The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland

by Blackwell, Amy Hackney

  Pleased with his success, Grattan drafted an Irish declaration of independence in 1780. This measure passed in 1782 and gave Ireland the right to govern itself through its Parliament and judiciary. England still sent a viceroy to Dublin, and Dublin Castle was still answerable to the Crown, but it seemed to be a step forward.

  The French Revolution, which began in 1789, gave more encouragement to Irish patriots; the Ulster Presbyterians were especially excited by the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the declaration of a French Republic. France seemed to be a model of religious tolerance, and the more idealistic Irish Protestant leaders accordingly decided that equality for Catholics would be good, or at least helpful to their cause.

  54 { Wolfe Tone’s Rebellion

  In 1791, a young Protestant named Theobald Wolfe Tone founded the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast. The United Irishmen’s goal was to unite Irish people of all religions, to emancipate Catholics politically, to end the dominance of landlords, and to achieve political independence for Ireland. Wolfe Tone became secretary of the Catholic Association in Dublin, and through his efforts the Catholic population regained a number of the rights they had lost a century earlier. Catholic Relief Acts in 1792 restored the right to education, to practice law, to vote in local and parliamentary elections, and to bear arms. Catholics still couldn’t sit in Parliament.

  England didn’t sit idle while this was going on. It formed a militia of citizens and passed the Convention Act to prevent public assemblies. In 1794 the British government repressed the United Irishmen in Dublin. The result was that the Irish people met in secret, and more of them began to agitate for more extreme reforms.

  Wolfe Tone decided that the key to success was attracting the poor to his movement, and he emphasized the United Irishmen’s commitment to protecting Catholics. Catholics were ready for action, and many joined his cause. But other Protestants weren’t nearly as sure that they wanted to align themselves with Catholics. This tension was especially bad in the north, where Catholics had flocked in the wake of the new free-trade laws. Local Protestants feared Catholic competition in the profitable linen industry, and had been raised to fear Catholic theology as the teachings of the devil. The growing population didn’t help, either, especially because Protestants saw Catholics as producing far more children than they did.

  This tension found an outlet in secret agrarian societies, such as the Whiteboys or the Ribbonmen, which Catholics joined to protest unjust taxes or other points of contention; Protestants had their own groups. In South Ulster, the tension turned into a clear-cut conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Protestants in that area formed an armed group called the Peep O’Day Boys, and the Catholics responded with a group called the Defenders. These groups fought often; their most bloody battle was the 1795 Battle of the Diamond, in which the Protestants trounced the Catholics.

  The victorious Protestants set up an organization called the Orange Order to protect their supremacy; they called themselves Orangemen, and many were government officials and leaders of the established church. The Catholics felt that the government was siding with the Orangemen and failing to protect them from Orange atrocities. This increasingly drove Catholics to side with Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, who were explicitly open to all religions and actively courted Catholic support.

  In the second half of the 1790s, Wolfe Tone planned an armed rebellion against the English. He got to work drumming up military assistance for this enterprise, traveling to America and to France to rouse support for the Irish cause. His first efforts met with little success. In December 1796, he tried to land in Ireland with a group of French soldiers, but bad weather prevented his landing. The British government increased its repression of the United Irishmen; it had a network of spies that kept the authorities in Dublin Castle well informed of Irish movements.

  Things came to a head in 1798. The United Irishmen had planned a huge rebellion in Dublin and had collected more than 20,000 pikes to use against British soldiers. Before they could get started, British troops marched into Dublin. They arrested the leaders of the Dublin United Irishmen and searched houses all over the city, turning up quite a pile of pikes.

  Many Irish decided to go ahead with their rebellion and started small-scale efforts all over the country. They were poorly armed and disorganized without their leaders in Dublin, and the British quickly put them down. Between 30,000 and 50,000 Irish people rebelled, and many of them lost their lives. The French sent a small group of troops to Ireland to help the rebels, but they were quickly captured. Wolfe Tone was among them, dressed as a French officer; the British took him to Dublin and sentenced him to death, but he committed suicide in prison before he could be executed.

  The British Parliament had no intention of letting Ireland rebel further. In 1800 they passed the Act of Union in both British and Irish Parliaments, which created the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” This act dissolved the Irish Parliament and instead created seats for Irishmen in the British Parliament in London. In passing this act, Irish Parliament essentially voted itself out of existence.

  The Act of Union polarized Protestant-Catholic relations by forcing Protestants to align themselves with Britain. It also paved the way for the career of one of the most important patriots in Irish history: Daniel O’Connell, also known as the Liberator.

  55 { Hasta La Vista, Baby: Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator

  O’Connell came from an aristocratic Catholic family in County Kerry. As a boy, he studied briefly at a hedge school, where he learned Gaelic history. He then went to school in France, where he observed the French Revolution firsthand; it’s thought that the bloody events he witnessed there contributed to his avoidance of violence later in his political career. He was one of the first Irish Catholics to practice law after Catholics won back that right in the late 1700s.

  O’Connell was strongly opposed to a union between Ireland and Britain. In 1823, he established the Catholic Association, a political organization whose goal was to force Britain’s Parliament to admit Catholics. The association was open to all Catholics, rich or poor, and quickly became very popular. Even the poorest could afford the symbolic dues of one penny a month. O’Connell was a brilliant orator, and his followers loved his style and his rhetoric, in which he claimed that the poor would soon inherit the Earth. He promised that if the Act of Union were repealed, the Irish would have rent security, unjust rents would be ended, votes would become secret, more people would be allowed to vote, and landlords would be taxed to support the poor.

  At this time, people who leased very small parcels of property (paying as little as £2 a year) were allowed to vote. Votes weren’t secret, and landlords could and did “influence” the votes of their tenants. This meant that landlords had an interest in keeping lots of tenants on their land, because they could then control blocks of votes. The more tenants they had, the more votes they controlled.

  Generally tenants complied with their landlords’ wishes. But in 1826, encouraged by O’Connell, poor Catholics stood up to their landlords and elected to Parliament many legislators sympathetic to the Catholic cause. It was a start.

  56 { Catholic Emancipation

  In 1828, O’Connell himself ran for Parliament as a representative from County Clare and won. This presented a problem for the British because, since the days of Queen Elizabeth I, anyone taking public or church office was required to swear an Oath of Supremacy, which acknowledged the British monarch as the head of church and state. Anyone who refused to take the oath could be charged with treason. Catholics who believed that the pope in Rome was the head of the Church obviously couldn’t swear this oath, so it kept them out of office. But O’Connell called the British bluff; he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, and Parliament capitulated by allowing him into office without it.

  It did this by passing the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829; this act allowed Catholics to enter Parliament and hold other important political offices without t
aking the oath. This accomplishment won O’Connell his famous nickname, the Liberator.

  The Catholic Emancipation Act wasn’t a perfect law; it mainly benefited the richer, middle-class Catholics. It actually made matters worse for the poor because it raised the rent requirement for voting to £10 a year. This disenfranchised most poorer property renters — now only about 1 percent of the Irish population could vote. It also took away any incentive landlords had to keep small tenants on their land and made the thought of using the land for profitable livestock more appealing. Landlords began getting rid of their tenants, which is one of the reasons the Great Famine was so devastating.

  O’Connell’s next goal was to get the Act of Union repealed, mainly so that the Irish Parliament could be reinstated. His poorer Irish compatriots wanted faster action than he could provide working in the British Parliament. They were disappointed that Catholic Emancipation hadn’t been more profitable to them, and they began to take action for themselves.

  O’Connell had kept agrarian secret societies, such as the Ribbonmen, quiet while he worked for emancipation, but now they rose up and again began to commit crimes against landlords. One continuing bone of contention was that Catholics had to pay tithes for the upkeep of Protestant clergy. In the 1830s, many Catholics refused to pay these tithes; this campaign became known as the Tithe War.

  O’Connell kept working with the British Whig government to good effect. Through his efforts, Catholics won the right to be elected to important civic offices, and the Protestant Orange Order was quelled; the Orangemen didn’t regain their strength until the 1880s. Tithes to the Church of Ireland were reduced, and some Poor Laws were passed to help the destitute. Most important for O’Connell, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1840 introduced more democratic local elections; as a result of this reform, O’Connell was elected mayor of Dublin.

  These reforms were nice, but they didn’t get to the root of Ireland’s concerns — its continuing domination by the United Kingdom. In 1840, O’Connell founded the National Repeal Association, supported by the Catholic clergy and the Irish people. He declared 1843 “Repeal Year,” and held “monster meetings” — huge and raucous gatherings — throughout Ireland to show the British government that he had ample support.

  O’Connell’s movement was undone by his insistence on nonviolence. The night before his last scheduled monster meeting, which was to have been held on the site of Brian Boru’s famous victory at Clontarf, the British government made the gathering illegal, and O’Connell acquiesced rather than allow fighting to erupt.

  That was the end of his great influence in Irish politics. His followers had seen him as a messiah, but now they felt that he had surrendered to the British. Many of them also disagreed with his insistence that Ireland was first and foremost a Catholic nation, arguing that politics should come before religion. These young men founded a new group, the Young Irelanders, which was to play an important political role in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Over a century and a half, from 1692 to 1840, Ireland lived through a time of unprecedented peace. There were no major wars, urban culture flourished, and high agricultural productivity led to a population boom. The positive aspects of the Protestant Ascendancy, however, could not cover up the fact that it was a society based on inequality and oppression. Resentment at this injustice flared up in the forms of Wolfe Tone’s rebellion and O’Connell’s independence movement. But true freedom was not to come about until after Ireland had endured its greatest tragedy — the Great Famine.

  Part 3

  Preserving Irish Culture and History

  There can be no discussion of Ireland’s history and culture without considering the role of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church has been integrated in Irish society for 1,600 years, and the word “Irish” has become almost synonymous with “Catholic.” The Church has guided Irish nationalism and influenced the world’s opinions of the Irish people, and it’s still a major force in Ireland today.

  57 { Before the Reformation

  In the Middle Ages (c. 500–c. 1500 C.E.), just about everyone in Ireland was Catholic, as was nearly everyone in England, Scotland, and Wales. At this time, almost all Western European Christians were Roman Catholic, led by the pope in Rome. Catholic churches were everywhere, in every town. Most people were baptized after birth, attended Mass, married in a church, and were buried in church cemeteries.

  Saints were a very real presence, and believers prayed to them for help with their problems. Each saint had a different specialty; for example, someone with bad eyes would pray to St. Lucy, musicians would pray to St. Cecilia, and someone with a lost cause would pray to St. Jude for whatever help he could offer. The bones and physical possessions of saints supposedly could work miracles, and believers would travel to the places where these things were enshrined.

  The liturgical calendar governed the course of the year. Each day was either an ordinary day or part of a ritual season like Lent or Advent. Every day had its own saint, which created a sort of family called the communion of saints. The liturgy was formulaic and ritualized and made it perfectly clear how a believer should worship.

  On a local level, the Church was organized into geographical divisions called parishes, led by priests. Bishops oversaw larger territories that might encompass several parishes. A bishop had his seat in a cathedral. Each parish priest oversaw the spiritual life of the people in his area, called parishioners.

  Priests said Mass (in Latin, which most people didn’t understand) and provided sacraments:

  Baptism — accepting a new member into the Church

  Penance — confessing sins to the priest, repenting, and being absolved

  Eucharist — the ceremonial re-enactment of the Last Supper

  Matrimony — the union of a man and a woman in marriage

  Extreme Unction — anointing of the sick and dying

  Priests also ran schools, mediated quarrels, and helped the poor. In return, parishioners supported their priests with money and goods.

  The Irish Church was run locally rather than externally, which made for lots of regional variation in practices. Outsiders tended to find Irish Catholicism both archaic and lax. Priests were respected, but they didn’t control social structure; authority remained in the hands of chieftains and lords. The Irish mingled their Christianity with folk beliefs in fairies and changelings. Though the Catholic Church had decided in the eleventh century that its priests should be celibate, Irish priests continued to marry and have children. Divorce was allowed, and marriage between close relatives wasn’t discouraged.

  But however “unorthodox” their practices, the vast majority of Irish people were Catholic and knew it. They did not take it kindly when the English decided that they should change.

  58 { Ireland’s Counter-Reformation

  Henry VIII’s interest in Ireland (and in England) was primarily political, not theological, but subsequent monarchs became much more interested in what people believed. Queen Elizabeth I began a concerted effort to transform Ireland into a Protestant land. During her reign, Irish people were required to attend Anglican churches and use the Protestant Common Book of Prayer. Preaching in the Irish language was outlawed. A number of extreme Protestants called Puritans moved to Ireland. In the early seventeenth century, King James I sent many Protestant clergymen to Ireland and banished Catholic priests; he fined people who refused to attend Protestant worship services and banned Catholic school teachers. Priests were persecuted violently — some of them were drawn and quartered. But the Irish proved resistant to conversion. They refused to attend Protestant services and persisted in hearing Mass out in open fields.

  When the Protestant Reformation began to gather steam, the Catholic Church set about creating its own institutional reforms, in an effort to revitalize itself and keep its members. The Council of Trent (1545–63) modernized the Church in Europe, but Ireland was slow to implement these modernizations.

  The Pope watched the Reformation i
n England with great interest. He didn’t want to lose Ireland, too. In 1606, the pope congratulated the Irish for sticking to their religion, and the Church leaders in Ireland decided it was time to modernize their parishioners.

  The pope sent the Jesuits, a new group of Catholic missionary priests, to take on this project; the Jesuits found Irish Catholicism very strange. Not only was it full of odd Celtic rituals, the Irish Church itself was divided into an old Gaelic form, which rejected interference from Rome, and a (newer) Old English form, which embraced Roman doctrine.

  The Jesuits worked on getting Irish priests to stop drinking and marrying, and encouraged the Catholic people to avoid Protestants. Although the Irish resisted change and persisted in holding their traditional wakes and casual marriages, the Catholic Church in Ireland did increase its presence and modernize some practices. The traditional Irish flexibility and adaptability proved useful in the survival of the institution.

  In 1600, Ulster was a stronghold of rebel Catholicism, led by the prominent O’Neill family. Beginning in 1606, Scots were allowed to settle in Ulster as part of the Ulster Plantation plan. These settlers were predominantly Presbyterians who feared Catholics.

  The English government encouraged this settlement because it helped them control Ireland economically and socially, as the settlers imposed “civilized” values on the Irish “barbarians.” As English settlers continued to arrive in Ireland, they took much of the best farmland for themselves. As a result, most Irish farmers and herdsmen saw their status continually diminished and deeply resented the occupiers.