Ireland. A history. Part II. Иностранный язык. Фомина И.В. - 10 стр.

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   The fleet had experienced some mishaps on the way. In a storm at sea it
had parted company and lost its flagship. There were almost no British government
troops anywhere near the area and the way lay open for the French to reach Cork and
beyond. But they could do nothing until the wind dropped.
   There was very little sign of human opposition, though the French were in the bay
a week. About 400 men of the militia stationed at Bantry eventually drew themselves
up boldly on the shore to try and make out that they were only the vanguard of some
larger force. But it was the weather that saved England. One by one the great ships
found they could hold on no longer and ran back down the bay to the open sea and
France again. Wolfe Tone went with them.

2. Retell the text.
                                  Unit VI.

1. Read and translate the text.
    A National Directory of the United Irishmen for the whole of Ireland had been
formed in Dublin under the military leadership of a radical aristocrat, Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, and in spite of the setbacks in Ulster, this group now tried to organize a
national rebellion for the whole country, with the immediate expectation of French
help. The method by which the United Irishmen hoped to bring the internal rebellion
about was by incorporating within their own organization that the peasant agrarian
secret society network, particularly a mysterious but widely-spread society known as
the Defenders which was already developing some vague national political thinking
of its own among the Catholic peasantry.
    Contact with the Defenders however had only been most imperfectly effected
when the United Irish Society was devastated by the work of informers, at least three
of whom were highly placed within the organization. Almost the entire National
Directory was arrested in one swoop in March 1798, and although Lord Edward
Fitzgerald himself escaped for a time, he too was betrayed not long afterwards and
mortally wounded in the course of his arrest. Thoroughly alarmed by the scale of the
conspiracy it had unearthed, and particularly by its contacts with the vast numbers of
discontented peasantry in the Defenders, the government now proceeded to apply the
methods of repression which had been so successful in Ulster the year before in the
Midland counties of Ireland.
    All the tortures had an undoubtedly successful effect in extracting information.
Thousands of arrests were made; thousands of stands of arms were uncovered and the
United Irish organization in the Midlands was in such confusion by the time the
signal to rise was eventually given that, though the rebels had a few local temporary
successes, the whole thing went off at half-cock with great slaughter of the peasantry.
But there was another effect of the military terror too, and that was to cause the
government to tremble.
    The County of Wexford in south-east Ireland was not one in which anyone
expecting rebellion in 1798 would have expected it to be particularly menacing.
Branches of the Defenders had long existed there but only the year before it had been
officially noted that they were not particularly widespread; such contacts as the Irish