The Story of Ireland

by Neil Hegarty

  It was becoming evident in both America and Ireland that the growing Irish communities in the New World had increasing power and influence at their disposal; and that events in Ireland itself were being tracked now by an international audience. At the same time, a slowly developing Catholic middle class of traders and merchants in the home country was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with its lot: deprived of representation in parliament and barred still from many professions, its ambitions and aspiration remained consistently stymied. It was at this point that a new Irish leader stepped on to the stage – one who had long observed the intricacies of a complex and frequently festering society, and who understood both the importance of communication and the vast possibilities that were opening up in a shrinking modern world.

  In January 1797, days after the French expedition had turned back from Bantry Bay, the twenty-one year-old Daniel O’Connell had enlisted in the Lawyers’ Artillery Corps. The assorted yeomanry was dedicated to the maintenance of the state against the threat of revolutionaries; and O’Connell had little choice but to enlist: failure to do so would surely spell the end of his legal career before it had properly begun. Three years later, O’Connell was in principle opposing the Act of Union. ‘My blood boiled,’ he wrote, remembering the bells of St Patrick’s pealing across Dublin in honour of the Union in 1800, ‘and I vowed on that morning that the foul dishonour should not last, if I could put an end to it.’21

  History has assigned to O’Connell the role of the hero, the natural leader. ‘Three men,’ wrote Balzac, ‘have had in this century, an immense influence – Napoleon, Cuvier, O’Connell…the first lived on the blood of Europe; the second espoused the globe; the third became the incarnation of a people.’22 O’Connell was educated, cosmopolitan and blessed with keen organizational and oratorical skills; he possessed colour and flair; and his eye for self-promotion ensured that he became a dominant figure in the politics of Ireland and Britain and influential on the global stage too. He charmed the young Queen Victoria – but only for a brief interval, before the monarch took fright at his political methods. He fought a fatal duel with a member of Dublin City Council; was prone to drunkenness and vulgarity; and was accused of all manner of lechery and womanizing.* Not beyond using the courtroom itself as a political stage, it mattered to him if his client received a harsher sentence as a result.**He was a champion both of the abolition of the death penalty at home, and of the anti-slavery cause in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s; and while he managed to tap the energies of the swelling Irish immigrant communities in the New World, he also provoked strong reactions.23 For every one of his supporters in the United States there was an opponent: ‘Konno [O’Connell] was a knave’, notes Herman Melville in his allegorical Mardi (1849); and this bald declaration was shared by many.24

  Although Catholic emancipation was ostensibly O’Connell’s principal goal, his ultimate desire was for the repeal of the Union – a result to be achieved in a series of slow increments. The society that he wished to see in the aftermath of repeal, however, was one thoroughly respectful of the rights of propertied men (such as O’Connell himself) and at ease under a united Crown. He was firmly opposed to the Ribbonmen and their kind: ‘I would not join in any violation of the law,’ he wrote in 1833. ‘I desire no social revolution, no social change…in short, salutary restoration without revolution, an Irish Parliament, British connection, one King, two legislatures.’25 And he had observed the fate of the United Irishmen, in the process becoming convinced that any vehicle for change in Ireland must be public and not secret in nature, and that it must draw its strength openly from the mass of the people rather than from cells planted discreetly here and there throughout the country.

  A third conviction sprang – in part – from the experiences of his youth, when he had witnessed first-hand the bloodshed of revolutionary France and had resolved as a result that any campaign for change in Ireland must be peaceful and constitutional. He had, in addition, noted that violent action in Ireland had never worked in the past. But his attitude towards constitutionality also encompassed certain ambiguities: the fact that he sent his son Morgan to South America to join in Bolívar’s uprising against Spanish colonial rule on the continent demonstrated that he was not always averse to the use of violence; and there was of course also the matter of the duel he himself had fought.

  O’Connell understood the importance of continually probing the limits of constitutional politics. Having observed the failure of tried-and-tested methods to achieve reform – and in particular the repeated votes against change at Westminster – he knew well that the British ruling class could not be relied upon to resolve the issue of emancipation satisfactorily. It would have to be jostled into action – and, much as he had disliked the actions of the Paris mob in the eighteenth century, he perceived that the mass of the Irish people themselves must be employed to ensure that the issue was properly dealt with. But at first he had a difficult time convincing his colleagues that any action could be taken. Given the litter of failed promises and petitions that had followed the Act of Union, there was a widespread and reasonable belief that emancipation could not be achieved – at any rate, not by conventional political ends. As for Union itself, this was dormant as an issue, for its opponents in Ireland were of the view that, if emancipation could not be brought about, then separation from Britain was well-nigh a political impossibility.

  It was in this unpromising climate that the Catholic Association was established at Dublin in May 1823, with the explicit aim of finally bringing about Catholic emancipation – specifically, the right of Catholics to sit in parliament without renouncing their faith. There was, of course, nothing in law to prevent Catholics from being members of parliament. The obstacle instead lay in the nature of the oath a new member was required to take, which stated ‘that the sacrifice of the mass and the invocation of the blessed Virgin Mary and other saints as now practised in the Church of Rome, are impious and idolatrous’ – a problem insurmountable for a pious Catholic. The Association was from the off an underwhelming affair, seemingly afflicted by the prevailing political lethargy: its members tended to come from the upper classes and bourgeoisie, and it seemed that this latest attempt to bring reform would go the way of all previous efforts.

  In January of the following year, however, O’Connell introduced a new category of associate member – and the subscription fees for such members could be as little as a penny a month. At a stroke, the Catholic Association was transformed from a moribund talking shop into a mass movement. At the same time, other administrative innovations were put in place with the aim of maintaining a structure of local branches; and a good deal of effort went into ensuring that the Association’s work was properly reported and disseminated throughout Irish society. O’Connell’s own public appearances became important events, with crowds gathering to hear his fiery oratory. The Catholic Association had become a force to be reckoned with.

  Daniel O’Connell had created one of the first popular democratic organizations in the modern world – and at a most auspicious moment too: the Catholic Association appeared and expanded at a time when news and gossip could travel farther and faster than ever before, when modern communications permitted the passing on of information in a way previously impossible. Literacy had also developed among the general population to a point where all manner of pamphlets and newspapers could be used to spread the word. While the Catholic Association was not always, perhaps, the well-oiled phenomenon of lore, it certainly did enough within a very short time to energize the communities within which it worked and to turn itself into a very potent political force.

  Much depended, of course, on the willingness of the Catholic Church to work alongside the organization; and here too a change was quickly detected. While many priests and members of the hierarchy stuck to the old view that loyalty and obedience were the paths that the Catholic faithful must follow, others noted O’Connell’s popularity and held their tongues; and still others demonstra
ted an overt willingness to work with this new political force in the land and to assist in the spread of its message by providing lists of clergy and parishioners. Bishop James Warren Doyle of Leighlin and Kildare went further still, commenting publicly that the British government could not expect the Irish Church to act as its handmaiden in matters of security:

  The minister of England cannot look to the exertions of the Catholic priesthood…the clergy, with few exceptions, are from the ranks of the people, they inherit their feelings, they are not, as formerly, brought up under despotic governments…they know much more of the principles of the Constitution than they do of passive obedience. If a rebellion were raging from Carrickfergus to Cape Clear, no sentence of excommunication would ever be fulminated by a Catholic prelate.26

  But it was evident that not all Doyle’s fellow bishops shared his opinions – and apparent too that some of the strategies of the Catholic Association were viewed as disturbing in other quarters. In particular, its conflation of the issue of emancipation with a broader range of Catholic grievances – especially the existence of remnants of penal legislation on the statute books – was a dangerous game, arousing as it did expectations that could not easily be satisfied. Penal laws, for example, had limited the extent to which the Catholic funeral rite could take place in Ireland: so it had become common practice to inter Catholics in Protestant graveyards, accompanied by a limited form of funeral. The Catholic Association moved to establish the country’s first Catholic cemetery, at Goldenbridge outside Dublin, and this was consecrated in 1829 – the national cemetery at Glasnevin would follow several years later – thus fulfilling a specific Catholic need to bury the dead according to their own rites. But not all such grievances could be so readily answered: in particular, the hardship and privations of daily life could not be instantly eased by means of emancipation or legislative reform, as implied by the campaigns of the Catholic Association. And although O’Connell himself publicly rejected violence as a means of bringing about political change, he made it clear that violence would certainly ensue if his demands were not met.

  As the 1820s went on, so the signals transmitted across the Irish Sea became ever more unmistakable and impossible to ignore. In the general election of 1826 a candidate sponsored by the Catholic Association challenged and broke the political mould in Waterford; further results elsewhere in the country demonstrated that the world was changing and the establishment could no longer pretend to hold fully the reins of power. At the same time, the context of a changing culture and a rapidly modernizing world meant that anti-Catholic sentiment in Britain – at its highest point in an era of nation-building – was now quickly losing its potency: O’Connell was pushing suddenly at an opening door.

  His opportunity came in July 1828, in the form of a by-election that took place in County Clare. O’Connell himself stood as a candidate – and it rapidly became obvious that the Clare by-election would be the ultimate test of the government’s resolve on the issue of emancipation. O’Connell won with ease: his supporters invaded the county town of Ennis, marching in step like a civilian army; their determination, potency and discipline demonstrated to the weakening anti-emancipation lobby that the game was up. O’Connell came to the silent Commons to claim his seat and, with due ceremony, read to himself the words of the oath. ‘I cannot do it,’ he told the watching House and he flung the papers away, in the process forfeiting his seat. Wellington was now prime minister and his understanding of Irish affairs proved decisive. He was privately sympathetic to the cause of emancipation; more pressingly, he and his home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, feared that a failure to amend the oath and to legislate for Catholic emancipation would lead inevitably to unrest in Ireland. ‘We have also had the experience,’ said Peel, ‘of that other and greater calamity – civil discord and bloodshed. Surely it is no womanly fear that shudders at its recurrence’ – in the eyes of some, an ungracious argument that conceded little to those larger notions of justice and fair play implicit in the idea of emancipation.27 Catholic emancipation was voted through in the spring of 1829 and signed into law by George IV – though the additional clause that a man had to earn over £40 per annum in order to vote had the effect of raising the bar beyond the reach of nearly all of O’Connell’s natural supporters. He himself stood for re-election, as he was required to do, and finally claimed his seat in the Commons – the first Catholic in parliament in over three hundred years – in November of that year. Irish Catholicism for the first time sensed its potential political power; the Catholic press hailed O’Connell as a new Brian Boru and acclaimed him as the Liberator.

  Protestant factions reacted sharply to the emergence of this new force that was able to fuse religion and nationalism to such heady effect. Ulster’s Protestant merchant class, absorbed in building their banking and textiles businesses, viewed such a disturbance of the status quo with much trepidation. Religious tension and incidents of sectarianism rose markedly, with the Orange Order becoming an increasingly prominent player throughout much of Ulster. Crucially, however, not all observers in the province had watched O’Connell’s actions with dismay. Ulster Presbyterianism was no more monolithic than was Catholicism; and not all Presbyterians had forgotten the radical agenda embodied in the United Irishmen. Liberals naturally sympathized with O’Connell’s pro-emancipation agitation: after all, this was another step along the road to removing all remaining religious-based discrimination from the British political system – discrimination that historically had targeted both the Catholic and Presbyterian churches. Liberals in Ulster could now, perhaps, anticipate a progressive political agenda that would embrace both Catholic and Protestant. After all – so the thinking went – it had happened before; and it might happen again, if only O’Connell could accept the Union as a done deed.

  He could not: with emancipation now achieved, he set his sights immediately on the greater goal of repeal. At the beginning of 1830, his Letter to the People of Ireland laid out an ambitious reformist programme that encompassed repeal, a measure of parliamentary reform, and the abolition of the tithe system so deeply resented by both Catholics and Presbyterians. This last measure was of course crucial, for it would help to ensure that popular support would swing behind him once again. Ultimately, however, such a measure could not bridge the political gap that yawned between O’Connell and all shades of Presbyterianism: the abolition of the tithe was all well and good, but the two sides aspired to fundamentally different national conditions.

  O’Connell also had to deal with changing political circumstances. From reliance upon Protestant opinion as its base of support in Ireland, successive British administrations now reacted to the success of the Catholic Association by attempting to draw majority opinion into the administration of Ireland. This task got underway with a gradual reform of the justice system and local government – aspects of life that impacted most immediately on the mass of the population. These efforts bore fruit in such legislation as the Municipal Corporations Act (1840), which ensured that the town corporations were a little less medieval in their organization and a little more representative of the people they were designed to serve. Moneyed and propertied Catholics would now be able to vote and sit on local government bodies; and in 1841 O’Connell himself became Dublin’s first Catholic lord mayor in 150 years.

  His own power base, however, was not wholly secure, for a grouping within his ostensibly united front began to grow restless. The leadership of the Young Ireland movement, passionate, articulate and non-sectarian, was devoted to a conception of national culture and the common good that owed much to classical philosophy: ‘It is true wisdom to raise our thoughts and aspirations above what the mass of mankind calls good to regard truth, fortitude, honesty, purity, as the great objects of human effort, and not the supply of vulgar wants.’28 The movement’s newspaper, the Nation, was founded in 1842 in order to share and disseminate this vision of an inclusive society: it was imagined as carrying forward in print form the classical ideal of a citize
ns’ forum. The Young Irelanders, under such leaders as the Protestant Thomas Davis, were inevitably far from enamoured of several of O’Connell’s methods – in particular, his steady deployment of Catholicism as a political weapon and his overt links to Rome. To Davis and others, religion was a private matter, and an element that nationalism could manage without.

  Yet O’Connell did manage to keep his movement together, not least because the political context continued for a period to be favourable for agitation. The power of the Irish lobby at Westminster was enhanced by the Reform Bill of 1832, which produced an altered and less monolithic Commons: it was clear that henceforth the Irish voting bloc might frequently hold the balance of power. The raising of the voting bar had of course produced a whole new grievance to be exploited; and ironically, the Reform Bill itself supplied another, in that it diminished the proportion of Irish seats in the Commons. But in 1841, with an insurmountably large Tory majority at Westminster and the avenues of political possibility closing down, O’Connell shifted his attention away from Westminster-based legislative reform. His prime objective remained repeal of the Union – and now the changing political scene in Ireland was working once more in his favour. The question of land reform was opening up a new front: in particular, the absence of security of tenure for tenant farmers was a bitter grievance. This was an issue that would suppurate for the next forty years – but for the moment, it provided a useful rallying tool.

  O’Connell now opted to return to his former pattern of mass meetings and popular protest. He set about convening the Monster Meetings of 1843 – events that replicated in discipline and determination the congregations of the 1820s, but on a much larger scale. A crowd of over thirty thousand gathered at Limerick in April to hear the now ageing Liberator speak; much larger multitudes came together during the course of the summer at Mullingar, Lismore, Cork and Mallow; and the largest meeting of all took place on the hill of Tara in August.*‘Step by step,’ O’Connell told his listeners, ‘we are approaching the great goal of Repeal of the Union, but it is with the strides of a giant.’ The government, unsurprisingly, took fright, and in the second half of 1843 a sharp security crackdown and the prospect of uncontrolled bloodshed forced O’Connell to cancel the last Monster Meeting of the year, which was to have taken place at Clontarf in October. The setting was of course no accident: just as Tara had been the seat of the high kings and the location of a notional unified Irish nation of yore, Clontarf was the scene of what, in an evolving nationalist historiography, had been a famous victory of the native Irish over the Vikings.