The Irish State has issued a stamp in his honour and funded an official commemoration on the 250th anniversary of his birth. This is hardly surprising, as O’Connell was the godfather of British constitutional Irish nationalism - a philosophy which has dominated Irish political culture from the mid-19th century to the present day.
His acolytes insist on calling him ‘The Liberator’, as O’Connell rejoiced in calling himself, and yet he liberated nothing and nobody.
He declared, ‘The people of Ireland are ready to become a portion of the Empire, provided they be made so in reality and not in name alone; they are ready to become a kind of West Britons…revealing a disdain for Irish sovereignty predating John Hume’s ‘you can’t eat a flag’ mantra.
He famously said, 'The winning of Ireland's freedom isn't worth shedding a single drop of blood'.
This man of peace joined the Lawyer’s Artillery Corps against the republican rebellion of 1798. This campaigner against political violence had no qualms about self-serving personal violence, challenging two men to duels, and killing one of them.
As a Crown militia man, O’Connell carried a blunderbuss during house searches after Emmet’s failed rebellion of 1803. He later said Emmet deserved to be hanged, declaring that ‘A man who could coolly prepare so much bloodshed, so many murders, and such horrors of every kind has ceased to be an object of compassion’.
O’Connell not only ignored the horrors and bloodshed of British imperialism but also encouraged Irish Catholics to join the Crown forces to fight in its cause. He is lauded as a great humanitarian for opposing the international slave trade, but O’Connell also opposed trade unions. He spoke against an 1833 Act banning the employment of children under nine years of age in factories, declaring that Westminster should not “go about parading before the world their ridiculous humanity, which would end by converting their manufacturers into beggars.”
The reactionary mindset of his brand of Castle Catholics was exemplified by his nephew John O’Connell MP who when informed by a bishop in 1847 that starving and fever ridden tenants in West Cork were “bravely paying their rents” exclaimed ‘I thank God I live among a people who would rather die of hunger than defraud their landlords of the rent!’
His disciples often recite his declaration that:
Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong, as the altar of liberty totters when it’s cemented only by blood.
O’Connell had nothing to say of the oceans of blood that cemented the conquest and colonisation of Ireland, nor the political and legal institutions that emerged from that conquest to manage and maintain it. Institutions that O’Connell enthusiastically validated and joined as a lawyer and MP.
Roger Casement said at his trial in 1916 that “conquest gives no title.” O’Connell, like others before him and since (John Redmond, John Hume, et al) never clarified at what point in history Britain gained democratic title in Ireland; when, precisely, the Brits achieved political and legal legitimacy over whatever section of the Irish people they could control, their laws elevated to a moral imperative and the British soldiers and constables enforcing those laws invested with a sole monopoly on the lawful use of force. It was simply taken as a given that the Irish people were lawfully subjugated and that the fundamental principles of British sovereignty and the primacy of British law were sacrosanct. To enhance the optics, the British would allow a loyal nationalist opposition to emerge, but Britain alone would define the parameters of Irish democracy and set the boundaries within which Irish opposition to British rule must operate.
Setting up the Catholic Association in 1823, O’Connell used priests to collect the Catholic Rent of one penny a month, helping to cement the concept of Irish nationalism with Irish Catholicism. The rent of a penny a month was a shrewd move. It gave even the most marginalised a sense of having a stake in a struggle for justice. O’Connell raked in enormous sums, which he used to pay his expenses.
O’Connell peddled hope for the downtrodden peasants and poorest workers, cleverly balancing the threat of a mass uprising while at all times serving the vested interests of the Catholic elites.
O’Connell’s role in channelling the anger, frustration, and resentments of the mass of Irish peasantry and workers away from revolutionary action into impotent constitutional cul-de-sacs was not missed by the British.
The son of the Irish parliamentarian Henry Grattan, also named Henry, alluded to O’Connell’s liaison with British security officials at Dublin Castle. Writing after O’Connell’s death, he remarked:
You may take my word for it that O’Connell during the greater part of the Repeal agitation was in close and confidential communication with the Castle authorities! That he had ample license to speak treason in Ireland so long as there should be no outbreak of the people and so long as he should maintain the Whigs in office. The people were beginning to suspect this, but the influences of the Bishops and of the clergy and curates under their control always satisfied them for the time that whatever O’Connell said or did was right, and it was their duty to support him. I could tell you some curious things.
O’Connell is lauded for ending the penal laws and achieving Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which permitted affluent Catholics such as himself to attend the British Parliament and hold most public offices. In fact, the penal laws had been largely repealed by 1793.
The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 permitted Catholics who swore loyalty to the King to inherit and purchase land. Prior to this, Irish Catholics could not join the British army, but due to manpower shortages, the British required Catholics to fight the American rebels and later the French. The Act was met with such gratitude by the Irish hierarchy that they publicly gave their support to Britain’s war against American independence and called for prayers and fasting for the success of the Redcoats against George Washington and his men. This was at a time when many Irish protestants supported the American rebels. A major aim of the act and acts that followed was to encourage Catholic recruitment and to discourage Catholics from finding common cause with Protestant nationalists and republicans.
Catholic Emancipation was brought in, not because England altruistically acknowledged a surging democratic tide but because London feared an armed revolt led by Ribbonmen if O’Connell wasn’t permitted to take the seat he won in the Clare by-election of 1828.
Furthermore, after O’Connell’s election, the British moved the goal posts, disenfranchising the 40-schilling freeholders and raising the franchise qualification to the English level of ten pounds. This reduced the overall electorate in Ireland from 216,000 to just 37,000 voters out of a population of approximately 7.5 million.
What was our greatest of all democrat’s view on this? O’Connell claimed the franchise restriction would ‘give more power to Catholics by concentrating it in more reliable and less democratically dangerous hands’.
In addition to easing penal restrictions, the British founded and funded the Roman Catholic Seminary at Maynooth in 1795. A major purpose, besides preventing the Irish Catholic clergy from being tainted by democratic and republican ideals acquired from a continental education, was to train the priests and bishops who would educate and shape the mindsets of a Catholic middle class from whose ranks would emerge a loyal nationalist opposition amenable to reconciling Irish nationalist aspirations with British sovereignty.
All Maynooth students and staff pledged loyalty to the British Crown and took an oath which declared:
…I will do my utmost endeavour to disclose and make known to his Majesty, and his heirs, all treasons and traitorous conspiracies, which may be formed against him or them…
Richard Lalor Shiel, an Irish politician and a leading supporter of Daniel O’Connell, addressed the House of Commons on the occasion of the Maynooth Grant of 1845, saying:
…Are not lectures at Maynooth cheaper than State prosecutions? Are not professors less costly than Crown solicitors? Is not a large standing army and a great constabulary force more expensive than the moral police force with which by the priesthood of Ireland you can be thriftily and efficaciously supplied?
Calling for peaceful protest at all public gatherings (and asking government stenographers recording his speeches to move to the front of the crowd so they would neither miss nor misinterpret a single word that could lead to a prosecution), O’Connell sometimes gave blood-curdling speeches at private dinners about the forceful methods he would use to defeat the Saxon foe. He was the classic example of the Grand Old Duke of York marching his men up the hill only to march them meekly down again.
A populist and egotistical demagogue, bombastic windbag, and consummate bluffer, O’Connell could skilfully read a crowd, bringing them to the brink of revolutionary fervour and back again to loyal and lawful deference before they dutifully slinked home to starve in submissive silence.
In the words of a Tipperary peasant recorded by Alexis de Tocqueville:
Emancipation has done nothing for us. Mr. O’Connell and the rich Catholics go to Parliament. We die of starvation just the same.
Historian Owen Magee writes [bold text my own]:
…O’Connell invented a new form of political rhetoric. Although the Irish community had no right to determine its own political future, O’Connell argued that it could have faith that benign and enlightened liberal reformers at Westminster would respond to the ‘moral force’ of the Irish MPs speeches. To rationalise this claim, O’Connell tried to replace the ageless republican dichotomy of citizenship and slavery with a new one of his own. He dubbed his argument as one in favour of ‘constitutional methods’ and labelled all those who disagreed with him as advocates of ‘physical force’, the supposed opposite of ‘moral force’. Outside of Catholic political circles in Ireland under the Union, this distinctions drawn by O’Connell was never (and has never) been adopted by any other political community because, literally speaking, it makes no sense. No politician or party can claim to represent a constitution, while force is an integral component of any state’s constitution. O’Connell was also speaking nonsensically by making this argument as a political statement, because only the government, or lawyers and judges in their purely legal capacity, could have any right to speak of what was ‘constitutional’ due to the non-republican (unwritten) nature of the British constitution. Irish Catholic politicians who liked to call themselves ‘strictly constitutional politicians’ could be, and were, arrested just as much as their republican critics whom they had labelled as ‘unconstitutional politicians’ whenever they were perceived by Westminster to have stepped outside the moral authority of the law. The only actual purpose of this rhetoric adopted by the Irish Catholic establishment was to claim on its own behalf a superior moral authority to that of republicanism, and to rationalise the political and moral legitimacy of the British state in its own eyes. (THE IRB, Four Court Press, pp. 39-40)
Daniel O’Connell was no Liberator. He refused to challenge the British government in any meaningful way, and a million Irish people perished during the Great Hunger, which began on his watch.
The only liberators in Ireland were the volunteers of the Irish Republican Army, who accomplished infinitely more in the five years between 1916 and 1921 than O’Connell and his ilk ever accomplished in over a century of grovelling to London.
Unfortunately, they didn’t achieve full freedom. It was Irishmen primarily of the O’Connellite tradition who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty and worked under British sanction, supervision, and with British arms to defeat the Republic. It is no surprise that when the revolutionary counter-state declared in January 1919 was replaced by the counter-republican Free State in December 1922, one of their early acts was to rename Sackville Street (Dublin’s principal thoroughfare) after Daniel O’Connell and not after Tone, Pearse, or Connolly.
Today it is politicians of the O’Connellite tradition, and not the republican tradition, who are in the ascendancy. This is due in no small part to British political and military operations over many years designed to shape the strategic environment by channelling Irish political trajectories in particular directions, harnessing Irish leaderships to drive the strategies, and convincing the Irish it was their own idea. In addition, the Brits ensure that the O’Connellite tradition remains an infinitely safer and far more profitable place to reside than taking a republican position.
O’Connellites will never place Irish national interests before British strategic interests because to do so might invite ‘violence’. They promote a ‘Shared Island’ which annuls the republican concept of national unity across the sectarian divide. This ensures that Britain will continue to sabotage our national cohesion by guaranteeing that unionists will remain British citizens even after a nationalist majority is reached in the Six Counties. That Irish citizens of the nationalist tradition and those of the plantation tradition will never form a united civic identity. That they will never, in the words of Wolfe Tone, ‘abolish the memory of past dissentions’ or, in the words of the Proclamation become ‘oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government’. Instead, a ‘Shared Island’ or ‘Agreed Ireland’ positions these differences at the core of future constitutional arrangements.
Many supporters of the Good Friday Agreement believe the intergovernmental British-Irish Council should keep functioning even after a pro-unity referendum is won so that Britain can continue to represent its citizens in the North East of Ulster. Far from achieving sovereignty over our whole territory and population, a part of Ireland will continue to be administered under British government supervision. The O’Connellite tradition is comfortable with this as it has always acknowledged the essential nature of the English connection.
Many Shared Islanders advocate a continuation of Stormont and champion an enduring role for the British royal family as an institutional point of reference for the loyalties of those who would prefer to see themselves as a civic outpost of London rather than as equal citizens of a national democracy. O’Connell’s political progenies have no issue with that one either.
Robert Emmet requested that his epitaph be withheld until his country had taken its place among the nations of the earth. Not as two nations among the nations of the earth. O’Connell was happy they hanged him.
The ‘Liberator’ indeed.
 |
| John Crawley is a former IRA volunteer and author of The Yank. |
Fair analysis John.
ReplyDeleteStill, it's important to acknowledge where and when the last transition from Republicanism to Nationalism occurred, including who lead it, and who blindly followed.
Good read.
ReplyDeleteIs there a record of those blood curling speeches in private.
The constitutional physical force dichotomy he invented that you write about is interesting for another angle. Because he blinked at Clontarf and the timing right before the famine. Can imagine that raw energy of any survivor of the famine in Mayo or Dublin or Manchester or coatbridge or Boston or new York in the creation of the Fenians. Imagine arguing for another go of O Connells methods in that environment, can totally see the energy titling to invading Canada.
That abstentionist logic, agree, it's not talked about but it's older than the first Dáil it's the basic intellectualism but bar rsf we don't see it much today interesting to see an objective discussion as to why that is. Obviously most splits came post 86 but we don't see these structured arguments on non recognition.
On the hypotetical future in the event of a border poll being won. I'd suggest that they aren't even contemplating it being won because they don't expect London to honour it and that they are aligning to where they pre emptively expect the line to be. Blinking at Clontarf again.