By An Claidheamh Soluis, August 11, 1906.
It was death to him who broke the Peace of the Gael during the progress of Feis na Teamhrach of old. Tara is a grassy hillside, and Baile Atha Cliath, for good or evil, is the capital of Gaeldom. Feis na Teamhrach has gone with the Ard-Righthe and the Tánaistí; the Oireachtas stands in its place today. Not until an emancipated Ireland directs her own affairs can the hosting of the new Gael vie in native hue, in impressiveness, in ordered beauty with its old-time prototype; but it can at least strive, year after year, to live up to that fair exemplar. Gradually we can shape our Oireachtas into an adequate expression and summing-up of all that this land thinks, does, hopes, has thought, done, hoped; a synthesis in the present of its past and of its future. Let us seek from afar – wandering in the dim aisles of history or traversing the shadowed glens and lonely uplands in which the Gaelic past is still a present – all that was gracious, generous, artistic, in our native civilisation; let us bring each precious relic to the Oireachtas, and weave it into its due place in the radiant fabric of a new national life; thus re-piecing together, reverently, lovingly, the civilisation that shone and glowed on Tara and at Carman and at Taillte, as a rich piece of embroidery or a jewelled hillside shines and glows when the sunlight falls on it.
It is not only the institutions and forms of the past that we would restore, but the spirit also. And that spirit found its most humane and altruistic expression in the law which established the Peace of Tara. The Gael is in council; let there be peace, let there be brotherhood, let there be mutual trust, and tolerance, and love! The Dove of Peace hovered over Tara when her Feis assembled in the Rath of the Senates; may it hover over Baile Atha Cliath and over every other trysting-place where men meet to take counsel for the weal of the Gael!
Brothers! We are banded together in a companionship holier than that of the Craobh Rua or of the Fianna, and our only strife is with the Outland Races.