To mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, commemorated this week, An Post issued a stamp designed by graphic artist David Rooney which raised eyebrows due to its inclusion of a TV aerial. An Post defended the design as alluding to “the very modern, global range and impact of O’Connell”.
The stamp captures O’Connell in all his pomp; a triumphant procession in a gilded chariot through Dublin following his release from Richmond jail in 1844. He had called for the previous year, 1843, to be “the year of repeal” of the Act of Union and proposed the convening of an Irish “Council of Three Hundred”; a parliament of district “delegates”.
The planned “monster meeting” in Clontarf that October in pursuit of repeal was proclaimed illegal by the British government and O’Connell famously backed down to prevent bloodshed, after which he was convicted of sedition and imprisoned in Richmond, though in a suite in the prison governor’s house.
This was a turning point; what is notable about Rooney’s stamp is not just its surrealism but that it depicts a triumphant image that masked the end; sticking with Rooney’s modern media landscape imagining, O’Connell’s ratings were falling. As historian Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh observes, the cancellation of the Clontarf meeting “seriously damaged O’Connell’s aura of invincibility ... with repeal stopped in its tracks for the moment, O’Connell reverted, as he had ever done, to exploring alternative possibilities of renewed co-operation with the Whigs, and indeed expressed interest in canvassing federalist ideas as an alternative to repeal.
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“The young intellectuals found this compromising disposition and dilution of the demand for repeal on O’Connell’s part unworthy and unacceptable. The old leader, used to being followed rather than corrected, found the self-righteous and incorruptible stance of his young critics naive and, in a sense, impertinent.”
The impertinence endured. When Todd Andrews was one of the teenage members of a Sinn Féin club in Dublin in 1918. “It was accepted that Daniel O’Connell was a coward because he called off the Clontarf meeting, and, what was worse in the eyes of the Sinn Féin club members of 1917-21, he was a politician,” he said.
That generation came to their own reckoning with politics shortly afterwards; some managed to swallow the bitter pill of compromise; others never came to terms with what they regarded as the great betrayal that created a Free State within the empire rather than a republic. But they were all inheritors of O’Connell’s legacy: abstention from Westminster, after all, was an updated version of O’Connell’s “Council of Three Hundred” idea.
And while Irish republicans in the early 20th century may have revered O’Connell’s young critics, Thomas Davis and John Mitchel among them, their grandparents knew what it had been to live through the era of O’Connell as “the Liberator” and champion of Catholic emancipation.
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O’Connell’s personal vanity was a propelling force: “I wish to God I could make my motives so pure and disinterested as to care little for gratitude and applause,” he wrote to his wife Mary in 1825. He cared greatly for those things but also succeeded in the 1820s in carrying what historian Paul Bew termed “a massive weight of historic expectation” as “leader of a novel form of popular politics”. Historians have also documented his sectarian impulses, the extravagance of his spending, his relative disinterest in the Irish language, and the violence of the rhetoric he used to denounce political opponents.
But his emotional impact on Irish Catholics discriminated against by the penal laws and ingrained racism was profound. Consider, for example, his appeal to the Clare electorate in 1828: “Our Protestant friends really think we are beings of degraded minds – that because we are Catholics, we have neither reasoning nor understanding; they imagine we are creatures of an inferior grade to themselves ... I may be considered the representative of the suffering of my country.”
As evidenced by the commemorative stamp, where to place O’Connell and his relevance remains complicated. Any considered assessment must include debate about the merits of moral force, his placing of the Irish question at the centre of British politics and his international humanitarianism and championing of the anti-slavery cause, which was genuine and costly in relation to his standing in America.
In 1938, Seán O’Faoláin’s biography, King of the Beggars, presented a heroic narrative, lauding O’Connell as one who “drank deep of Europe” and fathered Irish democracy. Contemporary historians might be more nuanced and critical, but O’Faoláin did highlight the dangers of reductive hindsight, noting O’Connell was “radical only in relation to his times; never a republican ... never a social reformer ... there is no reason to blame him for that. His day is not ours.” He was, rather, “a brutal realist, occupied with the present conditions of his country,” whose “vision of an Irish democracy was limited by those conditions”.
