Ireland

by Joseph Coohill

  O’Connell and his allies thought that none of these problems could be solved until Catholics (the bulk of the population of Ireland) participated in government at the parliamentary level. This meant agitating for the right to sit in parliament, and O’Connell’s great success during his early career was in convincing people, even poor tenant farmers, that this was relevant to their everyday lives. Until about 1820, the campaign for Emancipation was largely a Catholic upper-middle-class concern, headed by landlords, businessmen and professionals. The early Emancipation movement was also hampered by disagreements within its ranks over how best to proceed, and what powers the British government might be allowed to retain, including a right of royal veto over the appointments of Catholic bishops in Ireland. O’Connell tried to keep up popular interest in Emancipation by founding a Catholic pressure group, which lasted from 1815 to 1817, and by his work on the Catholic Board (a sort of successor to the Catholic Committee) until 1818. There was very little practical result of the early Emancipation agitation, which consisted largely in discussing the issue in newspapers and journals. The British government saw no real reason to listen to this group because they could not claim to speak even for the majority of Catholics. O’Connell changed all that.

  THE CATHOLIC ASSOCIATION AND THE CATHOLIC RENT

  Although he had been active in the debates about Catholic Emancipation in Dublin circles, O’Connell had been largely dissatisfied that the issue was not discussed beyond certain urban, middle-class circles. In 1823, he founded the Catholic Association, a new pressure group to agitate for Emancipation. There were two important aspects of the Association that made it different from previous Irish pressure groups. O’Connell realized that getting the Catholic clergy involved in the Association was vital to its success. Previously, Catholic clergy had not been overtly political. But O’Connell realized that their distribution across the country, their standing within local Catholic communities and their captive congregations made them the perfect people to enlist as lieutenants in the agitation for Emancipation. In its early days, the Association agitated on a number of Catholic issues (not just Emancipation), and opposed the Orange Order demonstrations and gatherings that were increasingly evident, mainly in Ulster. The Association gained a good deal of publicity because of this activity. The Catholic Association cost one guinea per year to join, which was too expensive for the vast majority of Catholics. O’Connell wanted to have the Association open to all Catholics, whatever their economic circumstances. In order to do this, but at the same time raise enough money for pay for organizational activities, he set a subscription charge of one penny per month (less than one-twentieth of the full membership cost) to become an associate member. This was low enough for even the poorest to pay. The ‘Catholic Rent’, as it came to be called, raised much more money than getting large subscriptions from a few wealthy donors. Between 1824 and 1829, it raised £52,000. Collecting the Catholic Rent also meant creating a network of local agents, which provided a sophisticated national infrastructure for the Association. Finally, the Catholic Rent had a strong psychological effect on the people who paid it. Paying made people feel they belonged, and that they were part of a larger movement to bring about the reforms they sought. This completely changed the nature of the Catholic Association and O’Connell’s power within Catholic Ireland. Before 1824 and the associate membership scheme, O’Connell was not the obvious leader of Catholic Ireland. He was just one of many prominent Catholics (although he was probably the best known). After the associate membership plan took off, O’Connell became the most important Catholic in Ireland. The Catholic Association and its agitation now also made the Emancipation question paramount in Ireland and the question of the accommodation of Catholics the most important Irish issue in the British parliament.

  There were some indications in the mid-1820s that the British government was willing to grant important concessions to Catholic Ireland. The Orange Order was outlawed in 1825 (so was the Catholic Association, but it was relaunched as the New Catholic Association). Also in 1825, a backbench MP proposed Catholic Emancipation, along with a reduction in the Irish franchise and the state payment of Catholic priests. O’Connell was pleased that the bill passed the House of Commons, but it was defeated in the House of Lords. O’Connell now thought that he had convinced enough members of the Commons that Catholic claims were justified, and that the only thing he needed to do was to force the issue a little more, which, he thought, would overcome the opposition of the House of Lords and the king. This was the immediate prelude to the election of 1826, which was the first time that the Catholic Association had an opportunity to act as a real pressure group.

  Catholics had been given the vote in 1793. This was limited, however, to people who owned or occupied property over a certain value, as it was in the rest of the United Kingdom in this period. In most Irish counties, Catholics formed the majority of electors, but most of them were tenants and many voted along with their landlords’ wishes (which was not uncommon in Britain either). One of the first things that the Catholic Association did was to try to reduce this landlord influence. They convinced Catholic electors to vote for candidates who favoured Catholic Emancipation, even against their landlords’ wishes. In return, the Association promised to give financial support to tenants who were turned out by their landlords for voting against their candidates. The Association’s next priority was to get an electoral organization going. They had priests persuade Catholic voters to support pro-Emancipation candidates, even if they were Protestants. The Association also provided transport so that electors could get to the polls. This was done in groups, often led by the local priest. The Catholic Rent provided all the money for these activities. The result of the 1826 general election was that MPs who had opposed Emancipation were defeated in Counties Louth, Monaghan, Waterford and Westmeath. Pro-Emancipation Protestants were elected in their places. These results were not enough, of course, to overturn the ban on Catholics sitting in parliament, but another opportunity came quickly.

  POLITICAL PRESSURE AND THE GRANTING OF EMANCIPATION

  In 1828, the MP for Clare, Vesey Fitzgerald, was appointed to the British cabinet. In accordance with electoral law, this meant that he had to stand for election again. This was intended to give voters a chance to reaffirm their commitment to their MP who was about to accept higher government office. Vesey Fitzgerald was a relatively popular MP, even amongst Catholics. He was in favour of Catholic Emancipation. The cabinet he was about to join was opposed to Emancipation, however, so the Catholic Association decided to contest his re-election. After failing to get a more strongly pro-Emancipation Protestant interested in fighting the election, the Association decided to have O’Connell himself stand against Fitzgerald. Although O’Connell could not sit in the House of Commons because he was a Catholic, there was no specific law preventing him from becoming a candidate for a parliamentary seat. The Catholic Association put the full weight of its organization and its money behind O’Connell’s bid. On 24 June 1828, he defeated Vesey Fitzgerald 2,057 to 982. O’Connell had won the election, but he could not take his seat.

  Many Catholics in Ireland became very excited by the victory, and began to press more strongly for Emancipation. O’Connell stressed the application of peaceful means only, but there was too much excitement to contain some over-enthusiastic Catholics. After O’Connell’s victory in the Clare election of 1828, a number of new political clubs were formed in Ireland, with the intention of spreading Catholic Emancipation propaganda and support. These ‘Liberal Clubs’ were opposed by new ‘Brunswick Clubs’, designed to foster resistance to Catholic concessions and to promote Protestant interests in Ireland. This raised the possibility that organized and opposing political groups in Ireland would raise the tone of sectarianism in Ireland, and might, indeed, arm themselves as the Volunteers had done in the late eighteenth century. The British government saw this as further reason to grant Catholic Emancipation. The government, under the Prime Minister, the Duke
of Wellington (1769–1852), and the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), had been opposed to Emancipation, but feared that there might be a general rebellion in Ireland. Further, although the government was opposed to Emancipation, there was a slight majority of MPs in the House of Commons in favour of it. So, not only did Wellington and Peel have a potentially hostile Ireland on their hands, if the issue of Emancipation came up in the House of Commons, it might be passed. They decided, therefore, to present their own Catholic Emancipation bill in early 1829. It had taken a few months of behind-the-scenes negotiations to ensure that the bill would pass the Commons and the Lords (where opposition to it was strong), but Wellington and Peel were able to get it through, and it became law on 13 April 1829. Catholics were then allowed to sit in parliament, to hold all military ranks and to hold all but the highest government offices. As a way of reassuring nervous Protestant voters in Ireland that their influence would not be greatly diminished, however, the government also raised the property qualification for voting in Ireland, effectively taking away the vote from many lower-middle-class Catholics. Even with this compromise, Emancipation was received as a great victory for O’Connell in Catholic Ireland. He was hailed as the ‘Liberator’, and he and a number of his followers became members of the House of Commons. He and his Irish party generally co-operated with the Liberals, who were in office after 1830. O’Connell was successful in gaining a number of significant reforms from them in the 1830s (including increasing the number of people who could vote, reforming corrupt municipal government and abolishing the tax that Catholics and Presbyterians had to pay to the Anglican Church of Ireland).

  Emancipation was a clear victory for Catholics, especially since it was partly brought about by a new type of Catholic leadership and Catholic political organization. Just as significant, however, was the fact that the government passed Emancipation partly as a result of Protestant fears of a Catholic uprising, rather than solely on ideas of equal justice. This meant that any idea that Emancipation would reduce sectarianism was unfounded. There is also some evidence that the campaign for Emancipation and the long build-up of Catholic rights and prosperity since the mid-eighteenth century created a stronger idea of a ‘Catholic past’, which would more easily form part of future ideas of an Irish national past based largely on Catholic experience. It is possible, therefore, that O’Connell and his movement raised the political consciousness of Catholics to an extent that Catholicism and Irish nationalism came to be seen as the same thing in later decades. This, of course, had an equally strong reaction from Protestants, particularly Protestant activists, and it is not surprising that the linking of Orangeism with the idea of Union (which Orangemen had originally opposed) may have been in reaction to this rise of Catholic political power.

  REPEAL

  O’Connell’s next goal was to get the Act of Union repealed, and get a new parliament for Ireland. He had been opposed to the Act of Union when he was a rising lawyer in Dublin. O’Connell’s ideas for repeal, and the sort of government Ireland would have after it, were vague. He wanted a parliament with domestic control, but beyond that, he was non-committal. O’Connell spent most of the 1830s trying to get further reforms for Ireland, rather than fighting for repeal. This is not to say that he ignored the repeal question, but that these other questions seemed to be more open to quick solution than did repeal. In fact, O’Connell did a good deal of agitating for repeal in the 1830s and early 1840s, but it was mostly through speeches rather than direct political action. He founded the Repeal Association in 1840, which worked along the same lines as the Catholic Association. It collected a ‘Repeal Rent’ in the same way as the Catholic Rent had been organized. The Repeal Rent gathered even more money than the Catholic Rent had (at its height in May 1843, the Repeal Rent was bringing in £2,000 per week). As with the Emancipation agitation, O’Connell realized early on that gaining the good favour of the Catholic priesthood was essential to securing popular opinion and activism. One of the first things he did was to try to convince priests to join the Repeal movement. But British politics changed in 1841. The Liberals were out of office, and the Conservatives, under Sir Robert Peel, were back in power. Also, the Repeal movement was not a success in eastern and north-eastern Ulster. O’Connell seems to have ignored Ulster opposition to Repeal, where unionism was already very strong. In fact, his trip to Belfast in 1841 was met with hostility from Orangemen and other unionists.

  O’Connell thought that it was a waste of time waiting for the Liberals to return to power and try to get Repeal of the Union from them. He thought that Peel would give way to public pressure over Repeal in the same way that he had over Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Therefore, O’Connell added a new tactic to the Repeal Association – the ‘monster meetings’, huge gatherings many times larger than any held over Catholic Emancipation. Best estimates put them at hundreds of thousands of people at each Repeal meeting. The sites of these monster meetings were often chosen for their historical significance and connections with past Irish military victories or similar romantic settings. The height of the Repeal movement was August 1843, when there was a massive Repeal meeting at Tara. O’Connell did all this because he thought that an overwhelming display of public opinion would make the case for Repeal too strong to resist. He wanted a peaceful revolution, as had happened with Emancipation. But there were big differences between 1829 and 1843, and O’Connell misjudged their significance. The most important of these was that, however much support Repeal had in Ireland, it had almost no support in the British House of Commons. While there had been many MPs opposed to restrictions on Catholics in 1828 and 1829, Liberals and Conservatives in 1843 genuinely thought that the Union brought benefits to all Irish people. Many had thought that the Irish parliament had been corrupt and that both the Catholic majority and the Protestant minority in Ireland were better protected and had better living conditions under the Union. O’Connell simply could not get the same support for Repeal in the House of Commons that he got for Emancipation. In May 1843, Peel told the House of Commons that not only did the government reject the idea of Repeal, it would use all its powers, including that of the military, to maintain the Union. Even so, Peel pushed some Irish reforms through the House of Commons in the early 1840s, including religious and educational reforms, as well as strict coercion laws to try to contain political agitation. In many ways, Peel was motivated by a desire to prevent the Repeal agitation from getting out of control. He thought that a policy of the gradual amelioration of Irish concerns would lessen the appetite for Repeal of the Union. In order to keep a lid on the possibility of militant agitation, and in order to keep the Protestant ascendancy secure, however, he also had to impose some force, which meant that his policy was one of ‘coercion and conciliation’, a policy which would be used by British governments, of both Liberal and Conservative parties, until 1920.

  Even faced with this stern opposition, the Repeal movement continued its agitation, and planned a climactic meeting at Clontarf for 8 October 1843. Clontarf was symbolic because of Brian Boru’s victory over the Vikings there in 1014. The government, however, banned the Clontarf meeting a few hours before it was due to start. O’Connell, who always insisted that political movements should be law-abiding, acceded to the government’s demands and called off the meeting. O’Connell and some of his followers were arrested for conspiracy the next week. They were convicted and imprisoned from May to September 1844. This proved to be a depressing anticlimax to the Repeal movement. Meetings were still held, but they were poorly attended and the momentum was lost. O’Connell was in increasingly poor health after an operation in 1845, and the Repeal movement had faded away by the time he died in May 1847. O’Connell’s failing health mirrored the full horror of the famine as it reached its peak in 1847 (see chapter four). With a barely audible voice, he made a desperate plea in the House of Commons for more government action to halt the starvation. ‘Ireland is in your hands, in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself.�
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  The history of this period is not only the story of O’Connell, reforms for Catholics, and the building of Irish nationalism through the Repeal movement. The history of the political opponents of these movements is also important. These opponents were largely the ascendancy class, and their political manifestation was Irish Toryism (linked to British Conservatism). O’Connell labelled them ‘the Orange Party’, and thought that his work for emancipation would destroy Irish Toryism. In fact, Irish Toryism became very successful, and there were more MPs of this political ideology than Irish nationalists in the British House of Commons by 1860. Rather than destroy Irish Toryism, O’Connell helped it to thrive by showing the value of electoral organization and holding mass meetings to get the attention of the government. The Brunswick Clubs, organized in 1827–28 after the banning of the Orange Order, were very successful, and were instrumental in Irish Tory electoral victories at both the national and municipal level. The man who came to be the leader of Irish Protestantism in this period was the Reverend Henry Cooke (1788–1868). He held mass meetings to counteract what he saw as O’Connell’s broad threat to Protestantism in Ireland, and he tried to ally Irish Protestant groups to the British Conservative party, in the same way that O’Connell had agreed to co-operate with the Liberals after 1835. He also opposed O’Connell’s Repeal campaign and pointed to the economic success of Ulster (and Belfast in particular) as proof that Irish life was better under the Union. All this laid the groundwork for the success of unionism later in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.