Daniel O’Connell: Brain-washing with the Liberator [1975]

[Editor’s Note: The article below on how historians of different ideological backgrounds treat Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), the “Liberator”, was written by Desmond Greaves in the October 1975 issue of the “Irish Democrat” – that year being the 200th anniversary of O’Connell’s birth.]

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The 200th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell is giving some people in Ireland an occasion to use the reputation of the “Liberator” as an excuse for bashing political trends they disapprove of. Revisionist historians, white- washers of British imperialism and anti-national pundits and editorial writers of various kinds – of whom there are plenty in Ireland these days – are seeking to overthrow the view of O’Connell held by Fintan Lalor and James Connolly.

Every generation interprets the past in the light of its own political and economic problems. At present in Ireland, as part of the Common Market game and because of Britain’s failure to do the right thing in the North, a powerful lobby seeks to denigrate everything national. O’Connell, the “constitutionalist”, is opposed to the revolutionaries. O’Connell, the pacifist, is counterposed to the “men of violence”. O’Connell, the man who discouraged the use of Irish, is contrasted with those who wish to uphold and extend the language. A tradition of parliamentarism, moderation and constitutionalism going back to O’Connell, is praised as superior to the republicanism and radicalism which is allegedly causing such trouble in Ireland today.

The political whitewashing of the “Liberator” is, of course, carried out by middle-class conservative writers serving middle-class conservative interests. For just as O’Connell in his day – despite his achievements – sided with the lords of lands and of millions against those who championed the true interests of the people on key issues, so today it is the respectable, the comfortable and the monied who seek to use him as an ideological weapon against the forces and movements they most fear and hate – against republicanism, socialism and all radical agitation.

O’Connell did good work in rousing the people to oppose the penal laws and to organise in pressing the Government for their repeal, but his landlord background blinded him to the force which might have made it possible to repeal the Act of Union – the opposition to landlord tyranny of the peasantry combined with political leadership for national independence.

It was Fintan Lalor who showed how the forces of land agitation and a political struggle for independence could have rallied the mass of the Irish people into an enormously powerful movement at the time. O’Connell because of his stature and popularity was in an outstanding position to organise such a movement. But his class position prevented him from seeing or grasping the opportunity. Like other middle-class national leaders after him, he was afraid to lead the people on economic and social issues for fear they would want to travel further than he was himself willing to go, leaving him behind in doing so.

This was at the heart of O’Connell’s dispute with the Young Irelanders, who saw him for the essentially conservative politician that he was. His conservatism was shown also by his hostility to the emergence of trade unions when they sought to organise themselves in Britain, and by his opposition to the radical demands made by the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s.

Conservative politicians are praised by conservative historians, and a conservative period sees its reflection in other conservative periods.

So it is with Dan O’Connell and the current publicity he is receiving in Ireland. He did some good things and for them he should get the credit, but the judgement of Lalor and Connolly will remain definitive, irrespective of the exaggerations of O’Connell’s current “rehabilitators”.