‘For the first time these many years,’ declared the leading article in the Kilkenny Journal for Saturday, 19 August 1848, ‘this country is without any popular political association. There is no rallying point …. A more prostrate condition no country was ever in …’1 It was true. The Irish Confederation and the subsequent Irish League had been proved by the events of July to be rallying-points of straw. Now even they were gone. There was not a single club left in Dublin.2
It was no use trying to find a convenient scapegoat in O’Brien. It was, as the Kilkenny Moderator put it, the ‘absurd bravado and unmeaning rhodo-montade’ of the whole movement that had been exposed.3 Those club leaders who did try and blame O’Brien’s leadership conveniently forgot that ‘by their grandiloquent ovations, by bragging of what they would do and what they could do, unfortunate O’Brien was led out absolutely under false pretences’.4
The ineffectualness of simply talking about nationality in the face of the realities of Irish life was most cruelly revealed. In the political silence that now prevailed, the sounds the Irish people heard were not the dying trumpets of a defeated cause, but the clanking of crowbars demolishing cabins, the cries of evicted women and children, and the moans of the starving, all of which had persisted for the past three years.5 With the potato crop again blighted, the prospects for the autumn and winter of 1848 were as grim as they had ever been.6 The ragged, barefoot crowds lucky enough to find outdoor relief still laboured ten hours a day on empty stomachs for food tickets, throwing themselves on the ground when the overseer’s own dinner hour arrived, and staggering to their feet again like sea-sick men when he returned.7 ‘Travel where you would,’ wrote a contemporary later, ‘deserted and ruined cabins met the eye on every side. You frequently met large parties of emigrants proceeding to the ports.’8
Clearly the ideal of nationality had to be brought closer to the lives of the ordinary Irish people if it was to mean anything. A new sort of policy altogether was required.
For a year or so a few of the very young men who had been peripherally involved in the events of July 1848 tried to show that they could do better in the existing situation than their leaders. One was a former member of a Dublin Confederate club, a railway clerk named Philip Gray, one of whose uncles had been hanged in ’98.9 Gray had on his own initiative tried to rouse the peasantry in Meath while O’Brien was making his way round Tipperary at the end of July. Having totally failed, he had joined up with O’Mahony in the South in August and taken part the next month in the attack on Portlaw barracks. In November, with another Dublin ex-Confederate, an eighteen-year-old Protestant student of Trinity College, named John O’Leary, he planned to attack Clonmel gaol and rescue Smith O’Brien.
The rescue was arranged for the night of 8 November, but an informer gave away one of the assembly points, a piece of ground known as ‘the Wilderness’, and O’Leary and sixteen other young men under his command were arrested there and a few pikes and a large pistol found.10 The matter was not treated very seriously by the authorities, presumably because of the youth of the apparent leader. Gray, the real leader, was not caught. O’Leary was released from gaol a few weeks later.
It is not quite so easy to dismiss Gray, and O’Leary’s next moves as childish pranks. For although they too ended in fiasco they involved the formation of oath-bound secret societies to establish an Irish republic, and there were to be links at least in personnel between these and a later society of the same sort which finally altered the course of Irish history. The formation in 1848 by Gray and O’Leary of these secret societies in the South, and that of another by Joseph Brenan and Fintan Lalor in Dublin, showed at least a recognition, however amateurish, of the need to organize better in future. Their own particular deficiency in professional skill was revealed in the following year.
First, a bold plan of Brenan’s to capture Queen Victoria on her visit to Dublin in the summer of 1849 came to nothing, though 150 men actually assembled one night for the purpose.11 Then, when the different secret societies amalgamated under Fintan Lalor in September, they immediately embarked on a plan for a rising which was not only badly coordinated but also largely known beforehand to the authorities. On the night of 16 September 1849, an unsuccessful attack was made on the police barracks at Cappoquin by a force under Brenan, and the movement disintegrated. Lalor, and the son of a professor at Trinity named Thomas Luby, were imprisoned for a short time. Lalor, whose health had always been bad, died not long afterwards. O’Leary and Gray escaped arrest. Brenan fled to America. This abortive movement to assert Irish nationalism in a more openly aggressive manner than anything the Irish Confederation or Irish League had wished to undertake seemed only to confirm that all such purely nationalistic activities were doomed as unrealistic.
Of the realities of everyday Irish life two were paramount: the desperate hardship of trying to get a livelihood out of the land and the presence of the Catholic Church. The Church was, as it were, the only permanent form of national organization, or indeed true representation, the peasantry had. In Ireland, wrote a Catholic editor of this time, the priests occupied towards the people the role of a gentry or local aristocracy. They were the only educated class who truly sympathized with the people, and thus the only class to whom the poor Catholic farmer could turn for advice and guidance on matters temporal as well as spiritual.12
The Church was more important than any political association. It was more all-embracing than the agrarian secret societies, not only because it was open, but because it was both localized and universal at the same time. The only time the peasantry had shown themselves capable of being organized politically at all had been when political forces and the Church cooperated closely, in the days of O’Connell. At elections the extent of the priests’ spiritual intimidation was often grossly exaggerated, but they exercised considerable influence.13 Their general influence as day-to-day leaders was something no serious nationalist could leave out of account.
For the Irish farmer and labourer, national consciousness, such as it was, was an emotion rather than a doctrine, a powerful but vague adjunct to that identity of which the chief features were the passionate need to improve his material lot and his Catholicism. Irish nationality was not an end to be pursued for its own sake, as it had been for Davis. Any doctrinaire nationalist had to come to terms with this fact. It was not enough to appeal to national sentiment in order to assert it. If idealists wanted the Irish people to take the idea of Irish nationality seriously, they themselves must take the land situation seriously and must work if possible with the approval, or at worst the benevolent neutrality, of the Catholic Church.
This presented the doctrinaire exponent of nationalism with a dilemma. To work obliquely towards nationality was the only way of making it a reality; yet, by thus appealing primarily to other interests and other loyalties, the goal of nationality itself became secondary. It forfeited that overriding loyalty which should by definition be the essential characteristic of nationalism.
Thus for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond – perhaps still even today – there remains a certain lack of distinctness about Irish nationality. Many questions have always lain, only half-asked, just below the surface of political life. What, for instance, really was nationality, in Irish terms, if it did not spontaneously and instinctively assert itself as a separate force? Was it something real enough to be pursued for its own sake at all? Or was it only a means to an end; a tactical slogan with which to achieve a better life for the majority of the people of Ireland? And if this could be achieved without pursuit of separate nationality, was there really a need for any positive nationality? Given the long historical tradition of political and racial entanglement with the rest of Britain, was there not something absurd about the idea of ‘pure’ nationality? Could there perhaps be such a thing as a half-way status between a nation and a province? If not, in view of the past, could Irish pride be satisfied with the status of a province? Events alone were to resolve these uncertainties, often with an arbitrary disregard for national considerations.
With the total humiliation in 1848 and 1849 of all grandiloquent attempts to assert Irish nationality, Irish political life proceeded to concern itself for a time with more down-to-earth affairs. Even a former ardent nationalist like Duffy saw no alternative but to rest his ardour and concentrate, in the appalling wake of the famine, on efforts to alter the land system and extend Ulster custom of tenant right by law to the whole of Ireland. At the same time, Catholic considerations inevitably figured prominently.
The Irish Catholic Church’s attitude to the idea of Irish nationality was ambivalent. On the one hand, sympathizing with the people for whose material as well as spiritual welfare it was acutely concerned, it naturally favoured any emphasis on the people’s identity which would help further an improvement in their appalling conditions. Similarly, there were specifically Catholic objectives which could be pursued and gained by an effective political rallying of the people. Emancipation itself had been one obvious example of this, and there were other outstanding Catholic issues in which the hierarchy had a political interest, not least of which were the disestablishment of the Protestant Church and the principle of separate denominational education for Catholics.
As far as the pursuit of nationality as an end in itself was concerned, the Church had inevitable reservations, which were not just confined to its spiritual need to assess the justifiability of violence. The Catholic Church itself was, after all, the supreme loyalty with which the hierarchy wanted the people to identify themselves. Any attempt to promote the spiritual idea of nationality must in some sense prove competitive with this. On the whole, therefore, the Church’s attitude to nationality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proved pragmatic, being generally determined by tactical considerations. Inasmuch as Catholic interests seemed likely to be enhanced by nationality, it was in favour of it. Inasmuch as they seemed likely to be endangered by nationality, it tried to restrain it. In the last resort, where restraint eventually proved impossible, it was prepared to follow, for fear ultimately of losing the power to lead. All of which meant that individual members of the hierarchy, sometimes in conflict, were the forces that determined the Church’s attitude to nationality at any given time.
The Irish Catholic Church in the fifties, sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century was dominated by two giant ecclesiastical personalities of very different outlook and temperament: John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam, who had been a prominent supporter of O’Connell, and Paul Cullen, who became Archbishop of Dublin in 1852. Though Cullen is usually thought of – and rightly by comparison with the progressive MacHale – as having been an extreme conservative, his appointment was from the point of view of nationalists an improvement on his predecessor Archbishop Murray who had been an out-and-out supporter of the government.14 But Cullen’s approach to political developments was based on the cautious assumption that they should be judged by the experience of a dangerous past rather than in the light of an optimistic future. Whereas MacHale saw self-government as the eventual key to all other Irish political and social problems, Cullen feared that an Irish government would be controlled by the Protestant ascendancy. When something like an independent Irish party began to operate in the British House of Commons during the early 1850s, with its immediate objective a Tenants’ Rights Bill, Cullen soon cooled towards it because, he said, ‘if all Catholics were to unite in adopting such principles I am persuaded that the English government in self-defence would have to expel them from Parliament and begin to renew the penal laws’.15
The appearance in the 1850s of an independent Irish party in the Commons is of interest chiefly as an indication of more effective things to come. It eventually failed to obtain its objectives and had disintegrated by the end of the decade. But it was for a time quite an impressive political force, a working combination of the strongest feelings that dominated Irish opinion, namely those concerning the Catholic religion and the land.
Over a hundred thousand persons had been officially evicted from their holdings in 1849 and local tenants’ organizations had sprung up in that year as simple measures of self-defence. By 1850 there were twenty such organizations in ten different counties in Ireland. Simultaneously, Ulster tenants, who though protected by the custom of tenant right had suffered hardship trying to meet their rents in famine conditions and were anxious about future security, agitated for legalization of the Ulster custom. A Tenants’ League of North and South was formed, and this public recognition of common interest even on a purely material plane seemed particularly hopeful to a nationalist like Gavan Duffy.
Duffy had survived five attempts to convict him of treason felony in 1848 and 1849 when five successive juries failed to agree. He had returned to the editorship of The Nation, and in 1852 he entered Parliament as one of forty-eight Irish members of a so-called Irish Tenants’ League. The members of this League took a significant public pledge. This was, to be ‘perfectly independent of, and in opposition to, all governments who do not make it a part of their policy and a cabinet question to give to the tenants of Ireland a measure embodying the principles of Mr Sharman Crawford’s tenant right bill’.16
In fact, the nationally unifying drive of the new political association was never very great, for relative agricultural prosperity began to return to Ireland with a series of good harvests beginning in 1851, and the Ulster share in the agitation became insignificant. To some extent the good harvests also lessened the impetus of the tenant right movement in the South. But here religious issues came to its aid.
Even before the election of 1852 Irish members in the House of Commons had been combining in the defence of Catholic interests, particularly against a bill to prevent Catholic bishops assuming territorial titles. In this way Irish Members in Parliament had already achieved some temporary solidarity, parading under the name of ‘the Irish Brigade’ or, as their opponents called them, ‘the Pope’s Brass Band’. They had assumed a position of obvious importance in the prevailing delicate balance of British political parties. One prominent member of the ‘Brigade’ (the Mayo Catholic land-owner G. H. Moore, father of the novelist George Moore) even proposed that they should employ methods of obstruction in the House, but was over-ruled by his colleagues. And it was the alliance of this parliamentary ‘Irish Brigade’ and the Tenant Right League which gave the forty-eight members elected in 1852 their appearance of independent strength. They took a public pledge to remain independent of any English party that did not commit them to Tenant Right.
But this notion of independence received a temporary shock soon after the new Parliament had assembled. For though the party’s first action had been to help turn out Lord Derby’s Tory government, yet when a new government under Lord Aberdeen was formed, also depending on the Irish vote for its majority, it was suddenly revealed that two members of the ‘independent’ Irish party, in spite of their pledge, had taken posts as ministers. These were John Sadlier, a junior Lord of the Treasury, and William Keogh, the new Solicitor General. No assurance of any kind had been given by Aberdeen that he would introduce a Tenant Right Bill. In the light of their public pledge, the behaviour of Sadleir and Keogh was cynical and undermining to the party. Both were men of over-riding personal ambitions.
The character of Sadleir in particular was soon afterwards shown to have been unsavoury by any standards. A gigantic financial swindle was uncovered in 1856, involving securities personally forged by himself, the collapse of the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank, the ruin of thousands of humble Irish farmers and his own suicide on Hampstead Heath. Something of the ill-repute thus attaching to him and Keogh, who though he was to become a judge, also in the end committed suicide, was often later extended by extreme nationalists to the whole principle of trying to work through the House of Commons at all. But at the time, the colleagues of Sadleir and Keogh, once they had recovered from their shock, hailed their departure as having a cleansing effect on the Irish party in the Commons. Ireland was stronger as a result, declared The Nation.17 Frederick Lucas, editor of the Catholic Tablet, who had done much to bring the independent party alliance about, also thought that the prospects were good, or even better than they had been before the defection.18 The term ‘independent opposition’ was in fact only used about the party after Keogh and Sadleir had left it in April 1853.19
A more serious threat to the party’s effectiveness was the increasingly reserved attitude of Archbishop Cullen to the principle of ‘independent opposition’. Cullen had originally shown some goodwill towards the Tenant Right League and had obviously been gratified by the mobilization in Parliament of pro-Catholic sentiment. But his fear of the possible consequences to Catholicism of too effectively thwarting the British Government was reinforced by the irrational obsession with which he viewed the activities of Gavan Duffy and any sort of national principle that stemmed from the Young Ireland tradition. Cullen had been at the Vatican during the Roman revolution of 1848, and the traumatic shock he had experienced there at the hands of Young Italy became indistinguishably associated in his mind with Young Ireland. Duffy, Cullen declared, was ‘a wicked man … the Irish Mazzini’.20 Cardinal Newman related how Cullen always compared Young Ireland to Young Italy; and ‘with the most intense expression of words and countenance assured me they never came right, never – he knew them from his experience in Rome’.21
It was partly due to the discouraging attitude of the Church that in 1855 Duffy decided to abandon hope for the Tenant Right movement and independent opposition altogether, and emigrate to Australia. Those, he said, who ought to have guided and blessed the people’s cause had deserted it.22 There was, he wrote in The Nation, no more hope for Ireland ‘than for a corpse on the dissecting table’.
It so happened that this independent opposition did in the end achieve nothing. But its failure was not as foregone a conclusion at the time of Duffy’s withdrawal as Duffy’s own later history made out. His rival editor, Frederick Lucas of the Tablet, declared that Duffy’s real reason for leaving Ireland was want of financial means, ‘but he wants to go off in poetry rather than prose’.23 The truth was that a number of different factors had made political life difficult for the ‘independent party’ – Sadleir, and Keogh’s defection, the cold shoulder of Archbishop Cullen, Duffy’s withdrawal itself, and above all perhaps the good harvests of the fifties which took the desperation out of the Tenant Right movement. But if the core of the party had been stronger, if there had been better organization and discipline, or if there had even been one figure of outstanding political ability to lead it, these setbacks might not have led to its disintegration.
By 1857, of the original forty-eight members who had emerged as ‘Independents’ from the election of 1852 there were only fourteen left, the rest having drifted off into conventional party commitments. The party introduced a land bill every year until 1858, but without converting the government of the day to anything like the necessary radical reappraisal of the system of land-ownership. The greatest failure had been a tactical one: the party’s incapacity to exploit the sort of political situation in the House of Commons most favourable to it. In February 1859, for instance, the Liberal Government fell and the Conservatives came into office with a minority vote. The Irish might have been expected to wring from them some major concession in return for their invaluable support. But all that was extracted from the government was a series of peripheral concessions to Catholics, such as the award to Catholic chaplains in the British Army of permanent rank and status along with Church of England chaplains. This concession, though long overdue considering that about one-third of the British Army were Irish Catholics, was of little relevance to the condition of the Irish tenant farmer and labourer. Admittedly, a government landlord and tenant bill was said to be in the course of preparation, but as yet only the intention had been stated. And when later in the year this bill actually appeared and became law it made virtually no difference to the existing situation on the land at all, inspired as it was still by the assumption that at all costs the rights of property must remain paramount. By then, however, the Irish party had already split on other issues and disintegrated.
The failure of this attempt to work through the Union Parliament even for limited Irish national interests was afterwards often taken to prove the hopelessness of trying to achieve Irish national goals through Parliament at all. But the collapse of the independent party of the fifties proved no such point. It proved only the inadequacy of one particular set of men in one set of circumstances. There was no intrinsic reason why in different circumstances, with the agrarian temperature rising and with more gifted men and better tactics, the principle of parliamentary action should not one day be highly successful. And with additional assistance from the widening franchise it was one day to be so, changing the face of Ireland and effectively deploying a widely based national movement for the first time in Irish history.
A potential nucleus of nominally independent Irish members remained, though long unorganized, in being in the House of Commons. The traditional aim of Repeal or some lesser restoration of Irish autonomy remained continually before the Irish people. In 1864 a National League was founded to recover Irish legislative independence, by constitutional means. It is now almost entirely forgotten because another contemporary movement, Fenian-ism, has retrospectively eclipsed it in Irish history. But it is remarkable that in the eyes of two contemporaries it was the constitutional movement and not Fenianism that then seemed the important national movement of the day. ‘The Irish political movements since 1860,’ wrote W. J. O’Neill Daunt, the old friend of O’Connell, in 1867, ‘have been chiefly an attempt by John Martin [former editor of the Irish Felon, now a constitutionalist] and The O’Donoghue [a young ex-soldier MP for Tralee] to establish a National League for the recovery of our national cause of 1782.’24 And the journalist A. M. Sullivan, himself to be a Member of Parliament, could write in 1878 the now seemingly incredible words: ‘The men who led, or most largely influenced, Irish National politics from 1860–65 were William Smith O’Brien, John Martin and The O’Donoghue.’**25 On the other hand it was the failure of such efforts to make progress that gave moral encouragement to other men, trying to promote a more effective way for nationalists to go about their business. These were the men soon popularly to be known as Fenians.