About Terence MacSwiney (from a very interesting blog)

"THE FRUIT WILL EXCEED THE COST".

ON THIS DATE (28TH MARCH) 139 YEARS AGO : AN IRISH REPUBLICAN HERO IS BORN.
Terence MacSwiney, pictured, left, his wife Muriel and their daughter, Máire, photographed in 1919.
' "If I die I know the fruit will exceed the cost a thousand fold. The thought of it makes me happy. I thank God for it. Ah, Cathal, the pain of Easter week is properly dead at last..." - Terence MacSwiney wrote these words in a letter to Cathal Brugha on September 30, 1920, the 39th day of his hunger strike. The pain he refers to is that caused by his failure to partake in the 1916 Easter Rising. Contradictory orders from Dublin and the failure of the arms ship, the Aud, to land arms in Tralee left the Volunteers in Cork unprepared for insurrection...' (from here.)

In his book 'History of the Irish Working Class', Peter Beresford Ellis wrote : "On October 25th, 1920, Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney - poet, dramatist and scholar - died on the 74th day of a hunger-strike while in Brixton Prison, London. A young Vietnamese dishwasher in the Carlton Hotel in London broke down and cried when he heard the news - "A Nation which has such citizens will never surrender". His name was Nguyen Ai Quoc who, in 1941, adopted the name Ho Chi Minh and took the lessons of the Irish anti-imperialist fight to his own country..."

Terence MacSwiney, born on the 28th March 1879 - 139 years ago on this date - was the Commandant of the 1st Cork Brigade of the IRA and was elected as the Lord Mayor of Cork. He died after 74 days on hunger strike (a botched effort to force feed him hastened his death) in Brixton Prison, England, on the 25th October, 1920, and his body lay in Southwark Cathedral in London where tens of thousands of people paid their respects. He summed-up the Irish feeling at that time (a feeling and determination which is still prominent to this day) - "The contest on our side is not one of rivalry or vengeance but of endurance. It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can suffer the most who will conquer. Those whose faith is strong will endure to the end in triumph." And our faith is strong.

http://1169andcounting.blogspot.ie/