Charles Gavan Duffy, the first editor and proprietor of the Nation newspaper, died 100 years ago on Sunday, February 9th, writes Breandán Ó Cathaoir.
A high-minded, cautious, rather conservative man, his long career in public life had surprising aspects. He was deeply involved in the exciting, potentially dangerous events of the 1840s. Released from prison in 1849 - Dublin Castle having failed to convict him of high treason - Gavan Duffy resumed publication of the Nation, devoting his energies to the cause of tenant rights in an unsuccessful attempt to stem the tide of post-Famine evictions.
In ill health and despair he emigrated to Australia, where he became prime minister of Victoria and was knighted for his services to the colony in 1873.
Even more important than his own political career in Ireland and Australia, was his role as the interpreter of the Young Ireland movement for later generations of nationalists. He did more than any other writer to recall the teachings of Young Ireland and to emphasise the contribution of Thomas Davis to the making of modern Irish nationalism.
In retirement in France, where he outlived his friends, Duffy became a brilliant apologist for Young Ireland and a telling critic of the policies of Daniel O'Connell. The two-volume Young Ireland - his most valuable work - was followed by his autobiography, My Life in Two Hemispheres; a biography of Davis; and The League of North and South, his account of the Tenant League in the 1850s.
An Ulster Catholic
Gavan Duffy was born in Monaghan town on Good Friday, 1816. His boyhood friends included Terence Bellew MacManus, destined to be one of the more determined leaders of the 1848 rising.
"Before patriotism awoke I was passionately religious," Duffy recalled. "But the first passion was superseded after a time by one which has lasted all my life - the determination to love and, if possible, serve Ireland."
One day when Duffy was aged 18, Charles Hamilton Teeling, a veteran of the 1798 rising, walked into his mother's house (his father had died when he was 10). Teeling was establishing a journal in Belfast and asked Duffy to accompany him on a round of calls to promote it in Monaghan. Teeling inflamed his imagination with recollections of '98 and launched Duffy in journalism by inviting him to contribute to the Northern Herald.
Duffy read for many hours daily and developed into an elegant writer. He later edited the Belfast Vindicator, an O'Connellite journal.
He met John Blake Dillon and Davis while studying for the bar. The three became political friends and out of this friendship grew the resolve to establish a new nationalist paper in Dublin.
The editorship was assigned to Duffy as the proprietor and more experienced journalist, but he acknowledged modestly: "Davis was our true leader. Not only had nature endowed him more liberally, but he loved labour better, and his mind had traversed regions of thought and wrestled with problems still unfamiliar to his confederates."
Nation Prospectus
The Nation, a name derived significantly from a Parisian newspaper, appeared for the first time on October 15th, 1842. Its prospectus set out the aims of Duffy and his friends: "Nationality is their first great object, a nationality which will not only raise our people from their poverty, by securing to them the blessings of a domestic legislature, but inflame and purify them with a lofty and heroic love of country . . . a nationality which may embrace Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, Milesian and Cromwellian - the Irishman of a hundred generations and the stranger who is within our gates."
The Nation formed part of the first serious campaign to repeal the Union. At the outset O'Connell welcomed the vigorous propagandists, while they accepted him as the patriarchal leader of the national cause. Anti-climax set in after he called off the proscribed Clontarf meeting. The Young Irelanders, as the Nation group came to be known, advocated a comprehensive nationality, while O'Connell's movement developed an ultra-Catholic character.
After the sudden death of Davis in September 1845, Duffy invited John Mitchel to replace him on the staff of the Nation, thereby adding a fiery component to Irish revolutionary journalism. The two men would quarrel bitterly as Mitchel took the road of excess, influenced by the Famine catastrophe and James Fintan Lalor's agrarian response to it.
Throughout 1845-46, the Young Irelanders denounced O'Connell's strategy of forming a new alliance with the Whigs as an abandonment of nationalist principles. By July 1846 he had decided to assert his fading authority. His peace resolutions were the means chosen for either whipping his young critics into line or of driving them out of the Repeal Association. He insisted that a pledge repudiating the use of physical force in all circumstances be adopted by every member of the association.
The Young Irelanders were unwilling to accept this pledge, though no one thought seriously in terms of Irish revolution at the time. Faced with the choice between submission on a matter of general principle and withdrawal, they quit the association reluctantly. Duffy was arrested two years later, directly before the attempted insurrection.
Major contribution
His major contribution to the shaping of modern Irish nationalism was that, nearly half a century later, his books drew attention to the idealism of Young Ireland at a time when many people were seeking something more inspiring than the post-Parnellite squabbles. In the opening years of the 20th century, Davis's doctrine of self-reliance provided Sinn Féin with a fruitful source of principles and arguments.
None the less, as Prof Kevin B. Nowlan pointed out in his lecture to mark the 60th anniversary of Duffy's death: "To the end Gavan Duffy and his friends remained moderate nationalists, seeking legislative independence under the Crown, rather than separatist revolutionaries."
Duffy died in Nice on February 9th, 1903, aged 87. His body was re-interred in Glasnevin cemetery in a grave within the O'Connell circle near to that of John Blake Dillon.