Excerpt from The Years of the Shadow

We came back to a changed Ireland. We had left it - that part of it with which we were best acquainted - in the passion and stress of Parnellism and Anti-Parnellism. A good deal of water had flowed under the bridges since then, and as far as politics were concerned - surface politics, at all events - we found people tepidly liking and tepidly disliking Home Rule, in which I think no one believed. By the way, what a dull name! The thing deserved to be scrapped for its name alone.

Also, superficially perhaps, the giving and entertaining Ireland we remembered had ceased to be. Perhaps it was there all the time though we did not know it. Perhaps it was only that we returned to the Anglo-Irish having gone away from the Celts, and the Anglo-Irish of the suburbs, who are very often remarkably like the same class in England. They were very kind and friendly, but tea-giving was the order of the day, not lunch-giving, nor dinner-giving on a lavish scale as we remembered it. Dublin priests had ceased to entertain the laity to any great extent, very much against the grain, I am sure, for Hospitality when she is hunted will find her last refuge and sanctuary under the roof of an Irish priest's house.

We found all our new friends selling something. It might be pedigree fowls, or it might be dogs, or perhaps carnation-slips.

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