Aodh de Blácam

Harold Saunders Blackham (Irish: Aodh Sandrach de Blácam); 16 December 1891 – 16 January 1951) was an English-born Irish author, journalist, and editor. He was associated with 20th century Irish nationalism through movements such as Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Clann na Poblachta.

Quotes

• The "rush to the town" is known to be one of the signs of racial ruin. It foreran the fall of Rome and of other great powers of the past. Peasant nations may be subjected, but they outlive their oppressors; for in them the family, which is the living cell of the nation, has a direct source of life in the land on which it lives, and States and empires might go into anarchy, yet the peasant community would survive. A wide view of history shows that humanity flourishes when the town is the adminicle of a rural society, the centre in which it has craftsmen to make its tools, merchants to exchange its wares, and colleges to educate its people. When the balance tilts, and the town becomes the main and normal dwelling place of the race, with the countryside merely its vegetable garden—when, so to speak, man goes indoors to live and gives up the open-air—then decay begins and doom, within a few generations, is certain.
  • 'Books and Our Dying Countryside', The Irish Monthly, Vol. 66, No. 776 (February 1938), p. 132