19th Century Irish History Articles - O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation by Dr. Samuel Couch

Articles: 19th Century Ireland
II. O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation

by Dr. Sam Couch, Ph. D.
Owner, Rising Road Tours

The Act of the People allowed Catholics to hold all offices of state except the very highest. The penal laws were virtually ended. O'Connell now took on another crusade: repeal of the Act of Union. His Repeal Association was founded in 1840. It was in support of this movement that the "monster meetings" gained strength. During this time the English press merciless lampooned O'Connell, Catholics and the Irish. The Emancipationist was characterized as:

Scum condensed of the Iris bog,
Ruffian coward demagogue,
Boundless liar, base detractor
Nurse of murders, treason's factor...

The newly established Punch saved its most graphic attacks for Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church. These barbs reflected the times in England when the country was generally xenophobic and certainly hibernophobic.

The purpose of O'Connell's huge rallies was involvement of the newly politicized, if disenfranchised, mass of the poorer Irish. The energy that was diffused earlier in faction fights was channeled into peaceful protest. IN 1843 there were protests in Connacht, Leinster and Munster. O'Connell's headquarters, significantly named Conciliation Hall, was built during this period. The most memorable of the monster meetings at which attendance numbered in the hundreds of thousands was held at Tara on 15 August 1843. The place was chosen for its historical significance; the date was the great autumn feast of Mary. At least 750,000 attended, some reported over a million.

O'Connell's young Turks, a band of journalists and "varsity" men founded by Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon formed a society called Young Ireland. This trio used the Nation to re-establish a sense of nationality and patriotism that fitted well with the Catholic and Repeal Associations training in politics and doctrine as offered by local priests and teachers. Its non-denominational stance and Trinity College background reassured Protestant liberals. Some of the ballads written during this period were seen as clarion calls to change.

The Fenian Michael Doherny claims that he and Davis had designed the tactic of the meetings "to train the country people to military movements and a martial tread." It was about as literal as O'Connell's "Mallow Defiance" when he said "We were a paltry remnant in Cromwell's time. We are nine million now."

A meeting was called for Sunday 8 October in Clontarf remembering the glories of Brian Boru, Ireland's High King reputedly chased the Vikings from the island. It was intended to make Tara look "like a caucus." On the Saturday evening, Peel banned the meeting. O'Connell had to decide quickly and he called off this most prestigious of meetings. This was a turning point in O'Connell's leadership. Repeal was not to be achieved by passive meetings, however monstrous, and Peel had won. The government did what it could to save O'Connell's reputation by sending him to prison for a year. He was now sixty-nine and already suffering from the intermittent senility that made his last years so pitiful. His last speech in the House made on 8 February 1847 was almost inaudible but accurate in its grisly prophecy:

Ireland is in your hands... your power. If you do not save her she can't save herself... I predict... that one quarter of the population will perish unless you come to her relief.

Daniel O'Connell died in Genoa on 15 May on his way to Rome. His heart is buried in Genoa, but his body is buried in Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery in the "Great Comedian's tomb," in Yeats's not-inaccurate description. He recreated Ireland and gave the lost and hopeless masses heart and hope. He taught them democracy. The failure of his movement for reform sped up the process toward independence. His actions paved the way for Fenianism and the IRB. The failure of O'Connell's tactics did not mean that all constitutional methods would fail, merely that the gathering together of many thousands of people had reached the end of its usefulness.

O'Connell brought priests into politics but for the most utilitarian of reasons: they were to be his teachers and his local organizers. They would have more immediate authority than any other man in the parish. With the national schoolteachers, they ran the Reading Rooms that turned a population of illiterates into a population with perhaps too much respect for education. His two great errors were affiliation with the Whigs and his total lack of rapprochement with the northern Protestants. O'Connell rarely traveled north of Monaghan and his Belfast venture in 1841 to sell Repeal was a disaster, not because he was not welcomed warmly by the growing Catholic population but because he did not tangle with the northern Protestant leader Bully Cooke. O'Connell's failure to make an attempt at understanding the Unionist north has been shared by nearly all nationalist leaders since.

Davis died in 1845 just as the first reports of phytophthora infestans, the potato blight, were received. These reports presaged a "famine" that would define the Irish imagination both at home and abroad for nearly 150 years.

This series of articles is based on lectures given by Dr. Samuel Couch to Irish Studies courses at Georgia Southern University and Young Harris College between 1997 and 2004. Documented sources come from Couch's research and studies in American universities and with scholars in Ireland. The articles are in no way intended to be comprehensive.

Background materials come from, but are not limited to, readings in the following books:

Duffy, Sean, ed., Atlas of Irish History. Gill & Macmillan: Dublin. 1997.
Joyce, P.W., Outlines of the History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1905. M.H. Gill & Son: Dublin. 1909.
Killeen, Richard, A Short History of Ireland. Gill & Macmillan: Dublin. 1994.
Smyth, Daragh, A Guide to Irish Mythology. 2nd ed. Irish Academic Press: Dublin. 1996.

Any lack of attribution to primary sources is unintentional and the sole responsibility of Dr. Couch.

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Articles: 19th Century Ireland II. O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation

Articles: 19th Century Ireland
II. O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation