I have wandered around cities in Europe and seen many statues of influential figures from the past. We today build these in memory of people who changed the world or tried – they are generally people who made a difference. I take photos of them and often go and read a bit to find out who they are and what they did – why someone thought a statue of them would be a good idea.
Heroes of the past. It does seem that there were many of them. I can walk around Dublin and see many statues of the famous, the heroes who fought for this country, people who changed the world or sometime even tried to change the world.
In modern society it is okay to look back as these figures of influence and talk of them as heroes. Where are all the modern heroes? I can think of one – Nelson Mandela. In a world that is now so cynical, so probing, expecting of perfection, it appears that it is impossible to find modern heroes, so we find the flaws and discard them all too easily.
One thought that has sat in my head during the last month – what would life be like if I was not so cynical? I am going to try it a bit and see.
Anyway here is some more on Wolfe Tone, a hero.
Born in Dublin, the son of a Church of Ireland, Protestant coach-maker, Tone studied law at Trinity College, Dublin and qualified as a barrister from King’s Inns at the age of 26 and attended the Inns of Court in London. As a student, he eloped with Elizabeth Witherington, daughter of William Witherington, of Dublin, and his wife, Catherine Fanning. By his wife, whom he renamed Matilda, he had two sons and a daughter. She was only 16 when they married, and she lived on for 50 years after his death.
Disappointed at finding no notice taken of a scheme for founding a military colony in Hawaii which he had submitted to William Pitt the Younger, Tone turned to Irish politics. An able pamphlet attacking the administration of the marquess of Buckingham in 1790 brought him to the notice of the Whig club; and in September 1791 he wrote a remarkable essay over the signature “A Northern Whig,” of which 10,000 copies were said to have been sold.
The principles of the French Revolution were at this time being eagerly embraced in Ireland, especially among the Presbyterians of Ulster, and two months before the appearance of Tone’s essay, a meeting had been held in Belfast, where republican toasts had been drunk with enthusiasm, and a resolution in favour of the abolition of religious disqualifications had given the first sign of political sympathy between the Roman Catholics and the Protestant dissenters (“Whigs”) of the north. The essay of “A Northern Whig” emphasized the growing breach between Whig patriots like Henry Flood and Henry Grattan, who aimed at Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform without breaking the connection with England, and the men who desired to establish a separate Irish republic. Tone expressed contempt for the constitution which Grattan had so triumphantly extorted from the British government in 1782; and, himself an Anglican, he urged co-operation between the different religious sects in Ireland as the only means of obtaining complete redress of Irish grievances.