As Uris says, ´only the weak´ are left behind. Most of them immigrate to America or Australia, making half of all immigration in the 1950s to the US from Ireland. The Irish Catholics have an age-old social strata, where the oldest child inherits, leaving the rest of the siblings (always too many) fending for themselves. While both Protestants and the RCs had fanatic overbearing churches, the Protestants have the Orangemen, the Gombeen, and the British Aristocracy. Uris does a good job of showing the sectarian and sub-sectarian divides in the Irish society of those times. The book is replete with historical events, from the Great Famine of the 1840s to the Easter Rising in 1916. No prose could force a man with a full belly into the streets to rise, nor could any law stop a hungry man from taking to the streets.Īlongside Conor is his best friend, Seamus O’Neill, who decides to narrate the story from time to time, and disappears when the narrative gets too historical. As he witnesses the plight of the Irish Roman Catholics (RCs) under the yoke of the British, rebellion rises in him till he joins the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the roots of Sinn Féin.
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