of heaven.’

‘Aye, that's it! there you are! dreaming! dreaming! dreaming! dreaming!’

‘Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.’

‘Once, when I was a small kid, I dreamt I was in heaven. [...] It was a sort of pale blue satin place, with all the pious old ladies in our congregation sitting as if they were at a service, and there was some awful person in the study at the other side of the hall. I didn't enjoy it, you know. What is it like in your dreams?’

‘In my dreams it is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three. It is, in short, the dream of a madman.’

‘What a regular old Church and State Tory he is! He’s a character: he’ll be an attraction here. Really almost equal to Ruskin and Carlyle.’

‘Yes; and much good they did with all their talk!’

‘Oh tut, tut, Larry! They improved my mind: they raised my tone enormously. I feel sincerely obliged to Keegan: he has made me feel a better man: distinctly better. [With sincere elevation.] I feel now as I never did before that I am right in devoting my life to the cause of Ireland. Come along and help me to choose the site for the hotel.’