Madam, - Fintan O'Toole (Opinion, April 18th) describes a plaster saint rather than the real Daniel O'Connell. He is simplistic in his explanation of the criticism of O'Connell's ultimately ineffectual demagoguery, which not only failed to bring repeal of the union, but actually killed the movement stone dead.
After rousing the country with "monster meetings" in 1843, O'Connell's "Year of Repeal", he was to speak at Clontarf on October 8th. In contrast with later leaders of passive resistance (Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement) O'Connell baulked at "resistance" by cancelling the meeting when Peel's British government banned it. The success of the Repeal movement cannot be measured by the fact that the British had no one to massacre on the day. Rather, O'Connell's abstention from attempting to change the course of history can be measured in the millions of lives lost a few short years later in a famine whose effects the British government exacerbated.
This brings us to the more serious criticism of O'Connell, who entered into a place-seeking alliance with the Whig administration of Lord John Russell in 1846. Russell promptly dispensed with the famine work projects, food depots and imports of his Tory predecessor, saying that "private enterprise" would step into the vacuum. Thus followed "Black '47" in which more than 10,000 died weekly in the name of political economy. O'Connell occupied himself with "endeavouring to keep the people from outbreaks, and endeavouring to get food to them". His first endeavour was more successful than the second.
In truth, O'Connell was a conservative landlord whose anti-violence rhetoric seems less sincere in the light of his praise of the murderous yeoman terror that put down the 1798 rebellion. He helped to win Catholic emancipation in 1827, but then agreed to a restriction of the franchise, so that "40 shilling freeholders", who previously had the pleasure of voting only for Protestants, then found themselves voteless.
O'Connnell opposed the "godless" young Irelanders led by the Protestant Thomas Davis. Davis had promoted O'Connell in his Nation newspaper up to the Clontarf fiasco. In the gulf that was to open up between them we see the distinction between a "loyal" Catholic nationalism, in which, according to O'Connell, "patriotism and religion run in the same channel", and the eventually successful non-sectarian republicanism that was to culminate in the Sinn Féin election victory of 1918.
O'Connell's sometimes sectarian rhetoric and practice has echoes in the conservative nationalist ideology that ruled this State in the first 40 years of its existence. Its effects, or rather the lack of them, are also the abiding memory of Northern nationalists.
They continued to endure "the arid lash of censure" in the British six counties, until they decided to take matters into their own hands in the late 1960s and stand up for themselves, initially by defying a ban on the right to assemble peacefully.
- Yours, etc,
NIALL MEEHAN, Offaly Road, Dublin 7.
Madam, - Fintan O'Toole has usefully recalled the seminal role that Daniel O'Connell played in forging modern Irish democracy. As it happens, while others flocked last week to remember the rebels of 1916, I dropped into the Irish College in Rome to view the marble plaque by Charles Bianconi that marks the spot where Daniel O'Connell's heart is entombed.
O'Connell had a terrible end, racked by ill health, reduced to begging in parliament for his starving people and desperately trying to reach Italy in one last symbolic act. Pius IX, the new pope by whom O'Connell wished to be blessed, was then regarded as a liberal. As Mr O'Toole notes, O'Connell himself was celebrated as a liberator not just in Ireland but across Europe. A Freemason for many years, O'Connell was no narrow or sectarian nationalist.
O'Connell died at Genoa on May 15th, 1847, famously bequeathing "my body to Ireland, my heart to Rome, and my soul to heaven". No fewer than 1,600 people an hour are said to have passed through the warehouse where his remains (less the heart) were laid out for four days on their return to Ireland.
O'Connell set the tone for Irish politics for the next 200 years. Our main political party, Fianna Fáil, still bears some of the hallmarks of his personal and political style. His influence on modern Ireland has been far greater than that of any individual who died in 1916, but I suspect that he would have appreciated only too well why Bertie Ahern opted to commemorate the 90th anniversary of that rising as he did.
Now that the Irish government has marked a 90th anniversary with such unusual fanfare, perhaps we might have a similarly unorthodox commemmoration for O'Connell. How about national ceremonies next year in honor of the 160th anniversary of his death?
- Yours, etc,
COLUM KENNY, School of Communications, Dublin City University.