A Brief History of Ireland (Brief Histories) by Killeen Richard

Author:Killeen, Richard [Killeen, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781780330730
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2012-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

This self-dramatizing farrago of victimhood through the ages might raise a supercilious smile in sophisticated drawing rooms. It hit a powerful nerve in Co. Clare in 1828; a version of it continued to serve Catholic Ireland as a rough epitome of its history well into the twentieth century; there are many in modern Ireland who might argue with the tone but not with the substance. The Irish nation was forming itself in uncompromisingly Catholic terms. It was going to be hard for Protestants not to recoil from this new nation. If Vesey-FitzGerald’s face did not fit, what Protestant face would? Ireland had moved a long way in a generation from the blithe idealism of the United Irishmen.

O’Connell won. He polled 2,057 to Vesey-FitzGerald’s 982. The Tory government was now in a bind. O’Connell was the duly elected member for Co. Clare with over two-thirds of the vote. But he was unable to take his seat, if only because of the anti-Catholic clauses in the oath of allegiance. Peel was horrified by O’Connell’s ‘tens of thousands of disciplined fanatics’ and prudently concluded that it was worth facing down King George IV and the Tory ultras in order to mollify O’Connell’s ‘hereditary bondsmen’. Faced with outright electoral revolt in Ireland, and the implicit threat of something worse, the government capitulated. Catholic Emancipation was granted: Catholics could now sit in parliament, being required to take only a revised and inoffensive oath; hold office; and become judges. The price extracted to save some of the government’s face was the raising of the franchise threshold in Ireland from 40 shillings (£2) to £10. Thus the 40-shilling freeholders, who won Catholic Emancipation, were disenfranchised for their pains – at least for the moment.

It was O’Connell’s greatest hour. He was fifty-four years old and beyond question the dominant figure in Irish life. To his contemporaries, he was a mixture of hero and enigma. He had titanic energy and organizing ability; a sulphurous temper; torrential eloquence; vast reservoirs of charm. He was a genuine liberal in many respects, as his parliamentary career was to prove – he was philo-Semitic, a free-trader and an anti-slaver at a time when these were litmus tests of liberalism – yet he led a movement that was nakedly confessional. His political organization was based on the Catholic parishes and with the parishes came the priests. O’Connell stands accused of introducing the priests into Irish politics. He might have replied that he simply used the most practical means to hand and that, after all, the confessional rivalry between Protestant and Catholic was the decisive line of division in Irish life.

It was. The problem for O’Connell was that Ireland was not all Catholic. The three provinces of Leinster, Munster and Connacht were overwhelmingly so. But the northern province, Ulster, was not.

Ulster had a Protestant majority. It was not a united community. Tensions between members of the established Church of Ireland (Anglican), mainly of English descent, and the Presbyterians of Scots descent were very marked. The liberal impulse in Presbyterianism, with its instinct for democracy, had found expression in 1798.

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