“A vote, like a law, is no good unless there is an arm behind it; it…” — John Boyle O'Reilly

“A vote, like a law, is no good unless there is an arm behind it; it cannot be enforced. This is a shameful truth, perhaps, but it is true.”

Pragmatic view of the limits of suffrage without power · Editorial / public statement

John Boyle O'Reilly

About John Boyle O'Reilly

28 June 1844–10 August 1890

On a June morning in 1844, at Dowth Castle near the banks of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, a boy was born into a world of contradictions—a world of ancient Celtic splendour and modern British subjugation, of rich oral tradition and stony colonial reality. That boy, John Boyle O'Reilly, would grow to embody…

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