The romantic Irish: Go on, say it

For a nation so comfortable with invention, for a people so at ease gilding the lily, our national folklore is not overcrowded with red-rose, passionate romantics.

For every William Butler Yeats, who spent his life carrying the wearying burden of his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, we have Flying Columns of strapping young men far more interested in the National Question or hurling — or in some hopeless cases, greyhounds — than they were in affairs of the heart.