A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  Two days later Dr Cooke addressed a ‘Grand Conservative Demonstration’ in Belfast:

  Look at the town of Belfast. When I was myself a youth I remember it almost a village. But what a glorious sight does it now present—the masted grove within our harbour—our mighty warehouses teeming with the wealth of every climate—(cheers)—our giant manufactories lifting themselves on every side.... And all this we owe to the Union.... Mr O’Connell ... look at Belfast, and be a Repealer—if you can.

  The Orange lodge in Comber, Co. Down, soon had a new marching song:

  O’Connell he does boast of his great big rebel host,

  He says they are ten million in number.

  But half of them you’ll find they are both lame and blind,

  For we’re the Bright Orange Heroes of Comber.

  Undeterred, O’Connell threw himself into organising a series of ‘monster meetings’ to seek repeal of the Union.

  Episode 177

  MONSTER MEETINGS

  The Repeal and the Repeal alone is and must be the grand basis of all future operations, hit or miss, win or lose. The people will take nothing short of that.... I say there can be no other basis of association save the Repeal, the glorious Repeal.

  In declarations such as this Daniel O’Connell made his programme clear during the general election campaign of 1841. He was seeking the repeal of the Act of Union and the restoration of the Irish parliament. Could he repeat the brilliant success of his campaign for Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s? The problem was that the election of 1841 brought the Tories to power, with O’Connell’s bitter adversary, Sir Robert Peel, as Prime Minister.

  Once again the peasantry of Ireland contributed to a fighting fund, known as the ‘Repeal Rent’, collected mostly in pennies and farthings. With indefatigable energy O’Connell addressed a series of ‘monster meetings’ across the country. The excitement was intense. Vast numbers travelled great distances to hear O’Connell, the ‘Agitator’, the ‘Emancipator’, the ‘Liberator’.

  A German traveller, Jacob Veneday, reported O’Connell’s arrival at the Athlone monster meeting of 15 June 1843:

  Now there arose a cry such as never before had greeted my ears; now all hats were raised in the air, and there burst forth the unanimous shouts: ‘Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah! Long live O’Connell! Long live the Liberator!’ A hundred thousand voices sent forth these salutations to the man whose magic power had circled them around him. He sat on the box-seat of a carriage drawn by four horses, and answered the salutation with head, hand, and cap.... How he made his way I do not even to this day comprehend, for there was not room for a person to fall, much less to walk. ‘Make way for the Liberator!’ was the charm word which accomplished the wonder that otherwise had been an impossibility.

  Meetings were usually followed by public banquets. At Mallow, Co. Cork, before the dinner speeches, a singer performed one of Thomas Moore’s ‘melodies’:

  Oh, where’s the slave so lowly,

  Condemned to chains unholy,

  Who, could he burst

  His bonds accursed,

  Would pine beneath them slowly?

  O’Connell then leaped to his feet and raising his arms wide, cried out ‘I am not that slave!’ Then all in the room raised their arms in the same way, exclaiming again and again: ‘We are not those slaves! We are not those slaves!’

  The greatest meeting of all was on the Hill of Tara on the feast-day of the Assumption, 15 August 1843. Even The Times, a newspaper fiercely hostile to O’Connell, reported the audience at Tara to be around a million. The fields for miles around were filled with vehicles. The mounted escort, told off in lines of four by volunteer ‘Repeal police’, was estimated at 10,000 horsemen. It took O’Connell’s open carriage two hours to make its way through the vast crowd. The carriage was preceded by a car on which a harper sat on a throne playing Thomas Moore’s ‘The Harp that Once through Tara’s Halls’. Vigilant laymen and priests made sure that there was no disorder, no shillelaghs, no strong drink. During O’Connell’s speech the vast audience shouted, laughed, groaned and exulted at appropriate moments in response to his stentorian oratory—including those who were too far away to hear what was being said.

  The English writer Bulwer Lytton attended a monster meeting and described the scene in verse:

  Once to my sight the giant thus was given:

  Walled by wide air and roofed by boundless heaven,

  Beneath his feet the human ocean lay,

  And wave on wave flowed into space away.

  Methought no clarion could have sent its sound

  E’en to the centre of the hosts around;

  And, as I thought, arose a sonorous swell,

  As from some church tower swings the silvery bell;

  Aloft and clear from airy tide to tide,

  It glided easy as a bird may glide;

  To the last verge of that vast audience sent,

  It played with each wild passion as it went:

  Now stirred the uproar, now the murmurs stilled,

  And sobs or laughter answered as it willed.

  Peaceful meetings of such enormous size were unheard of in other parts of Europe. Only meticulous planning and organisation made it possible to hold more than forty monster meetings across Ireland during the year 1843 without any violent incidents.

  And how did Peel’s government respond? Thomas, Earl de Grey, the viceroy, urged the Prime Minister to stand firm: ‘Let whatever you do be strong enough.... Let no morbid sensibility, or mawkish apprehension of invading the constitution ... be allowed to weigh.’ Peel had every intention of following this advice. O’Connell announced that the climax of his Repeal campaign would be a monster meeting on 8 October 1843. It would be held at Clontarf, the site of Brian Boru’s victory over the Vikings in the year 1014. The government, however, was determined that this meeting would not take place.

  Episode 178

  A NATION ONCE AGAIN?

  At 3.30 in the afternoon of 7 October 1843 a messenger arrived hotfoot from Dublin Castle to the offices of the Loyal National Repeal Association in Dublin. There Daniel O’Connell read out the Lord Lieutenant’s proclamation to committee members. The monster meeting, due to take place next day north of the city at Clontarf, had been ‘proclaimed’—in other words, it would be an illegal assembly. What was to be done?

  All his life Daniel O’Connell had believed passionately in staying within the law. ‘Liberty is not worth the shedding of a single drop of blood,’ he had once said. Now tens of thousands were making their way to Clontarf. This was arranged to be the greatest of his ‘monster meetings’, a massive peaceful demonstration to demand repeal of the Act of Union. O’Connell did not hesitate: the meeting would be called off. All the committee members agreed.

  The government feared that O’Connell’s campaign would end in violence. Extra troops had been rushed to Ireland. Additional warships rode at anchor in Dublin Bay. Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, should have known O’Connell better. O’Connell dictated an address to the Irish people, directing them to obey the proclamation. Within minutes it was dispatched to the printer.

  In spite of his strict compliance with the law, on 30 May 1844 O’Connell was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment in Richmond Penitentiary in London. Instead of putting O’Connell in a cell, the bewildered governor deferentially made over his handsome residence to the great man. Then in September the sentence was overturned in the House of Lords and O’Connell was released. Nevertheless, now approaching seventy, O’Connell was no longer the man he had been. The millions who had devotedly followed him were left in a state of bewilderment. The Repeal movement began to run into the sands.

  Meanwhile, over much of western and central Europe, the old order faced a growing challenge. Kings, emperors and privileged aristocrats, brought into the sun again after Waterloo, had to cope with rising discontent. The seeds of liberty, equality and fraternity, planted over vast areas during the years of Napoleon’s greatest trium
phs, had sprouted and grown. Germans, Italians, Poles and a host of other peoples demanded national self-determination with an ever more powerful voice. Romantic nationalism saw the forging of new identities and threatened to rock the sprawling multinational great powers to their foundations.

  Thomas Davis was one young man powerfully affected by this political romanticism. Son of an English surgeon and an Irish mother, and a Protestant, Davis turned to Irish history rather than to the Rights of Man for inspiration. He threw himself into O’Connell’s Repeal movement and joined with two other young activists, John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy, to found a newspaper to promote the cause. The Nation began publication in October 1842 and quickly outsold all other newspapers in Ireland; since it was widely circulated throughout Repeal reading rooms, it may have a readership of a quarter of a million.

  Davis and his associates formed a group within the Repeal movement called Young Ireland—a conscious imitation of Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy. Repeal of the Union was, to Young Ireland, only the first step towards full national independence. The pages of the Nation carried passionate songs written by Davis to instil a love of national freedom:

  When boyhood’s fire was in my blood

  I read of ancient freemen,

  For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,

  Three hundred men and three men.

  And then I prayed I yet might see

  Our fetters rent in twain,

  And Ireland, long a province, be

  A NATION ONCE AGAIN.

  Davis viewed the history of Ireland as a six-hundred-year struggle against the foreigner. In ‘The West’s Asleep’ he reminded the people of Connacht of their ancestors’ resistance over the centuries:

  And if, when all a vigil keep,

  The West’s asleep, the West’s asleep—

  Alas! and well may Erin weep,

  That Connaught lies in slumber deep.

  But—hark!—some voice like thunder spake:

  ‘The West’s awake, the West’s awake’—

  Sing, oh! hurra! let England quake,

  We’ll watch till death for Erin’s sake!

  Unlike Daniel O’Connell, Young Ireland believed that it was not wrong to shed blood for Ireland’s freedom. In April 1843 the Nation published a song by John Kells Ingram commemorating those who had fought and died in the rebellion of 1798:

  Who fears to speak of Ninety-Eight?

  Who blushes at the name?

  When cowards mock the patriots’ fate,

  Who hangs his head in shame?

  He’s all a knave, or half a slave,

  Who slights his country thus;

  But a true man, like you, man,

  Will fill your glass with us.

  O’Connell would have nothing to do with any talk of armed insurrection. Bitter exchanges with the Young Irelanders inevitably followed.

  Episode 179

  ‘THE MISERY OF IRELAND DESCENDS TO DEGREES UNKNOWN’

  In their prospectus of the Nation, the Young Ireland newspaper launched in 1842, the editors explained:

  Nationality is their first great object—a Nationality which will not only raise our people from their poverty ... but inflame them 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 ... a Nationality which would be recognised by the world and sanctified by wisdom, virtue and prudence.

  By 1844 members of Young Ireland and Daniel O’Connell were quarrelling openly. Young Ireland believed that O’Connell’s movement had become too closely tied in with the Catholic Church. Protestants were being alienated, especially after O’Connell had denounced the plan for Queen’s Colleges in Belfast, Cork and Galway as ‘godless colleges’ because of their secular character. Young Ireland wanted armed insurrection to end the Union to be given serious consideration. O’Connell would not hear of it. By 1845 these bitter disputes had become increasingly irrelevant, for Ireland was on the brink of a national catastrophe.

  While the Napoleonic Wars still raged, Ireland gave every indication of flourishing under the Act of Union. Then, after Waterloo, markets with the European mainland opened up again and agricultural prices began to fall, and they continued to fall for years to come. The Corn Law, enacted by Westminster in 1815, failed to stop the collapse in prices for wheat, barley, oats, butter, salt pork and other farm produce. In this protracted depression, almost everyone getting a living from the land was in difficulties.

  Landlords had been able to increase rents very considerably during the war. In Co. Cavan, for example, the Hodson estate raised rents by 257 per cent between 1806 and 1812. Then, in response to the sharp and prolonged fall in the prices tenant farmers could get for their produce, most landlords lowered their rents for a time—but only slightly. The Co. Tyrone estates of the Royal Schools did not reduce rents at all until 1843. The Marquis of Downshire actually increased the income from his Co. Down estates by 5 per cent in the years after 1815.

  Landlords had little incentive to lower rents. The demand to rent land—even miserable scraps of mountain and bog—was too strong. The plain fact was that Ireland’s population had increased at an extraordinary rate: it had actually quadrupled between the famine of 1741 and the census of 1841. With the possible exception of Finland, nowhere else in Europe experienced such an increase. The 1841 census recorded 8,175,124 people, and the population was probably 8,500,000 by 1845—and this was in spite of the fact that well over 1,500,000 had emigrated since the Union in 1801.

  In some respects early nineteenth-century Ireland was not a backward country. Agricultural output may have been lower than in England, but it was as good as that of France. Life expectancy too was similar to that of France. Ireland became more than ever a granary for Britain, supplying the rapidly growing industrial towns across the Irish Sea with their daily bread. Agricultural output, indeed, increased by 80 per cent during the first forty-five years of the nineteenth century. The problem was that population increase was greatest among the poorest classes, the cottiers and labourers. By the 1840s official government inquiries reported that some two million were living in a state of extreme poverty. Forty per cent of Ireland’s population lived in wretched one-roomed cabins. These people desperately competed with one another to rent scraps of land, often too small to feed them adequately over a year.

  The French writer Gustave de Beaumont was appalled by what he had seen during his tour of Ireland in 1837:

  I have seen the Indian in his forests, and the negro in his chains, and thought, as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness; but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland.…

  In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered; but an entire nation of paupers is what never was seen until it was shown in Ireland.…

  The misery of Ireland descends to degrees unknown elsewhere. The condition which in that country is deemed superior to poverty, would in any other be regarded as a state of frightful distress; the miserable classes of France, whose lot we justly deplore, would in Ireland form a privileged class. And these miseries of the Irish population are not rare accidents; nearly all are permanent, and those which are not permanent are periodic.

  Every year, nearly at the same season, the commencement of a famine is announced in Ireland, its progress, its ravages, its decline.

  Episode 180

  ‘SO MUCH WRETCHEDNESS’

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century poor farmers and labourers had supplemented their incomes by spinning and weaving wool and linen in their homes. Thirty years later cheap printed and dyed cloth from the steam-powered mills and factories of Manchester and Leeds flooded into Ireland, supplemented by the output of Belfast’s linen mills. Spinning-wheels and handlooms found it impossible to compete. A vital supplement to the family incomes of labourers, cottiers and small fa
rmers was being destroyed. Joseph Nicholson of Bessbrook, Co. Armagh, observed:

  To one unacquainted with Ireland the small earnings of the poorer females—frequently not more than two pence a day, working diligently from morning till night, for months together—must appear very extraordinary.

  As Thomas Beggs, a Co. Antrim weaver-poet who died during the Famine, wrote:

  But the guid auld times are gane out o’ sight,

  An’ it mak’s the saut tear aften start to mine e’e;

  For lords o’ the Mill and Machine ha’e decreed

  That bodies like me maun beg their bread.

  The Ordnance Survey Memoirs, written by army officers as they mapped Ireland in the 1830s, tell the same story:

  Parish of Laragh, Co. Cavan: The manufacture of coarse linen has almost ceased within the parish ... the flying shuttle seldom resounds ...

  Parish of Pomeroy, Co. Tyrone: A good weaver can only earn about 5s a week and a spinner must work hard to earn 2d a day ...

  Parish of Currin, Co. Monaghan: The ruins of the extensive bleachfields, which are observable around the district, testifying by their magnitude the outlay of vast capital in their erection, very few of which unfortunately are now in operation.

  No memoirs survive for southern parishes, where the hand spinning and weaving of wool had been so important, but the story was much the same. The collapse of domestic industry left the vast majority of people in the congested countryside utterly dependent on what the overworked soil would yield. The handloom weavers of fine cloth in Dublin were also steadily driven to the wall by imports. Industrial concerns in towns across the country wilted and died. Ploughshares, sickle and scythe blades, harrow pins and the like were forged more cheaply by the steam-hammers of Coventry and Birmingham than they could be beaten out on the anvils of local Irish blacksmiths. Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall, in their 1841–3 publication on Ireland’s scenery and character, observed the squalor and lack of employment in Navan, a town in the heart of Ireland’s most fertile county, Co. Meath: