THE Catholics might have been able to find a remedy for all these evils, had it not been that they were destroyed from within by another and greater internal disease. For most of the families, clans, and towns of the Catholic chiefs, who took up the defence of the Catholic Faith, were divided into different factions, each having different leaders and following lords who were fighting for estates and chieftaincies. The less powerful of them joined the English party in the hope of gaining the chieftainship of their clans, if the existing chiefs were removed from their position and property, and the English craftily held out that hope to them. Thus, short-sighted men, putting their private affairs before the public defence of the holy faith, turned their allies, followers, and towns from the Catholic chiefs and transferred to the English great resources, but in the end did not obtain what they wished for, but accomplished what they did not desire. For it was not they, but the English, who got the properties and rich patrimonies of the Catholic nobles and their kinsmen; and the holy faith of Christ Jesus, bereft of its defenders, lay open to the barbarous violence and lust of the heretics. There was one device by which the English were able to crush the forces
This hope turned Con and Henry, sons of the chief Shane O'Neill, and Art, son of Turlough, against O'Neill. The same greed for chieftaincy prompted Niall O'Donnell, surnamed Garve, to effect the destruction of Tyrconnell by levying war against O'Donnell. The same envy drove Owen O'Sullivan against his cousin The O'Sullivan Bear. The same ambition set Thady O'Rourke against The O'Rourke, his brother. The same lust excited the English Maguire against The Maguire. Why should I narrate the dispute between Florence, Dermot and Daniel as to the chieftaincy of Clancarty? Why should I recall how Earl James FitzGerald was stripped of his resources by the faction of the other James? Why repeat six hundred examples of the same thing? Assuredly, my countrymen, however high they may stand amongst the nations in the profession of, and devotion to, the Catholic faith and Divine religion, yet during this war, were far worse than Turks or heretics in faction, dissension, ambition and perfidiousness. Wherefore, it could not be otherwise than that by so many and so great distractions, Ireland should be utterly destroyed, for as the holy Evangelist has it, ‘Every Kingdom divided against itself shall be destroyed.’ Indeed my wonder is how it should have so long withstood so many divisions, so many wars, such incendiarism. And, indeed, had it not been accomplished by God, I do not think that the few Catholics could have so often overcome the multitude of Protestants and their allies; that half-armed soldiers could have been able to defeat armies thoroughly equipped with all kinds of arms; that the attenuated resources of the Catholics could have withstood during fifteen years the wealth and power of the Queen of England; that from small beginnings a war should have, beyond all expectation, swelled to such dimensions that the heretics were nearly on the point of losing all Ireland.