You remember, of course, the huge national celebrations in 1997 of the 150th anniversary of the death of the greatest leader in modern Irish history, Daniel O'Connell., writes Fintan O'Toole.
Who could forget the marching bands, the flying flags, the cheering crowds, the thrilling fly-past? It is hard, indeed, to forget what didn't happen. And the big commemorations of O'Connell have a way of not happening. The bicentenary, in 1975, of his birth went almost unnoticed, the Cosgrave government largely accepting the advice of the Civil Service (revealed in recently released papers) that it should be marked "at most" by the issue of a commemorative stamp and "some local function at [ his ancestral home] Derrynane with low-key participation by the State". In 1997, the 150th anniversary of his death was just as low-key.
This is not just a matter of forgetfulness. O'Connell's place within Irish history has been deliberately and systematically downgraded. If this seems over the top, consider the Government's reluctance to purchase O'Connell's birthplace, Carhan House, near Cahirciveen. When it came on the market in the late 1990s, Síle de Valera, then Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, decided that the State would not pay any more than £40,000 for it. This shocked even her colleague John O'Donoghue, then minister for justice, who wrote to her expressing his dismay: "Seriously, I have to say that as the father of Irish democracy, O'Connell merits the place of his birth being secured for the future generations. Would the Americans leave George Washington's birthplace to languish like this even if it were in ruins?" Likewise, the Daniel O'Connell Memorial Church in Cahirciveen, widely reported as the only Catholic church in the world to be named after a lay person, is in a dire state, and it has been left to a local committee to try to raise the money to restore it.
To understand this neglect, you need only recall John O'Donoghue's phrase in that letter to Síle de Valera: "the father of Irish democracy". Big mistake, John. Accurate, of course, but a big mistake nonetheless. Yes, O'Connell is not just the father of Irish democracy, but arguably the father of mass democracy, full stop. In his campaigns for Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Act of Union, he pioneered the notion of a non-violent mass political movement in which even the poor could become actors in their own destiny. His methods spread, through Irish emigration, to the Chartists in England and the Democratic Party in the US. These methods, and his linking of Irish Catholic demands to the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of the Jews, made him a figure of global significance.
A contemporary French observer, Gustave de Beaumont (whose 1839 book Ireland has just been reissued by Harvard University Press), pointed to O'Connell as a new historical phenomenon, a man who exercised immense political power by moral force alone: "Is not the power of O'Connell one of the most extraordinary that can be conceived? Here is a man who exercises a sort of dictatorship over seven millions; he directs the affairs of his country almost alone; he gives advice which is obeyed as a command, and this man has never been invested with any civil authority or military power. I do not know if, in the history of nations, a single example of such a destiny could be found: examine, from Caesar to Napoleon, the men who have ruled over nations by their genius or their virtue, how many will you find who, to establish their power, did not first possess the majesty of civil station or the glory of arms?"
But a child can't have two fathers, and John O'Donoghue's acknowledgement of O'Connell's paternity of Irish democracy is an awkward family secret. The official line is that Irish democracy, in the Taoiseach's words, "all started in the leadership of 1916". This kind of history is a zero-sum game. If the great non-violent mass democracy that O'Connell called into being is acknowledged, then 1916 is diminished. If 1916 is to be acknowledged, then O'Connell must be disregarded. Commemoration becomes a match with winners and losers. Our relationship with history remains as neurotic as it ever was.
And it will remain so until we can imagine what we've still never had: a republic of equals. The 1916 Rising was motivated not by hope, but by despair at what its leaders saw as the decrepit state of the Irish imagination. As Harry Boland expressed it from prison after the Rising: "Ireland had sunk so low that nothing but blood could save her." The would-be revolutionaries saw themselves as Dr Frankensteins, running a bolt of violent energy through an inert body in the hope of bringing it to life. They did not know that, as we have learned, such violence creates life but also brings forth monsters.
But the question they pose for us is this: are we so imaginatively dead that only violence can wake us up to the possibility of a real republic? Or can we, like O'Connell, imagine a people that asserts its dignity by seeking collectively to shape its own history?