The Union (1843)
Songs Of The Nation.--No. VII.
How did they pass the Union ?
By perjury and fraud--
By slaves, who sold for place or gold
Their country and their God--
By all the savage acts that yet
Have followed England's track ;
The pitch-cap and the bayonet,
The gibbet and the rack.
And thus was passed the Union
By Pitt and Castlereagh ;
Could Satan send for such an end
More worthy tools than they ?
How thrive we by the Union ?
Look round our native land :
In ruined trade and wealth decayed
See slavery's surest brand ;
Our glory as a nation gone--
Our substance drained away--
A wretched province trampled on,
Is all awe've left to-day.
Then curse with me the Union,
That juggle foul and base,
The baneful root that bore such fruit
Of ruin and disgrace.
And shall it last, this Union,
To grind and waste us so ?
O'er hill and lea, from sea to sea,
All Ireland thunders No !
Eight million necks are stiff to bow--
We know our might as men--
We conquered once before, and now
We'll conquer once again ;
And rend the cursed Union,
And fling it to the wind--
And Ireland's laws in Ireland's cause
Alone our hearts shall bind !
Notes
From the Sydney Newspaper the Australasian Chronicle Saturday 7 October 1843 p. 2.
Pitt and Castlereagh -- recent discoveries show "perjury and fraud" re passage of the Act of Union
The past twenty years has seen the unearthing of a wealth of new archival material that has transformed previous interpretations about British activities in the 1790s. The majority of these papers have concerned foreign policy, revealing the existence of a fully efficient intelligence organisation on the Continent that was, even then, being referred to in official documents as 'His majesty's secret service'. This revolution in historical evidence has also applied to Ireland with the discovery of secret service papers that were previously 'missing'. Now on display in the Public Record Office, Kew, the documents reveal the existence of covert secret service activity in Ireland during the passing of the Union. In effect they constitute a second, secret set of secret service accounts, that were kept separate and distinct from the normal money that was accounted for legally. How these files went missing for almost two hundred years has never been adequately explained.