In the very week of March 1844 in which the exchange of words took place in the Repeal Association between the Young Irelander, Barry, and John O’Connell about his father’s intentions in England, Thomas Davis himself wrote John O’Connell a private letter expressing his own anxiety. He suggested that the success which the Liberator was soon enjoying in England was ‘embarrassing’ and even contradictory to the Repeal policy. There was an almost panicky note in Davis’s letter.
‘I do not, and cannot suppose,’ he wrote, ‘that your father ever dreamt of abandoning Repeal to escape a prison, yet that is implied in all the Whig [newspaper] articles.’1
Yet when the record of this short campaign of O’Connell’s in England is examined, it seems that Davis was paying an almost obsessional attention to what the Whig newspapers were saying, rather than to what O’Connell himself was saying. And in view of the fact that no alternative to O’Connell’s practical attempt to win English support had been suggested by anyone else, Davis’s implied suspicions seem unworthy of him.
In O’Connell’s public references to Repeal on this visit he usually made clearer than was strictly necessary his intention to seek, in the long run, nothing short of full Repeal. But his chief concern was to make Repeal acceptable to English ears. Thus, at Birmingham, where on 9 March 1844 he spoke on the same platform as the Federalist Sharman Crawford, he admitted openly that if the Union had been a fair bargain between Britain and Ireland it ought to be preserved, but denied that it was a fair bargain. (The emphasis was different from that of the thirties when he had talked openly about ‘testing’ the Union.) At the same time he denied that Repeal of the Union meant separation, maintaining that he would be against it if it did and insisting that one of his chief reasons for being in favour of ‘a just and equitable Repeal’ was that it alone could prevent eventual separation. (His tactful use of the adjectives ‘just’ and ‘equitable’ in Sharman Crawford’s presence made it unnecessary to go into any precise distinctions between Federalism and full Repeal.) His way of putting things was not that of the Young Irelanders, but then their more aggressively expressed nationalism would not have won many voices for Repeal of the Union within the British political system. In fact, O’Connell’s argument was to become the basic argument of the vast majority of nationalist Irishmen for the rest of the nineteenth century and the first sixteen years of the twentieth.
The day after this Birmingham meeting another large meeting took place in Manchester – this time without O’Connell – to direct the government’s attention to ‘the public grievances under which the people of Ireland labour’.2 The Mayor presided. Professors, bankers and clergy were among the sponsors. There was enthusiastic applause at the mention of O’Connell’s name. Certainly, it was primarily a Whig rally. But it was also a valuable part of that necessary process of softening up English opinion if Repeal were ever to be won by constitutional means. And no Young Irelander was then in favour of it being won by any other.
In the following week a great dinner was given to O’Connell in the theatre at Covent Garden, where the auditorium was entirely boarded over and made level with the stage.3 A number of Whig notables were present, including the Earl of Shrewsbury who proposed the toast of ‘The People’, and particularly ‘The Irish People’, though in a rather confused and dated way he seemed to mean by this the Irish country gentlemen. However, he announced the opening of a new era in history, and the toast of ‘O’Connell’ was received with immense cheering, the whole audience rising en masse and cheering and waving handkerchiefs for several minutes on end.
But though playing for British support, O’Connell was aware of the anxiety of the young men who were his political élite in Ireland, and was careful to consider them too. At Coventry on the following Monday he took up the remark of an earlier speaker who had said, in an over-accommodating manner, that what O’Connell was looking for was not in fact really Repeal of the Union at all, but simply justice for Ireland.
‘Now,’ said O’Connell of this speaker, ‘he was mistaken in his views of my objects for although it is true that I am looking for justice to the Irish people, yet I see no prospect of justice. I believe there is none in any other means than by a restoration of her domestic legislature to Ireland …. If,’ he went on in familiar vein, ‘by looking for Repeal of the Union I sought a separation of the two countries, I would be wrong in seeking it – but a Repeal of the Union would not produce separation – it would unite the two countries more closely.’4 He refused to leave his audience with any comforting sense of ambiguity about his final purpose: ‘You can never convince me that any other than an Irish Parliament will give justice to Ireland, and I will go to the grave with that feeling.’ But he compensated by concluding in his woolliest vein with a call for ‘a strong pull and a long pull for England and Ireland – for Ireland and for England; a strong pull and a long pull, and a pull altogether’. He sat down amid loud and renewed cheering.
Before leaving England for Ireland at the end of March 1844 O’Connell told a great indoor meeting at Liverpool, for which tickets had been changing hands at treble their official price, that if justice were not done to Ireland and the Union repealed there would be ‘a bloody revolution and separation between the two countries’.5 After a night at the Adelphi Hotel he sailed for Ireland, where Smith O’Brien was quick to approve his visit and wholly refute any suggestion that it had been nothing but a Whig manoeuvre.6
The date was approaching on which O’Connell and his six co-defendants were due for sentence on the conspiracy charge. Temporary loss of O’Connell’s leadership would inevitably be a serious tactical blow for the Repeal Association. He made clear how he wished its affairs to be conducted in his absence. At a dinner at Cork on 8 April 1844, at which a letter of support from MacHale, the Archbishop of Tuam, was read, O’Connell laid down the principle that ‘the Repeal must continue’, adding: ‘If you want to confer on me comfort when in my dungeon, you will rally for Old Ireland and Repeal.’7
On 30 May 1844 he was sentenced with the others to a year’s imprisonment. The Nation protested between black borders: ‘He, the King of your hearts, cannot step this land which he has so served, beyond the walls of his gaol.’8 Smith O’Brien, at the first meeting of the Repeal Association after the sentence, swore to vehement applause that he would not allow a drop of intoxicating liquor to pass his lips until O’Connell was released.9
O’Connell’s dungeon in fact turned out to be a luxurious one. The Dublin prison in which he was confined was under the control of the Dublin Corporation and the Governor graciously vacated his own house for O’Connell’s use. He was allowed as many visitors as he liked. Food was sent in from outside and very large dinner parties of twenty-four people or more were frequent, sometimes held in a special dining tent in the garden from which a tricolour flag was flown until over this at least the Governor put his foot down.**10 Smith O’Brien, who now assumed something of the position of O’Connell’s deputy in the Association, was able to consult with him continually, while Davis, who ran The Nation while Gavan Duffy served his sentence, was equally able to consult with him as much as he liked. Nevertheless, a great wave of sympathy and protest at the sentences was felt all over Ireland, and the additional enthusiasm for the Repeal cause in which it resulted was immediately signalled in a sudden prodigious rise in the Repeal Rent. The weekly sum had been drifting sluggishly around the £500 mark until O’Connell’s imprisonment, but it rose sharply to over £2,500 in the week in which he was sentenced and climbed still higher to over £3,000 a week for several weeks afterwards.11 These amounts, which in the money values of the mid-nineteenth century were considerable, were subscribed almost entirely in small sums by people in all walks of life – carmen, coach-lace weavers, solicitors, stockbrokers, priests, peasants, etc. Almost all of it came from Ireland itself. Of the tally of £3,389 14s 8d recorded in The Nation of 22 June 1844, only £34 came from America. More progress, wrote Davis in The Nation of 15 June, heading his leader ‘Third Week of the Captivity’, had been made in the previous fortnight than in any other quarter of the agitation.12
Davis now gave his mind to the question of how this favourable situation was to be turned to more practical advantage. He stressed particularly the need for internal unity and, on the principle that any sort of domestic legislature would at least give nationality ‘a temple’, he added that a Federalist was ‘a Repealer of the Union as decidedly as if he never called himself a Federalist’.13 He made it clear that The Nation itself thought that a claim in the government of the Empire and consent to contribute taxes and soldiers towards its upkeep ‘seems to us unwise’ but that this was ‘not such a difference as should make us divide’.14
Signs of a broad, if vague, sort of Irish unity were indeed coming from some unexpected quarters. In July 1844 an Irish National Society was formed in London to bring peers and gentlemen together for the promotion of social and intellectual intercourse among Irishmen, irrespective of political differences. The Earl of Clanrickarde and Lord Castlereagh were listed among its members, together with one of O’Connell’s sons, Maurice. This was the first of a number of such attempts made in these years to bring Irishmen of all parties together in London on the basis of nothing but their Irishness. Such groupings never led to anything very positive or constructive, but in retrospect they can be seen as a residual flickering of that sense of Protestant gentry nationalism which had partly inspired the more broadly based Irish nationalism now at work. At the time, to the young men of The Nation, they seemed more like the flickering of a reviving than a dying fire, a first faint sign of their vision being fulfilled.
Late in August 1844 a development in foreign affairs suggested a much more promising analogy with the years of the Volunteers. France became engaged in a series of actions against the Sultan of Morocco to which the British Government reacted with traditional sensitivity. The Nation declared that if war were to come between England and France then Repeal must be made to follow. There was no specific proposal as to how exactly this might be done beyond increased nationalist efforts to acquire knowledge and improve organization. But the inference was obvious. At the end of the month the paper spelt things out. The Prince de Joinville had bombarded the island and town of Mogador, while on land Marshal Bugeaud had defeated twenty-four thousand Moorish cavalry. ‘We heave a sigh for Morocco,’ wrote Davis in The Nation. ‘We rejoice for Ireland. There is hope for us in every volley …’ He drew the parallel with 1779. ‘The opportunity of 1779 may come again – our garrisons empty – an invader on the horizon.’ He addressed himself to Peel, telling him how rapidly he should endeavour to conciliate the people by releasing their leaders and yielding Ireland to the Irish; for ‘nationality consecrates a coast’. How too he ‘should accept their volunteer battalions, and strengthen their Patriotism by arsenals and discipline’.15
Yet even in this prospective concrete situation The Nation offered no practical scheme to nationalists. There was no call for the formation of volunteers, merely one to strengthen the Association by forming Repeal Reading Rooms and increasing contributions to the Repeal Rent. The furthest Davis went was to exhort Repealers to ‘carefully study every book and map that may qualify them for the defence of their soil’.16
The war did not materialize, but within a fortnight something happened which gave almost as much hope to the Repeal movement. Against all expectation, the judgement on O’Connell and his fellow prisoners was reversed in the House of Lords. They were released the same day, but chose to return to the prison for the night so that a triumphal procession of some 200,000 citizens could make the most of the event on the following day. Similar rejoicing took place all over Ireland. In Cork there was ‘the very ecstasy of joyous delirium’.17 The bands turned out. Bonfires were lit. Houses were decked with laurel. Torchbearers and blazing tar barrels turned night into day and beacons flared from hill to hill across the countryside.18
But when the first natural excitement was over, the same question which had faced Repealers before O’Connell’s imprisonment still remained: what was the next step to be?
Duffy’s retrospective account of events, coloured by Young Ireland’s subsequent quarrel with O’Connell, tries to establish that a physical and mental deterioration of O’Connell set in after his release from imprisonment.19 But there is no evidence of this at the time. There is no contemporary comment on a physical deterioration in O’Connell until November 1846. Then it is his friend, W. J. O’Neill Daunt, who notes specifically that while ‘his physical energies are plainly decaying’ he displays ‘unimpaired intellectual power’.20 Even in the following year, only a few months before O’Connell’s death, Daunt records that, though complaining of the feebleness of age, O’Connell declared himself otherwise ‘very well’.21 And Daunt was no sycophant, like Tom Steele, O’Connell’s so-called ‘Head Pacificator’ and others of his supporters in the Association. Certainly Duffy’s implication of O’Connell’s rapid decline into enfeeblement and senility after his release cannot be sustained, though his need to find some explanation that was not too painful for events which even forty years later were painful to look back upon is understandable.
In his first speech to the Association a few days after his release, O’Connell faced up to the problem of what the next step was to be without claiming to be able to supply the answer. Though he maintained that the Clontarf meeting had been legally summoned and illegally prohibited, he was on the whole against risking another challenge of that sort. Pre-eminent in his mind was the need to preserve what had always given his movement its strength: namely, the fact that, unlike the United Irishmen’s demand for nationality, it was not treasonably expressed.
The trial and the original legal decision against him had plainly given him a fright, and something like an obsession with this fright can be seen in his first suggestion – soon dropped – to prosecute those British authorities who had brought about his imprisonment; the Attorney General, the Judges and the British Ministers themselves. His other positive proposal was to proceed with the plan for the summons of a Council of Three Hundred (the same number of members as had sat in the old Irish Parliament). Since this plan had been actively under review when the prosecution was instigated he approached the subject now with extreme caution, and emphasized that it was full of legal difficulty. The fifty-year-old Convention Act, expressly designed to prevent any such extra-parliamentary body from meeting, was still on the Statute Book and O’Connell’s old confidence in his ability to drive a coach and six through any Act of Parliament had been rudely shaken. However, he was in favour of summoning the Council ‘as a Preservative Society’ which, while initiating nothing, should act as the supreme sanctioning and consultative body for the Association itself.22
Duffy, in his later history, suggests that Young Ireland’s reaction to this speech of O’Connell’s was one of disappointment bordering on dismay. But the issue of The Nation which reported it does not bear him out. The leading article appearing under its regular heading, ‘Remember the 30th May’,** in summarizing the Association’s prospects said: ‘the Preservative Society must be made a reality, though we concur with O’Connell that it must be done slowly and carefully’.23 It also agreed with O’Connell in deprecating a Clontarf meeting. Further, it advised a renewal of those arbitration courts which in the previous years had heard something like four thousand cases in an indigenous Irish process altogether outside the machinery of British law, and had obtained acceptance for their verdicts in all but a minute percentage of cases.24
O’Connell himself was in favour of these courts, though again he was anxious to keep their activities separate from the Association lest their possible illegality should endanger it.25 Nor was there anything in the rest of The Nation’s article with which O’Connell would not have agreed. Better organization was needed. The Reading Rooms should be extended. The men of the North should be educated, and England must be taught that it was in her interest to have Ireland a friendly neighbour helping her in danger, rather than a discontented province. In general the paper struck a most realistic note: ‘… while legally we are in the same position as on the day they [O’Connell and the other defendants] were impeached, politically we are far stronger. We have rallied good and generous men in our adversity …. We are far stronger than we were a year ago …. We have got where we are by organization, conciliation and peace. Our peace cannot be improved – the People cannot do better than adhere to their present obedience to the law.’26
In a speech at a banquet in his honour a few days later O’Connell echoed The Nation’s general tone. Their first duty, he said, was ‘to combine together the Irish of every sect and persuasion – to unite and combine Irishmen of every gradation of opinion who agree with us in thinking one thing necessary – the Repeal of the Union’.27
Many hopeful portents for such a combination were in the air. The Federal idea was becoming increasingly popular among men who had been previously opposed to the Repeal movement, and Sharman Crawford had actually sent a letter to this very banquet in O’Connell’s honour, apologizing for his absence. O’Connell took up an inference in this letter that Repealers ruled out Federalism, which he said was quite incorrect. It was true that most members of the Association preferred ‘simple Repeal, but there is not one of us that would not be content to Repeal the Act of Union and substitute a Federal Parliament, not one. I don’t think Federalism to be the best, but I was never one of those who had such an overweening opinion of the infallibility of my own judgement as not readily to yield to argument, and cooperate with anyone that thinks better. I am ready to join with Federalists to repeal the Act of Union.’28 He even went so far as to propose that he should hand over leadership of a combined movement to a new Protestant recruit for Federalism, a former Orangeman who was now High Sheriff of County Fermanagh, named Grey Porter.
Though such extravagant and uncharacteristic humility can be discounted as oratorical display, O’Connell was again undoubtedly sounding the one note which seemed likely to promise real advance for the Repeal movement, namely conciliation of those forces which were in any case moving towards it. Some time before this banquet a high Tory of distinction on the Dublin Corporation, a Dr Maunsell, had written to him with a proposal which while not going so far as Federalism was significant enough of a general shift in opinion. This proposal was that while the Act of Union itself should not be altered, the Imperial Parliament should meet in Dublin every three years. In this case O’Connell could only reply politely that much though the prospect of working together for Ireland with such men as Dr Maunsell delighted him in principle, he could not support this particular measure as it was clearly intended as a substitute for Repeal. Nevertheless, as Davis himself pointed out, the proposal did represent at least a ‘loosening of ideas, an abandonment of the old superstition that all was right’.29
That the general conciliatory line of tactics was a promising one seems confirmed by the British Government’s own reaction to these straws in the wind. Graham, the Home Secretary, wrote to Peel, the Prime Minister, voicing his suspicion that ‘the Federal arrangement will be the middle term on which for the moment opposite parties will agree: and some scheme of national representation will be devised, to which the Whigs will agree’.30 And the fact that the proposal for occasional Imperial Parliaments in Dublin should come from such a high Tory as Dr Maunsell alarmed him still further.31 Even Lord John Russell, the leader of the Whigs, seemed frightened by the way things were going and wrote to the Duke of Leinster asserting his determination to maintain the Union and reject any Federal solution.32
All this makes the breach that was about to take place between O’Connell and Young Ireland on the subject of Federalism difficult to understand. For The Nation, under both Davis’s and Duffy’s editorship, at first appeared wholly to endorse O’Connell’s tactic. ‘Mr O’Connell,’ it wrote, two days after his banquet speech, ‘is prepared to welcome Federalism …. We too will hail the concession of Irish supremacy in Ireland and will give this plan a fair trial.’33 And a week later, in another leading article headed ‘Conservative Repealers’, it drew attention to the fact that the Protestants felt sold out by the government and were therefore ready to listen to new suggestions that might be in their interests.34 ‘Federalism is making such way,’ The Nation continued, ‘both among Tories and Whigs, here and in England, as to lead us to hope that that great object will be gained without a shot being fired.’35
The new spirit among Conservatives derived partly from the developing political split between Peelites and anti-Peelites within the party. And it was not just wishful thinking to suppose that this internal split might be turned to advantage by advocates of the Repeal cause. An anti-Repeal English journal, the London Examiner, commented on the advance of the Repeal cause as moderate and sensible men came to see that in their own interests some new parliamentary organization was necessary ‘to adjust appropriate legal capacity and attention to the peculiar needs of different parts of the country’. ‘Affairs,’ continued the London Examiner, ‘have become too complex for the careless scrambling legislation in a mob of six hundred members … a very considerable portion of the thinking classes … are of opinion that the duties of the legislature have outgrown its means of performing them.’36
At the weekly meeting of Belfast repealers in those days it was no unusual thing now for Protestants and Orangemen to be proposed as members or associates. And the ultra-Tory Belfast Newsletter, in commenting that there were now many distinguished Conservatives openly supporting Federalism, wrote of ‘most extraordinary times’ and that the crisis of Ireland’s fate was approaching.37 No wonder The Nation felt optimistic. ‘Let the people go on as they had begun,’ it wrote, ‘– growing more thoughtful, more temperate, more educated, more resolute – let them complete their parish organization, carry out their registries, and above all establish those Reading Rooms which will inform and strengthen them into liberty; and ’ere Many Years Work, the Green Flag will be saluted by Europe, and Ireland will be a Nation.’ None of this fits in with the ‘silent discontent and dismay’ which Duffy nearly forty years later remembered to have greeted O’Connell’s utterances on his release.
After the necessary three weeks or so of speech-making and celebration O’Connell retired to his home, Darrynane Abbey in County Kerry, for a short holiday. This was reasonable enough for a man of seventy who had just emerged from three months’ confinement, even of a comfortable sort. He found his farm in excellent shape with the richest crop of hay of anyone in the district, and he was soon out on the hills delightedly hunting hares with his pack of beagles. Acknowledging his debt to ‘my merciful God for my health and strength’ he concluded a letter to one of his closest friends, ‘I am becoming very impatient to hear authentically from “the Federalists”.’38 Ten days later, he wrote a letter to the Repeal Association almost ten thousand words long containing his thoughts on future policy.
In this letter O’Connell started from two premises. First, it would be ‘criminal’ not to exploit their great legal victory ‘to achieve the great object of our desires – the restoration of an Irish Parliament’.39 Secondly, the conciliation of a sizeable body of Protestants was necessary in order to do so. Having demonstrated from ancient and recent history that Protestants had nothing to fear from a Catholic ascendancy, he proceeded to examine that movement which, for the first time since the Union, seemed to show Protestants again moving towards the idea of an Irish Parliament, namely Federalism. He recommended some alliance with it, and in terms of political tactics in the prevailing situation it was a realistic enough recommendation to make. Although O’Connell already knew enough of The Nation group to realize that political realism was not their strong point, it was not unreasonable to expect their support in this policy in view of their frequent editorial blessings on Federalism in The Nation in the past, and in particular in view of the fact that Davis himself was even at that moment in Belfast conducting negotiations with prominent Federalists.40
In fact the only practical difficulty O’Connell appeared to see was that the Federalists were not yet themselves precisely agreed on how their scheme was to work. But while admitting this reservation and making clear that no such precise scheme could be expected to come from him he went so far as to declare: ‘For my own part, I will own, I do at present feel a preference for the Federative plan, as tending more to the utility of Ireland, and to the maintenance of the connection with England than the mode of simple Repeal.’41
The qualification ‘at present’ seems to denote plainly the waiting game on which he was embarking. Davis himself had specifically approved such a game, writing of O’Connell the day after he had left for Darrynane: ‘He is wisely playing a slow game to let the Federalists … show themselves.’42
In the end O’Connell’s attempt at a new tactical move came to nothing for the Federalists remained unable to agree publicly on a precise formula. Indeed, his rather transparent eagerness to embrace them may have scared some of them off altogether. But their failure to respond gave him a way of escape from an even greater embarrassment. For O’Connell’s statement on Federalism rather surprisingly led to the first major public disagreement between The Nation and himself, a portent of disastrous things to come.
Duffy alone of those prominent in The Nation group had been in Dublin when O’Connell’s letter to the Association was inserted in the minutes.43 Without consulting any of the other Young Irelanders he published in the leader column of The Nation an open letter to O’Connell, signed by himself, repudiating the idea of any compromise on pure and total Repeal of the Act of Union.
It is possible to read between the lines of Duffy’s later writings that Davis himself did not approve of Duffy’s action.44 It would have been odd if he had approved, since he was then negotiating with Federalists in Belfast. And at the time Davis even described O’Connell’s letter as ‘very able of its kind’, though he thought his gesture of embrace towards the Federalists was too precipitate.45 Federalism could never be a final settlement, but it deserved a fair trial and toleration; in any case, whether they went through Federation or not, he believed there would be no limit to Irish nationality in twenty years.46 However, once Duffy in The Nation had made his purist stand for principle regardless of political expediency, Davis could only back him up. A fortnight later in The Nation he himself was stressing that Ireland’s aspiration was ‘for UNBOUNDED NATIONALITY’.
O’Connell seems to have been genuinely surprised, and not without reason, at the sudden indignation of his young supporters. He quickly seized on the Federalists’ failure to agree a detailed scheme as justification for reappearing as ‘a simple Repealer’ again, literally snapping his fingers in public at Federalism, as something that had let him down.47 But though The Nation soon radiated a conciliatory tone, reassuring its readers that all was going well with Ireland and that cordiality and resolution were perfectly restored,48 the situation was in two senses unalterably different after the incident. In the first place, the relationship between O’Connell, the experienced politician, and those literary idealists who were the intellectual élite of his movement, had taken an open turn for the worse. Secondly, a possible new tactic by which the Repeal movement might break through the post-Clontarf political deadlock had disintegrated. Though public enthusiasm for Repeal remained as great as ever, it was now again as difficult as ever to use that enthusiasm to effect.
In this frustrating situation the differences of temperament and outlook between O’Connell and Young Ireland grew more and more inescapable, and were increasingly reflected within the transactions of the Repeal Association. Contempt for many of the sycophants and provincial time-servers by whom the Liberator was surrounded, including his favourite son John; embarrassment about the lack of sound accountancy with which the Repeal Rent and other funds were administered; a dislike, though many Young Irelanders were themselves Catholics, of a routine sectarian flag-waving which even O’Connell was inclined to fall back on in the absence of other emotive material; but above all youth’s natural leanings towards uncompromising political puritanism in a power vacuum which O’Connell alone was seriously committed to fill – all these things made Young Ireland more and more impatient with the undoubted fact that O’Connell was the only conceivable leader who commanded the affections and loyalty of the Irish people.
Reciprocally, O’Connell, shouldering all political responsibility in a power situation which by the nature of the Union Parliament was heavily loaded against him, and in any case inevitably feeling something of an older man’s natural resentment for the cocksureness and intransigence of youth, found his particular style of pragmatic manoeuvre increasingly cramped by Young Ireland’s independent spirit, and longed to be able to contain it within the confines of what today would be called party discipline. The mutually irritant effect of the two parties on each other was only exacerbated by mutual recognition of the fact that each needed the other badly. Without O’Connell’s power of leadership over the Irish people, Young Ireland knew that they were only a minority middle-class group who commanded virtually no following at all. Without the practical drive and energetic intelligence of Young Ireland, and particularly its effective propagandizing influence through the columns of The Nation newspaper, O’Connell knew that the movement was in danger of acquiring a hack Catholic sectarian image against which the Protestants of Ireland and even some of the Catholic gentry would remain steadfastly united. When the break finally came the worst fears of each party were to be realized, to the sole benefit of the Union they had combined to repeal. Whether or not the internal stresses in any case made the final break inevitable is uncertain. What they could not stand was the additional dislocation of the political situation by the appalling consequences of the potato disease which settled on Ireland in the autumn of 1845.