Thomas Davis (1814 - 1845): A life and message still significant?

To mark the bicentenary of the birth of Thomas Davis (1814-1845), UCC Emeritus Professor John A Murphy , assessed the patriot’s significance in a lecture on March 11, 2014 in Mallow, Davis’s birthplace. Here is the full text of his address.

Thomas Davis was our most comprehensive philosopher of nationality whose writings during a brief lifetime influenced subsequent national thought and feeling down to our own day.

On the one hand, he appealed to Patrick Pearse as an uncompromising evangelist of separatism, while impressing Arthur Griffith as a flexible thinker whom he could invoke to argue for the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921.