THE IRISH CROSS PRESENTED TO THE
AUTHOR
The inscription reads: "The Cumman-na-mBan
and Irish Volunteers, Glasgow, present this to
Margaret Skinnider for the work she did for Ireland,
Easter Week, 1916."
DOING MY BIT FOR
IRELAND
I
Just before Christmas a year ago, I accepted an invitation to visit some friends in the north of Ireland, where, as a little girl, I had spent many midsummer vacations. My father and mother are Irish, but have lived almost all their lives in Scotland and much of that time in Glasgow. Scotland is my home, but Ireland my country.
On those vacation visits to County Monaghan, Ulster, I had come to know the beauty of the inland country, for I stayed nine miles from the town of Monaghan. We used to go there in a jaunting-car and on the way passed the fine places of the rich English people—the "Planter" people we called them because they were of the stock that Cromwell brought over from England and planted on Irish soil. We would pass, too, the small and poor homes of the Irish, with their wee bit of ground. It was then I began to feel resentment, though I was only a child.
In Scotland there were no such contrasts for me to see, but there were the histories of Ireland,—not those the English have written but those read by all the young Irish to-day after they finish studying the Anglicized histories used in the schools. I did it the other way about, for I was not more than twelve when a boy friend loaned me a big thick book, printed in very small type, an Irish history of Ireland. Later I read the school histories and the resentment I had felt in County Monaghan grew hotter.