A World Quite Mad

I found this today and it's very interesting. It's a reprint of a newspaper article from a hundred and one years ago today (their time), when Catholics got angry about a local man, a Protestant who had a meeting in his store. It caused days of violence.

The lower classes of Roman Catholics in the country were very ignorant, and made a ready prey for any bad leading and bad passions...and the least suspicion of proselytising on the part of Protestants... was quite enough to drive their Roman Catholic neighbours of a less educated class into paroxysms of senseless intolerance such as they experienced in Swords last week.

Those words are profound, and still relevant today. Intolerance and upheaval is what happens when you have a few people inciting the less educated among us, by stoking fears and prejudices.