Lew zakuty w łańcuch. Wizerunek Polski w dziewiętnastowiecznej Irlandii .......... 149

A CHAINED LION: THE IMAGE OF POLAND IN 19TH-CENTURY IRELAND

This work analyses Polish image in late-modern Ireland, basing itself on Róis ín Healy’s book titled Poland in the Irish Nationalist Imagination, 1772-1922 :. Anti-Colonialism within Europe. The text reports and arranges relations of both nations into five stages – early-modern, Kościuszkan, liberal, analogous, ambivalent and great-war. It notes that similarities such as devout catholicism, lack of self-determination and religious discrimination led to their mutual self-identification in 19th and early 20th century. The article presents elements of Polish resistance such as private education, care for native language, organisation of uprisings, engagement of Polish women on behalf of the independence cause, competition for arable land against occupational settlers and Galicia’s autonomy model, all of which Irishmen strived to use as ideals for their own national survival. This work follows reactions of Irish public opinion prompted by subsequent Polish uprisings and imperial repressions, as well as its implicit repercussions in their own struggle for independence. Pro-Polish attitudes of Irishmen have surpassed the class division and withstood different geopolitical orientations of Irish-nationalists in the eve of the First World War, initiating the exotic, yet durable Polish-Irish brotherhood. It was an element of broader Irish undestanding of their own struggle for independence as part of a coordinated effort of all subjugated nations envisioned as a community of the opressed.