I would like to congratulate everyone involved in this excellent project. It is a tough challenge to bring to life someone who was born 250 years ago, but you managed to do this with great success and to invite a wider national discussion about The Liberator.
The anniversary of Daniel O’Connell’s birth is important and it is one which I was eager to see marked in a substantive way. It was included in the Programme for Government and a range of initiatives have been supported.
I believe that we have a lot we can learn from a much wider engagement with O’Connell and his times. He speaks to themes and challenges which will always be relevant – and he calls us to step back from an increasingly narrow and exclusionary view of Irish nationalism.
During recent months I’ve given five addresses on matters relating to O’Connell at venues ranging from the small penal church where he was baptised in Kerry to the Reform Club in London, where he left a deep impression on liberal thought and politics.
I believe that we need to move away from the idea of looking for a single narrative of our history and the focus on great individuals must never be allowed to block wider perspectives. However O’Connell deserves much deeper understanding.
On a personal level he had few characteristics which would be tolerated let alone honoured in today’s world. Often chaotic and inconsiderate, his life was full of stories of poor behaviour and bad decisions.
However we must never fall for the error of trying to view historical figures through the standards of today or to hold them to account for later developments which they could not reasonably have anticipated.
As the organisers of today’s discussion have rightly pointed out, he has been marginalised in the story of our country to an extent which cannot be justified.
A part of this is that those who came after him consistently attacked him for failing to implement their agendas. Engels and other left-wing radicals up to today condemned him for not using his popular support to implement their ideals. This is an extraordinarily superficial approach which almost seeks to write O’Connell out of O’Connellism. It is also highly arrogant to lecture others about the use of mandates which you failed to secure.
O’Connell has also suffered from being contrasted with the Young Irelanders – with their greater separatist purity and cultural dimensions. I think it is right that we continue to admire much about that group of idealists, but they never developed anything close to O’Connell’s ability to engage and inspire the Irish people. They also lacked his core humanistic ideals and internationalist approach. This was seen, for example, in the shameful attempt of John Mitchell and some others to stop O’Connell’s aggressively anti-slavery rhetoric because they felt it damaged fundraising.
Fifty years ago Eamonn de Valera visited Derrynane during the bicentenary of O’Connell’s birth and expressed what I think is the correct approach to understanding the retreat of O’Connell in the national consciousness. O’Connell had, according to the last surviving leader of the 1916 Rebellion, suffered unfairly because his generation focused too much on the perceived failure of Clontarf. Essentially that because O’Connell had failed to either achieve his ultimate goal or gone down fighting for it, that he was a tragic figure. This was something de Valera regretted and I believe that was because he could see the broader perspective of O’Connell’s significance.
I would also add that we can go too far in thinking that there is some recent or unified movement to ignore O’Connell. As long ago as 1889 Gladstone explained that his decision to write about O’Connell was because the great Irishman’s name was supposedly almost forgotten.
I think it is reasonable to make a number of major claims for the unique stature of Daniel O’Connell in our history and his impact on our development.
Firstly, Daniel O’Connell is by some distance the Irish person who had the biggest international impact in our entire history. In fact, I don’t think anyone else comes even close.
He was an international star, written about and followed in all societies which had a free press and in many which did not. In this he was no mere curiosity or celebrity, he was known because his actions and causes spoke to the concerns and aspirations of a broad swathe of humanity.
His movements for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal were the first mass, democratic political movements in history. Religious, personal and national freedom were near universal concerns – and for many beyond our shores O’Connell was their prophet.
In Europe, North America, South America and much further afield, people not only knew the name O’Connell, they knew what it stood for.
The campaigns for religious freedom in Prussia, for the end of serfdom in the Hapsburg lands, for sovereignty in South America and for the abolition of slavery in the United States were only some of the movements which saw O’Connell as a kindred spirit and an example.
His core humanistic belief in solidarity and what we now understand as individual democratic rights was at the centre of this appeal.
Secondly, I believe that O’Connell is one of the most important figures in shaping our core, nationalist political tradition and, therefore, the events of the last two centuries.
Following the comprehensive suppression of 1798 and the passage of the Act of Union, Ireland went through a politically dark period. National sentiment was largely suppressed and it was entirely possible that politics would remain weak, splintered and of little importance.
O’Connell revolutionised this. He not only brought new hope, he empowered nationalist sentiment in way that it quickly became and remained the dominant political allegiance of the majority.
As the far more radical Seán Ó Faoláin wrote about him 90 years after his death “O’Connell thought a democracy, and it rose”.
O’Connell’s campaigns established the idea that the people could achieve progress by working together and it set an ultimate objective of a separate, democratic state informed by key values.
This represents the essential foundation without which much of the nationalism and republicanism which followed would not have been possible. Even when later generations differed from O’Connell in their methods they could have achieved little without the basic national sentiment established during his campaigns.
It is important to say that O’Connell’s failure to find a way to understand or reach out to loyalist and unionist sentiment remains striking. And it also represents a failure for the generations who have followed, where loud advocacy has always been more valued than the harder work of engagement.
Finally, I believe that O’Connell still deserves our respect today as a figure essential to broadening our sense of identity and our aspirations for the future.
He is a complicated and complex figure who does not fit easily into any one contemporary political box. He has influenced us all, but he is owned by no one - which is exactly why he is such an important figure.
The values of democracy and solidarity. The European perspective. The search for ways of building alliances. The willingness to innovate and evolve over time. These are at the core of O’Connellism and they are more relevant today than they have ever been.
Gladstone, who had won many elections and served as prime minister while the British Empire was at its zenith, summed up the significance of O’Connell with the claim that he was “the greatest popular leader the world has ever known”.
Whether he still holds that position can be debated, but I don’t believe anyone can question that he remains the greatest popular leader Ireland has ever known.
-ENDS-