Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.

We would not give up our own country - Ireland - if we were to get the whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it.

What are prophecies? Don't we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.

If the past year were offered me again, And choice of good and ill before me set Would I accept the pleasure with the pain Or dare to wish that we had never met?

There is lasting kindness in Heaven when no kindness is found upon earth.

Every day in the year there comes some malice into the world, and where it comes from is no good place.

Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.