This year marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, which is why I was delighted on Sunday to publish Eoghan Harris’s lecture – “O’Connell at Clontarf” – delivered to the Listowel Writer’s Week festival recently.
I was struck by some of the reaction to that piece, and the negative tone of it towards O’Connell. Some of the criticism was fair. For example, Gerard Hanney noted that:
“Daniel O’Connell may have damaged the Irish language. In his day Irish speakers formed the vast majority of the population. But, O’Connell spoke in English at his meetings despite being fluent in Irish.
At his monster meetings the ordinary people mostly conversed amongst themselves in Irish. But, the Liberator spoke to them in a language they little understood.”
Others echoed that sentiment. Indeed it is notable that O’Connell’s greatest political achievement – Catholic Emancipation – happened in concert with the rapid decline of Irish as a spoken language. I am not here to argue that this was a good or a bad thing (I’ll leave that to Niamh) but I am not entirely sure the cause and effect are direct, but rather indirect. For example, one of the main effects of emancipation was to open up the Empire’s civil service to Irish catholics, meaning that middle class Catholics suddenly had the chance to enter the British civil service, law, and judiciary – meaning in turn that being a native English speaker suddenly had more worth from a career perspective than being a monolingual Irish speaker. Catholic emancipation also came with a state backed programme of education for Catholics, also conducted through English. Whether this was conscious repression of the language (as Niamh would argue) or thoughtless neglect formed of the language having no relevance to those who governed, we cannot truly know. O’Connell certainly was no advocate of the language, though as Gerard notes, he spoke it fluently.
Others were more scathing about O’Connell, and less reasonable. I say less reasonable rather than less accurate, because those who describe O’Connell as some kind of early form of “west brit” are not without a point.
O’Connell was, in fact, the intellectual father of the modern “west brit”. Speaking at his most famous “monster repeal meeting”, at Mullaghmast, O’Connell defended Queen Victoria and pledged his loyalty to her, reserving his criticisms of the British state to those – principally the Duke of Wellington – who had “put words in her mouth”:
Yes, the glory he (Wellington) got (at Waterloo, versus Napoleon) was bought by the blood of the English, Irish, and Scotch soldiers—the glory was yours. He is nominally a member of the administration, but yet they would not intrust him with any kind of office. He has no duty at all to perform, but a sort of Irish antirepeal warden. I thought I never would be obliged to the ministry, but I am obliged to them. They put a speech abusing the Irish into the queen’s mouth. They accused us of disaffection, but they lied; it is their speech; there is no disaffection in Ireland. We were loyal to the sovereigns of Great Britain, even when they were our enemies; we were loyal to George III., even when he betrayed us; we were loyal to George IV. when he blubbered and cried when we forced him to emancipate us; we were loyal to old Billy (William IV), though his minister put into his mouth a base, bloody, and intolerant speech against Ireland; and we are loyal to the queen, no matter what our enemies may say to the contrary. It is not the queen’s speech, and I pronounce it to be a lie.
We will never know, of course, whether those were O’Connell’s true feelings, or whether he was simply staking out a position of loyalty to the Crown so that he could not personally be accused by his enemies in London of treason or insurrectionist fervour. Perhaps he was making clear, for political reasons, that he was part of the “loyal” opposition. Perhaps he was sincere.
There is no point speculating, other than to note that either is a possibility. We do know that he wanted the Act of Union shattered, and for Ireland to be a separate Kingdom with its own parliament, in a personal Union (that is, sharing the same sovereign Monarch) with England, Scotland, and Wales. In later years this position came to be modified and watered down a little, and known as Home Rule, which would have given Ireland a parliament on a par with that the Scots have today. Within the Union, but self-governing, in some respects. We would consider that an appalling vista were it offered to us today. It would I think have horrified O’Connell as well, who wanted this country to be a separate Kingdom.
In his lecture, Eoghan adopts what his enemies might call the mainstream “west brit” view of Irish history. In fact, few sentences sum up that view – with which I am broadly sympathetic – better than the one he wrote:
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.
The problem with this of course is that it is redundant and moot. O’Connell’s credo of non-violence was not followed. It is an imagined alternate history, of which we cannot be certain. And, as any Irish nationalist of either tradition must note if they are being honest, the British really only have themselves to blame for that. Indeed, as Eoghan’s lecture notes, it was that most peaceful of men – O’Connell himself – who was compelled to cancel his monster meeting in Clontarf under the explicit threat of British State violence against a peaceful gathering. Over the following century and a half, that threat was turned into reality with not one but two Bloody Sundays, and a host of other brutal acts of repression that cannot be excised from the record. The soldiers who committed those atrocities wore the crown on their uniforms.
This, I fear, is where I must gently depart from Eoghan’s analysis. With many of us who take his view of history broadly, there is a temptation sometimes to blame the Irish for the actions of the British state. Clontarf was scheduled to be non-violent – and there is no evidence it would have been anything other. It was the British state who erred there, and who ultimately stoked the arguments of O’Connell’s enemies in what became the physical-force tradition of Irish republicanism. What followed was not inevitable, but probably became so after the famine, which was another monstrous example of British neglect and mismanagement in Ireland, to put it kindly.
What separates the West Brit from the true Nationalist? As (allegedly) one of the former, I would argue that it is a broad regretting of the severance of the shared heritage and history between the two islands. This is often presented – falsely – as a desire that a political separation would never have happened. The true nationalist, by contrast, is unapologetic and proud of the various conflicts that ultimately brought the separation about and regards the British to this day as the oldest and foremost enemy of Irishness. In short, one regrets the conflict, the other exults in it. As such, living alongside people who exult in a conflict he opposes, the West Brit tends to disproportionately and wrongly blame the nationalist for the various wars.
And this is where the “west brit” view becomes problematic. It is when it begins to excuse the British for their role in the violence that birthed this state, and tosses all the blame for it at the doors of the Irish rebels. The rebels committed their fair share of atrocities and crimes and shouldn’t be allowed forget it, but equally it should never be forgotten that it was British callousness and indifference to Ireland that brought the rebellion about in the first place.
In his Mullaghmast speech, O’Connell was almost triumphant in his certainty that the Union was on its last legs. He told the crowd that day:
“I will not risk the safety of one of you. I could not afford the loss of one of you—I will protect you all, and it is better for you all to be merry and alive, to enjoy the repeal of the Union; but there is not a man of you there that would not, if we were attacked unjustly and illegally, be ready to stand in the open field by my side. Let every man that concurs in that sentiment lift up his hand.
The assertion of that sentiment is our sure protection; for no person will attack us, and we will attack nobody. Indeed, it would be the height of absurdity for us to think of making any attack; for there is not one man in his senses, in Europe or America, that does not admit that the repeal of the Union is now inevitable.”
As I write this now, 225 years after the enactment of the Union, and 182 years after O’Connell spoke those words, the Act of Union remains in force on part of this island. O’Connell’s certainty about its inevitable ending was misplaced. The British had made their minds up – even an overwhelming democratic mandate would not have ended the Union. In 1918, Sinn Fein did not get an overwhelming majority of the vote (just 48% island-wide) but even if they had won 60%, it would not have mattered. That is what made war inevitable, if regrettable.
It is interesting, certainly, to imagine how the history of this island might have looked had the British decided to repeal the Union in 1843 – as O’Connell thought they would – and given Ireland back its own parliament. But the British did not do that. They did not do it either when Parnell (whose name, incidentally, I learned this week, was pronounced in his lifetime as “Parrnel” with the emphasis on the first syllable) sought home rule. The British had myriad chances to respect the democratic desire for self-government on this island, and turned them all down. What followed, therefore, might well be something to be regretted. But it was also the fault of London.
It’s interesting, I think, to note the parallels with modern politics. In the end, the tradition which triumphed in the Southern part of this island was the hardline Republicanism of Padraig Pearse, and not the moderate Nationalism of O’Connell. The Redmondites were swept away. In more recent years, the SDLP has been swept away north of the border. In the context of the current immigration debate in Ireland, the hostility to relatively mainstream moderates like Aontu and Independent Ireland has a parallel to the fate of O’Connell and the readiness of some to embrace more radical ideas. What all of these things have in common is a refusal by the powers that be to listen to sincere and moderate voices demanding change, and to submit in the end only to insurrection and extremism.
But even if you are a hardline nationalist, as I know many readers are, you owe O’Connell a debt. For it was he – more than any other – who made clear what a reasonable and compelling demand Irish Self Government was, and is. If you have time, read his speech at Mullaghmast in full. It is one of the most magnificent ever delivered on this island. Perhaps some of us will be tempted to say, in the context of a century of often brutal and often needless Republican violence that “Irish people should have listened to O’Connell”. But they did.
It was the British, sadly, who did not listen to him.