16

Sean O’Faoláin, King of the Beggars (1938)

Sean O’Faoláin (John Whelan) and Frank O’Connor (Michael O’Donovan) were, like Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont or Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, an intellectual partnership of the type that makes it difficult to know, intellectually speaking, where one starts and the other leaves off. The two Corkmen, born within a few years of each other (O’Faoláin in 1900, O’Connor in 1903) worked together and knocked sparks off each other on and off for a generation, before they finally went their separate ways around 1950. O’Faoláin was a policeman’s son, and received a third-level education at University College Cork and later, at Harvard under a British Commonwealth scholarship. O’Connor left school while still a child and was almost completely a brilliantly self-educated scholar and storyteller. Some of the ideas in King of the Beggars seem to have been originally O’Connor’s, in particular the notion that the old aristocratic Gaelic order, so much lamented by the eighteenth-century poets, had been indifferent to, or even inimical to, the interests or general wellbeing of the common Irish people.

King of the Beggars is a powerful polemical argument in favour of Daniel O’Connell as the true founder of the modern Irish political nation, a nation the Irish leader had himself seen clearly as oppressed and profoundly dispirited. The Liberator himself remarked toward the end of his life:

I never will get half credit enough for carrying Emancipation, because posterity never can believe the species of animals with which I had to carry on my warfare with the common enemy.1

O’Connell’s reputation had, by the 1930s, been fairly consistently darkened by a century-long radical nationalist series of attacks, beginning with John Mitchel in the 1840s and continuing with Fenian and republican critiques in later years. Essentially O’Connell was condemned for his royalism and his acceptance of the continuation of some kind of a union with Great Britain. This acceptance was in the context of a liberated and democratised Ireland faithful to the Crown but enjoying its own representative institutions in the form of a Dublin parliament. He was faulted also by Irish cultural revivalists such as Daniel Corkery or the leaders of the Gaelic League of 1893 for accepting the defeat of Gaelic culture and welcoming the coming of the English language as the everyday language of the people. It is clear that O’Connell had seen this as essential for the mental liberation of the Irish people and their entry into the modern commercialised world of the English-speaking peoples.

O’Faoláin celebrates this O’Connell. He sees O’Connell as far more an authentic representative of the Irish people in his populism, ambivalence, realism and humorous acceptance of the everyday circumstances in which he found himself than was any canting republican ideologue. O’Connell saw the Irish people as degraded, certainly, but as also the human materials out of which might be forged an Irish democracy. He sensed the power that lay in the hands of the masses under the English Constitution if they were only to become aware that in their numbers lay their strength, a strength which could be called upon if they only consented to organise. This forging of an Irish democracy was the task he set himself and was his life’s work, argues O’Faoláin. This nation of slaves and beggars was to become a nation of citizens, masters of their government and of their collective destiny. O’Faoláin’s O’Connell saw that the Irish Catholic Church and English and Irish liberals of any religion were to be his allies in this task. His enemies were the Irish aristocracy with their corrupt stranglehold on the court system and local government, reinforced by its alliance with the English Tories. His weapons against them were his knowledge of the law and his keen awareness of their contempt for the principles of justice that lay behind the law. His native intelligence and underlying peasant hardness served him well. His public humiliation of judges, plaintiffs and packed juries made him a hero to the ordinary people for whom the law had long been a capricious and dangerous foe. The Irish democracy which O’Connell began to build by turning the law against its aristocratic enemies was to be given its capstone a century later by Michael Collins, who offered an incredulous nation the freedom to achieve freedom in the form of a democratic political order in 1922. An underlying liberalism and a popular capacity for tolerance survived the onset of anti-modernism and isolationism and the consequent imposition of a deeply obscurantist censorship between 1929 and 1967. This spirit of Irish democracy was O’Connell’s enduring legacy. O’Faoláin wrote:

There is but small respect due to the end of the old order of Gaeldom, to that eighteenth-century collection of the disjecta membra of an effete traditionalism. There is respect due but to one man. We must respect Dan O’Connell, despite all his faults, all his mean lawyer’s tricks, all his ambiguity, all his dishonesty, evasiveness, snobbery, because he, at least, he alone, had the vision to realise that a democracy could be born out of the rack and ruin of Limerick and 1691, out of the death and decay of antiquity – and it decayed rather than died, for it was rotting before it disappeared, and it stank before it was buried.

He, a Kerry peasant, one of the people, to be acknowledged and entitled The Man of the People, took the beggars of Limerick and gave them a kingdom of the mind. All he said to them was that they were not a rabble, and that they could, out of their own collective strength, make themselves into a nation.

With his tall hat cocked on the side of his curly head, his cloak caught up in his fist, a twinkle in his eye, he became King of the Beggars. The dates merge: 1691, and he that came in the middle of the century after, and won out by 1829. The dates merge, for less than one hundred years after he had emancipated his people, this modern Ireland came into being.2

This argument is not just a vindication of O’Connell, but is also a scarcely veiled but tacit attack on the whole Gaelic revivalist ideology associated with O’Faoláin’s old mentor, Daniel Corkery, the Gaelic League of Eoin MacNeill and Douglas Hyde, the assertion of a neo-Gaelic Ireland by Patrick Pearse and the values absorbed as youths by both himself and O’Connor during the revolutionary years. This was spotted by several commentators in a Studies symposium in 1938.3 One of the contributors, Michael Tierney, protested against O’Faoláin’s apparent consignment of all Irish cultural history before 1690 to the rubbish bin. Tierney granted that O’Faoláin was right to argue that Ireland’s modern political culture was derived from English models, but asserted that the Gaelic world, even in a somewhat faked and revived form, had a civilising and humanising influence: ‘The real study of Irish history has only begun, that of Irish literature is in its infancy.’ Daniel A. Binchy made a similar plea, and expressed scepticism about O’Faoláin’s claim to dismiss an Irish history which O’Faoláin himself obviously understood and by which he was really fascinated much as were Binchy and Tierney themselves. Binchy felt that O’Faoláin’s strictures on the old Gaelic order were anachronistic, as the common people thought as did their lords, and kept their loyalty to their leaders to the end in 1690. O’Faoláin was to stick to his guns, however, and assert repeatedly in subsequent decades that a century or two of history was quite enough for us Irish, descended as we were from slaves and defeated gentry. Perhaps he protested too much; like most Irish people of that time he was actually obsessed by Irish history and it was indeed a long nightmare from which he was trying mightily to awake; King of the Beggars is O’Faoláin’s own wake-up call as well as one for the Irish people of the twentieth century.

Almost certainly, the book is as much an attack on Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland as it is an attack on the neo-Gaelic idea or on insurrectionist republicanism. Certainly, it was a frontal assault on a nostalgic nationalist orthodoxy that was already showing signs of being set in stone for the foreseeable future. It is also evident that, in reality, O’Faoláin was interested all his life in Irish history seen in the longue durée, writing essays, for instance, on the intellectual life of early Irish Christianity. Also, he used that history himself as a weapon against his critics. It may be that O’Connor’s fascination with what he called ‘the backward look’ softened O’Faoláin’s rejectionism. But then, a few years after writing King of the Beggars O’Faoláin published a book on Hugh O’Neill, the sixteenth-century Ulster Gaelic leader, The Great O’Neill (1942). Intriguingly, this book argues for O’Neill as a modernising renaissance prince rather than a defender of an archaic social and political order.4 History was being used again as a weapon in modern Ireland’s current political life.

O’Faoláin’s O’Connell is a flawed hero. His vituperation, vulgarity, cunning and often unscrupulous style of public argument became recognisable long-term features of Irish democratic life, and not its nobler features at that. Furthermore, despite his extraordinary charisma, O’Connell failed in many of his projects. Even Catholic Emancipation, his greatest success, was passed at the expense of the voting rights of the forty-shilling freeholders, and something close to manhood suffrage was not achieved until the 1880s, fifty years later. He understood that the poorer peasants saw the vote as a burden, as they were afraid to express their political wills freely in an open ‘voiced’ ballot; it took a certain amount of property to make for political courage in a loud public declaration of preference. Again, he took the side of the more reactionary bishops in the 1840s in the controversy over the Queen’s Colleges, meaning that third-level education for Catholics was effectively postponed until the twentieth century. However, the centrality of O’Connellite democracy to Irish political culture has persisted now for nearly two centuries, and various attempts to camouflage that fact have failed. Where he wended his political way, Parnell, de Valera and thousands of others were forced willy-nilly to follow. His name is still on the principal streets of many Irish towns and villages, and as de Beaumont prophesied in 1839, he has never been forgotten by the Irish people. The Irish political party with all of its populism and craftiness was his greatest organisational invention, and it remains central to Irish democracy. King of the Beggars documents that fact brilliantly.

Fergus O’Ferrall has pointed out in a penetrating article that O’Connell’s central legacy was one of political ideas and practices associated with liberty.5 Classical liberalism survived in Ireland almost as a folk tradition of tolerance and egalitarianism, despite occasional incomprehension of it by some writers of Catholic provenance:

There exists a traditional lack of understanding of liberalism in Irish Catholic circles. Liberal Catholicism seems a strange, even a contradictory, conjuncture to many. Seamus Deane, for example, in a recent essay on ‘Edmund Burke and the Ideology of Irish Liberalism’ totally ignores liberal Catholicism, describing ‘the dominant liberal tradition in Irish political thought’ as stemming from late seventeenth-century writers such as Molyneux, to Burke and the United Irishmen and then, inexplicably, jumping to James Connolly and Liam Mellows.6

Despite authoritarianism, censorship and traditions of political secrecy, an essential liberalism has survived in Ireland. O’Connell’s politics, which included not only the defence of Catholic rights, but which also included demands for Jewish emancipation and opposition to black slavery has lived on, often not really recognised as such, in modern Ireland. As O’Ferrall argues, O’Faoláin, in a later book The Irish (1947 and 1969), addresses the question of Irish attitudes toward liberty, and toward what O’Faoláin acidly termed their ‘lovely past’.7 The Irish did not really turn their backs on that past until a generation or two had elapsed after the revolution of 1913–1923. These younger men and women finally set out to construct a new Ireland that had ‘nothing to do with the Past’. In this they were acting squarely in the tradition of O’Connell rather than in that of the Gaelic League. This change from more spectacular forms of revolutionary activity began slowly and tentatively, O’Faoláin argues. It did not really accelerate properly until the sons, in some cases the grandsons and granddaughters, of men and women of the generation of 1916 set out, in earnest, to make liberty viable in terms of the modern commercial and industrial world.8 The change did not go unchallenged. The gun and the bomb remained on the agenda in the minds of some, as O’Faoláin argued in 1947 and 1969.

… that restless ghost, our Past, still refused to go away. Unplacated, it had tauntingly pursued Fianna Fail for several years after they achieved power, under the shadowy name of the IRA. Haunted like Richard III by the ghosts they had deposed Fianna Fail treated them as they themselves had been treated in their own ghostly days. They imprisoned the ghost, starved it, executed it and apparently crushed it. With the [second world] war the ghost rose bloodily again and sank again. It was again rustling around the pillows of Fianna Fail in the early sixties.9

In fact, just at the time O’Faoláin republished The Irish in revised form in 1969, the armed struggle myth reasserted itself in Northern Ireland, causing thousands of deaths over the following thirty years. However, the constitutional tradition founded by O’Connell was, in the long term, to prove stronger than the anti-O’Connellite tradition of insurrectionist republicanism, and did so in both parts of Ireland, the North belatedly following the South on to the road of constitutionalism in the 1990s. Ironically, it was in precisely that part of Ireland that O’Connell had had his greatest political failure; he rarely entered Ulster during his political career.

In the seventy five years since the publication of King of the Beggars, Irish history has continued to vindicate the essential validity of its central thesis: Daniel O’Connell gave the Irish the democratic political process, and very slowly and very reluctantly that politics has been replacing the older, more primitive culture of incoherent violence that O’Connell despised so much and recognised as the real enemy in its Croppy and Ribbon forms two centuries ago.

TG

Notes

1Sean O’Faoláin, King of the Beggars (London: Nelson, 1938), p.x.

2Ibid., p,20.

3Symposium on King of the Beggars. Michael Tierney, ‘Daniel O’Connell and the Gaelic Past’ with responses by Gerald Murphy, Daniel A. Binchy and Sean O’Faolàin’, Studies, Vol. 27, No. 107 (September 1938), pp.353–80.

4Sean O’Faoláin, The Great O’Neill [1942] (Cork: Mercier, 1970). First published in London by Longmans, Green.

5Fergus O’Ferrall, ‘Liberty and Catholic Politics, 1790–1990’, in Maurice O’Connell, Daniel O’Connell, Political Pioneer (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1991), pp.35–56, quote from p.52.

6Ibid.

7Sean O’Faoláin, The Irish [1947] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p.145.

8Ibid., p.145.

9Ibid., p.156.