To mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, the liberator, Eoghan Harris was invited to give an address on O’Connell and his legacy at Listowel Writer’s week. His lecture – “O’Connell at Clontarf” – is published here, with permission. Very minor edits have been made for readability.
Daniel O’Connell was the greatest Irishman who ever lived, but his reputation was forever clouded by propaganda against the rational decision he made in the early hours of October 8th, 1843, as tens of thousands of people, possibly over a quarter of a million, prepared to set out by foot, cart and trap for Clontarf outside Dublin.
They had been due to hear him speak at his latest massive rally for repeal of the union- one of the monster meetings which had been so successful 14 years before in securing Caholic Emancipation.
Back in 1829 the then Home Secretary Robert Peel had been forced to back down on Catholic Emancipation, but now 14 years later, as British Prime minister, he had a score to settle with O’Connell. He mobilised some 3000 troops and sent two gunships, the Rhathemus and the Dee, to take up positions in Dublin Harbour and proclaimed, that is banned, the meeting.
Daniel O’Connell, a long time antagonist of Peel, and a close reader of his character knew that Peel was not bluffing, and meant to use deadly force. Given the densely packed crowds it would be a slaughter.
O’Connell did not waste a second. He cancelled the meeting and sent Repeal activists on horseback to the roads leading into the city to send back the thousands converging on Clontarf.
At first the Young Irelanders, the left wing of the Repeal Association, under the influence of that noble southern Protestant patriot, Thomas Davis, editor of The Nation, accepted that O’Connell had no choice, and acted out of necessity. But soon the leftwing faction led by John Mitchel blamed O’Connell for capitulating to the threat of force and broke with him the following year.
The Young Irelander’s animosity, via John Mitchel, was passed onto, and distorted, the minds of later generations of physical force republicans, obscuring the stellar reputation of O’Connell, and depicting him as verbose, windy politician who backed down when faced with British force – an image that has only faded in the past few years.
This distortion of O’Connell’s position as our greatest patriotic leader was a terrible tragedy. Had his credo of peaceful agitation been followed, rather than the doctrines of physical force republicanism, we would in my view have been spared much misery over the past 100 years.
Lest you think I am alone in believing that O’Connell’s status was deliberately denigrated, let me quote Paul Gallagher SC, who recently had the task of arguing before a jury on the (alleged – editor) role of Gerry Adams as leader of the Provisional IRA campaign. In the course of a brilliant essay in the Irish Judicial Review, he describes the cloud that both physical force republicans and Christian Brothers history teaching cast over O’Connell as follows:
“Daniel O’Connell was a truly remarkable man. I remember in national school in the 1960s we regarded Daniel O’Connell as a failure – a failure because he did not succeed in achieving Repeal. Underlying this perspective“ was the sense, sometimes, unspoken, that he was a failure, because he refused to resort to violence to achieve his aims and because he cancelled the Great Clontarf Repeal meeting, in October 1843, following its proscription by the British Government, rather than stand up to the threat of British violence. An Irish History Reader by the Christian Brothers which was popular in the 20thcentury criticised O’Connell for thinking that Britain’s hold over Ireland could be damaged by cheers and speeches.”
Paul Gallagher’s account of the cloud over O’Connell was certainly true of his image in republican circles when I was growing up. There was a general feeling that O’Connell funked Clontarf, that he was all talk and given to cowardly aphorisms such as the one that “Irish freedom was not worth the shedding of a drop of blood.”
The problem was that, like most Irish people, I knew just enough of O’Connell not to really know him. The playwright Berthold Brecht, confronted with the problem of us being so familiar with something that we can no longer see it clearly, came up with the technique he called “making strange”. This meant giving his audience a theatrical shock to make them see something familiar as if it was strange again.
My small Brechtian shock came in 1966 when I saw the famous photo of Charles De Gaulle walking the beach at Derrynane. Like most Irish people I had read Sean O Faolain’s King of the Beggars and admired O’Connell in a distant but not warm way. Like most republicans I saw him as a leader who had roused the passive masses crushed by Penal Laws into agitating for Catholic Emancipation, but had failed in his campaign for Repeal and backed down before the threat of British force, leaving Irish history to be redeemed by the men of 1916.
But the visit of De Gaulle, the war-time leader of the Free French, gave me a wake up call when I read he had wanted to visit the home of O’Connell since he was a young child. Clearly De Gaulle, saw O’Connell, who had been educated in France, as a great European progressive figure.
From then on as I studied O’Connell more closely I. began to realise what an extraordinary complex genius he was. As a former tutor in history, I am fond of basic biographical dates, and a few may help you put him in a wider context as they did me.
1775. Daniel O’Connell is born in Kerry into the remnants of the Catholic Gaelic aristocracy
1786. He is sent to good school in Cork and then to an academy in France for French polishing.
1789. O’Connell finishing his education in France finds himself in a country torn apart by the French Revolution.
1792. King Louis XVI is beheaded. Young O’Connell, on board ship at Calais, heading home meets the Cork Protestant Sheares brothers- meeting which leaves an indelible mark on him as we shall see.
1794. O’Connell is studying for the bar in London where he becomes a Freemason and briefly loses his faith, under the influence of William Godwin’s radical tracts. He also reads the works of Godwin’ Mary Wollenscraft, Godwin’s lover and later wife, the author of the feminist classic A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Wollenscraft was also mother to Mary Wollenscraft-Shelley, author of the somewhat more popular novel Frankenstein.
1796. Wolfe Tone and French fleet are in Bantry Bay. O’Connell with the horrors of the French Revolution fresh in his mind, condemns the potential invasion.
1798. Two years later, for the same reasons as we shall see, he condemns the Wexford Rising
1800. The Act of Union.
1810. O’Connell as a young Catholic barrister, makes his first major speech- against the Act of Union.
From then on O’Connell becomes the most famous barrister in Ireland
1829. O’Connell’s peaceful mass agitation culminates in Catholic Emancipation.
1840. O’Connell starts his second great campaign, this time for Repeal of the Union, supported by the Young Ireland movement.
1843. O’Connell calls off the mass meeting at Clontarf.
1843. O’Connell continues his international campaign for the abolition of slavery.
1847. Dies at Geneva.
During my deeper reading, I began looking at O’Connell not just through Irish eyes, but through foreign eyes. I saw why Europe progressives admired him as a colossus, a pioneer of a new kind of mass democratic politics, a liberal fighter who enjoyed the same international status in his day as a Nelson Mandela.
O’Connell had such stature in Europe that in 1830 when the Belgian parliamentarians voted on their new King, three of them voted for O’Connell! Honoré de Balzac included him among a list of four men, (including Napoleon) of immense influence.
Captain Nemo in Jules Vernes 20,000 Leagues under the Sea had a portrait of O’Connell hanging in his cabin.
Gladstone said of him: “the greatest popular leader the world had ever seen…who never for a moment changed his end and never hesitated to change his means”.
O’Connell’s stellar international reputation was forged by two things. First, his original techniques of peaceful mass agitation, pioneered during his successful campaign for Catholic Emancipation, and the immense self discipline he imbued in his mass army of the Catholic poor emerging from the last shadows of the Penal Laws.
Second, O’Connell became famous as the most outspoken critic of slavery in the world and his campaign against it ultimately led to the abolition of slavery by Britain and the Royal Navy’s noble campaign to put down slavery on the high seas.
Although O’Connell’s stance on slavery damaged support for Repeal in the United States, he remained relentless in his hatred of it, which won him the admiration of the great black abolitionist Frederic Douglass who recounts an anecdote which I enjoy greatly because of my regular problems with people I call bellyrubbers, fence sitters who want to “discuss” rather than condemn the Provisional IRA campaign.
Douglass recalled that a gentleman from America had been introduced to the Liberator and was about to offer his hand when O’Connell stopped him.
“Pardon me, sir, but I make it a rule never to give my hand to an American without asking if he is a slaveholder?”
The American gentleman attempted to placate O’Connell by saying “No Mr O’Connell I am not a slaveholder but I am willing to discuss the question of slavery with you”.
“Pardon me again” said O’Connell. “Discuss it with me? Should a gentleman come into my study and propose to discuss with me the rightfulness of picking pockets I would show him the door lest he be tempted to put his theory into practice”
But long before he became famous as the foremost foe of slavery Daniel O’Connell’s mass meeting to secure Catholic emancipation aroused awe and admiration in Europe.
Like most Irish people I thought I was familiar with what O’Connell had done just because I could say “monster meeting” But as I studied his campaign more closely I began to feel the same awe and admiration as I began to ask basic questions for the first time.
Who controlled these huge disciplined columns of marchers, sometimes hundreds of thousands strong ? How were stampedes prevented ? How did these mostly shoeless masses deal with such long marches and meetings? How did they eat, drink and defecate?
Studying the granular detail of these mass meetings I began to grasp O’Connell’s genius and why he was the envy of progressive liberals across Europe faced with autocratic regimes.
O’Connell was a master organizer. Every monster meeting was managed by local Catholic Association branches, who collected the penny a week from members and arranged food, shelter, transport and primitive latrines, for the mass meetings.
Above all the Catholic Association provided the Marshals who were crucial to the control and discipline of the marching crowds and massive meetings.
These marshals, armed with nothing more than slim staves, which they blandly called wands- although it is likely from time to time they used thicker blackthorns on trouble makers.
The Marshals policed these vast gatherings, the flick of their wands obeyed without question, and organised the bands and banners of the great marching columns, expelling agent provocateurs and drunkards.
Temperance was crucial to these massive meetings. Alcohol had always been the enemy of every successful agitation in the past. As a Tipperary priest angrily told his delinquent flock: “Twas drink that destroyed ye. Twas drink that made ye shoot at landlords. Twas drink that made ye miss! “
The battle to banish drunkenness from these monster meetings was helped immensely by the temperance campaign of Fr Matthew, another of my great heroes. Fr Matthew (Father Theobald Matthew, known popularly as “Father Matthew” – ed) was the priest who stood outside the flour mills of James Murphy, the Catholic chairman of the Cork Committee of Merchants and one of the biggest exporters of grain during the Famine, castigating him, as a “capitalist of the corn trade”
These monster meetings , impeccably controlled by a mixture of organisation and self discipline created a proud national consciousness among Irish Catholics that was the admiration of Europe and led directly to the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829.
Here I want to pay tribute to the major role of the then Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington in helping O’Connell to secure Catholic Emancipation. With Wellington’s support, his Home Secretary, Robert Peel drafted the Catholic Relief Bill and guided it through Commons. But they faced hysterical anti- Catholic opposition from King George IV and the House of Lords.
Wellington as Prime Minister and leader of the Tories, took a huge risk and told The King he would resign unless the relief act went through- which would mean the defeat of the Tories and the Whigs taking over.
At first the bigoted King George bluffed and accepted Wellington’s resignation – but on reflection he realised he hated the Whigs more that he hated Roman Catholics. He reluctantly recalled Wellington. The Relief bill passed the Lords and became law.
To the wonder of European progressives, O’Connell had secured a massive victory for parliamentary reform, without a shot being fired. Honesty however compels me to add that I doubt the Russians or Prussians would have allowed these mass demonstrations without treating the crowds to a whiff of grapeshot.
It is to the great credit of British Parliamentary democracy that O’Connell had no fear that Wellington would shoot down Irish Catholics in cold blood on the issue of Catholic Emancipation- but Repeal of the Union was another thing entirely.
However it was Repeal not Catholic Emancipation that had always been closest to O’Connell’s heart. He never deviated from the speech he made as a young barrister as far back as 1810 to an aggregate meeting to the largely Protestant Dublin Corporation – a speech in which he first shocked and then won the applause of many of his Protestant and Orange, audience by telling them he would sacrifice Catholic Emancipation for Repeal of the Union. That part of his speech is so powerful that it deserves quoting and I hope I have the breath to do it justice. O’Connell said:
“The Protestant alone could not hope to liberate his country- the Roman Catholic alone could not do it- neither could the Presbyterian- but amalgamate the three into the Irishman and the Union is repealed. Whatever course you take my mind is fixed- I trample under foot the Catholic claims, if they can interfere with the Repeal: I abandon all wish for Emancipation if it interferes with that Repeal. Let us then, my beloved countrymen, sacrifice our wicked and groundless animosities on the altar of our country.”
This sums up the genius of O’Connell- a man willing to say he would trample on Catholic claims if it meant the unity of Protestant and Catholic against the Union. What a pity in our dealing with Unionists that we never followed his example and offered to trample on some of our Catholic nationalist shibboleths so as to make space for Northern Protestants in a future united Ireland.
At first sight O’Connell’s 1843 Repeal campaign looked as powerful as the Catholic Emancipation campaign of twenty years earlier. Certainly the monster meetings showed the same discipline and confidence.
At the huge monster meeting in Mullaghmast, attended by tens of thousands, O’Connell called out if there were any teetotallers in the crowd. Cries of “Yes!” went up.
He told them he could not have risked mass meetings without teetotalers for his police. “We are all your police” they called back. To which he replied: “To be sure -and soon you will be the only police by the help of God.”
But that kind of provocative rhetoric was a bridge too far for the British Prime Minster, Robert Peel, an old foe of O’Connell’s. Back in 1829 , driven by Wellington, Robert Peel as Home Secretary had given in on Catholic Emancipation. But Repeal of the Union was a far more fundamental matter that affected the entire united kingdom. Peel made up his mind to stop the Repeal monster meetings for good by deploying deadly force. Then he. banned the meeting at Clontarf. O’Connell did not hesitate for a second- he knew that it was surrender or slaughter.
O’Connell’s rejection of violence is wrongly ascribed to him killing a man in a duel. He had turned against political violence long before that duel. His rejection was deeply rooted in his two direct experiences of mob rule during the French Revolution and the Wexford rebellion.
O’Connell, like Shakespeare, had a deep rooted fear, which I share, of mobs of all sorts. My own loathing of mobs goes back to my first days in national school in Tallow at the age of six when I saw a mob of chanting boys carrying a small fat boy, his white thighs exposed in short pants, tormenting him with bunches of nettles wrapped in newspaper, that brought up blisters on his thighs. When I ran to two teachers smoking at the gate to draw their attention to it, they gave me a belt in the head and told me mind my own business. But I’ve never minded my own business in dealing with mobs, then or now. The cruelty of the mob of boys deeply influenced my later loathing of mobs of the sort that murdered the two signals corporals in Belfast.
The problem with revolutionary violence either by or on behalf of a mob is that there is no redress from a mob. Confronted by a choice to support the state or a terrorist group I will however reluctantly support the state. My reason is simple. If your husband is murdered by the state you have a target for redress. You can sue the state. You can’t sue the Provisional IRA.
Some of you who wince my use of the word ‘mob’ should remember that Shakespeare shared O’Connell’s fears. Every history play of his is about the danger of disorder.
Shakespeare clearly prefers a flawed monarch to a mob whose aims, like Jack Cade’s, might be noble at the start, but which inevitably end a regime more repressive than the one they replaced.
I know many of you retain romantic notions of the French Revolution, summed up in Wordsworth’s line “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven”, lines he later regretted. Let me put a pebble in your romantic shoe by talking about Mary Wollenscrafts shoes.
Like Wordsworth, Mary loved her first trip to Paris and the fervour of early days of the Revolution. She saw Louis beheaded without a bother but did remark he died bravely. A few months later Mary returned for a second visit to Paris and bought new shoes for the trip. She was walking towards the Place de Revolution when she noticed her nice new shoes were clogged with black mud- and realised that it was not mud but congealing blood running down the gutters. When she showed shock, a passerby whispered to put on joy on her face or she herself might feel the blade.
O’Connell had a similar experience. A few days after Louis Sixteenth was beheaded he and his brother travelled home across France carefully carrying two cockades, each to be displayed depending on the politics of the area they were passing through- one white to show their loyalty to the Bourbons, the other red and blue for the Revolution.
This did not stop mobs hammering on their coach’s sides- until they reached Calais and took ship for home. On board ship, Connell met the Sheares Brothers, John and Henry, two Cork Protestants, sons of a wealthy Cork merchant prince, two noble souls, radicalised by the French revolution.
The Sheares boys cheerfully waved a black handkerchief in O’Connell’s face – black with the congealed blood of blood of Louis the Sixteenth, which they boasted they had secured by bribing guards around the guillotine to dip the handkerchief in the king’s blood.
O’Connell was sickened. He said he came back from France “ half a Tory”, The Provisional IRA campaign produced the same conservative effect on most empathic Irish people.
On July 14, 1798, both the Sheares brothers, who had become involved with the United Irishmen, were hanged in Dublin.
Noble as they were, O’Connell never shared their romantic illusions about the French Revolution or the ideas of that Revolution.
In 1796 as the French invasion force tossed in the storms off Bantry, O’Connell predicted what the Catholic masses would do with French guns in their hands and I quote: “Freedom would soon dwindle into licentiousness. They would rob, they would murder”.
O’Connell called it right. Two years later in 1798 during the Wexford Rebellion, the Catholic mob did murdered Protestants at Scullabogue barn – just as the North Cork militia, basically an Orange mob, murdered and raped in retaliation.
Recoiling from the sectarian spectres of Wexford, O’Connell wrote: “O Liberty what horrors are perpetrated in your name. May every virtuous revolutionist remember the horrors of Wexford.”
The serial shocks caused by the spinoffs of the French Revolution in Ireland led directly to O’Connell’s most famous aphorism: “that Irish freedom is not worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood”
My point is that O’Connell’s deep aversion to violence had nothing to do with the duel in which he killed D’Esterre and everything to do with his direct experience of the French Revolution and the ideology which inspired it.
O’Connell cared nothing for abstract political solutions. This which put him at odds with the Young Irelanders the left wing of the Repeal movement, who shared the Sheares’ brothers ideological passion for perfect political solutions- if necessary by violence.
Their passion for perfecting society by revolutionary means goes back to Plato’s blueprint for utopia in his book the Republic. Plato believed man was good and could create a perfect society. From Plato flow all the schemes for perfecting man, from the French Revolution to Communism to Fascism, right down to the politically correct extremism that protects students from ideas that might challenge their prejudices.
Conversely, Aristotle, who disputed Plato’s philosophy, believes man is not born good but is fundamentally and permanently flawed and that logically any attempt to created a perfect society, will also be flawed. Or in the words of the philosopher Kant: “out of the crooked timbre of humanity no straight plank can be cut”
I believe these two different ways of looking at life he Platonic or the Aristotelian go deeper than nature or nurture, race or religion and divide everybody in this audience.
By and large I believe we are born Platonists or Aristotelians, born revolutionaries or reformers, born radicals or conservatives, born to think we can perfect man by perfecting society or born to believe reforms will always be limited by original sin. As I do. Very much so.
Any politician who does not know there is no perfect solution to some problems – Palestine or Irish unity are two – or any politician who repeats slogans that show a slender grasp on reality, or above all, any politician who does not respect the iron law of necessity, can correctly be described as a Platonist or in my term, a Trot.
Trot is not a casual term of abuse on my part. It’s based on Lenin sending Trotsky to Brest Litovsk in 1918 to give up Russian land to the Germans in return for peace. Trotsky who hated looking bad funked it and came back to get cheap applause from cheering Bolshevik’s in St Petersburg with the idiotic slogan “I bring you neither peace nor war” Lenin sent him back to do it properly ie to respect the necessity of hard choices.
O’Connell knew that the one necessity that had to be respected in 1843 is that a divided Ireland could not free itself from the powerful British Empire by force. The Young Irelanders at first, under the influence of Davis, respected that necessity by supporting O’Connell’s prudent retreat at Clontarf.
But Davis died and soon the Platonists and Trots emerged led by that ideological psychotic, the Derry born John Mitchel, son of a non- subscribing Northern Presbyterian.
Despite his conversion to a violent nationalism, Mitchel still relished Biblical rhetoric flourishes as in his bombastic line: “If I could grasp the flames of hell in my hands I would hurl them in the face of my countries enemies.”
Mitchel, my least favourite republican, the man who drove his disciple Patrick Pearse to indulge in the same bloody rhetoric of physical force republicanism was equally fanatical about other issues. A follower of Carlyle, he was fanatically against Jews and later an equally fanatical defender of the slavery he and his sons practised in the Deep South of America.
Mitchel was willing to strike the chains from the wrists of white Irish nationalists in Tipperary but not from the wrists of black slaves in Tennessee. Compare his hypocrisy with O’Connell’s life-long hard line against slavery.
O’Connell’s decision to call off the Clontarf meeting took tremendous moral courage. But his republican critics both then and later used it to portray him as a soft character without the bottle for battle with the British.
There was nothing new in this charge. O’Connell’s harsh uncle Hunting Cap (Maurice “Hunting Cap” O’Connell – ed) – a thuggish gombeen in my view- criticised what he called in his nephew, and I quote “the softness and facility of his disposition”.
This alleged softness was hard to pin down but O’Connell’s later critics promoted it. I recall a republican academic years ago somewhat slyly referring to O’Connell’s” ductility” of character.
Ductility in normal discourse means malleability, and implies the person is persuadable and easily influenced. But when I looked up the word ductility for this talk I found its real source. Ductility refers to hard metals which can be bent and hammered into various shapes. But it misses the point that they still remain hard metals. O’Connell’s ductility, which I call decency- marked out our greatest politicians in their pluralist approach to Northern unionists.
Jack Lynch’s apparent ductility deceived loutish colleagues like Blaney and Boland, just as it deceived critics of Garret Fitzgerald, John Bruton, Bertie Ahern and Micheal Martin who insisted on civility to Northern unionists and refuse to treat them, as the Provos do, as an alien race to be bullied and coerced.
I believe if O’Connell’s credo of non violence had been followed, rather than the physical force tradition which led inexorably to the Provisional IRA campaign, we would have been spared much misery.
Happily, in spite of some verbal republican political rhetoric, in practice the political leadership of the Republic has continued to follow O’Connell’s relentless opposition to physical force republicanism, a rejection which has hardened in recent years in response to southern voters rejection of apologists for the Provisional IRA.
I began this talk with a quote from the brilliant long essay on O’Connell and the Law by Paul Gallagher SC in the Irish Judicial Review. Likewise I am going to give him the last word.
“O’Connell worked within the law, and gave hope to a downtrodden and helpless people. He was a champion for those who never had a champion. He was a voice for those who never had a voice.
“He gave self-respect to those who enjoyed no respect. He taught the People to disown servility and to develop the courage to oppose. In a real sense all the Catholic population of Ireland were his clients.
It was this universal appeal and instinctive connection to his own countrymen while always working within the law, which made him such a unique force in Irish history. He left a legacy of opposition to injustice, the benefit of which extended beyond these shores. He did not consider his people expendable in the cause of some great ideology or cause. He always remembered they were his cause.”