(
Punch, 1846)
Retreat from Repeal The Nation was loyal to O'Connell when, in October 1843, he stood down the Repeal movement at
Clontarf. The government had deployed troops and artillery to enforce a ban on what O'Connell had announced as the last "monster meeting" in the Year of Repeal. (In August at the
Hill of Tara crowds had been estimated in the hostile reporting of
The Times at close to a million). O'Connell submitted at once. He cancelled the rally and sent out messengers to turn back the approaching crowds. Although in Duffy's view, the decision deprived the Repeal movement of "half its dignity and all of its terror", the Young Irelanders acknowledged that the risk of a massacre on many times the scale of
"Peterloo" was unacceptable. Pressing what they imagined was their advantage, the government had O'Connell, his son John and Duffy convicted of sedition. When after three months (the charges quashed on appeal to the
House of Lords) they were released, it was Davis and O'Brien who staged O'Connell's triumphal reception in Dublin. The first sign of a breach came when, through an open letter in
The Nation, Duffy pressed O'Connell to affirm Repeal as his object. While insisting he would "never ask for or work" for anything less than an independent legislature, O'Connell had suggested he might accept a "subordinate parliament" (an Irish legislature with powers
devolved from Westminster) as "an instalment". A further, and more serious, rift opened with Davis. Davis had himself been negotiating the possibility of a devolved parliament with the Northern reformer
William Sharman Crawford. The difference with O'Connell was that Davis was seeking a basis for compromise, in the first instance, not at Westminster but in Belfast.
Protestant inclusion When he first followed O'Connell, Duffy concedes that he had "burned with the desire to set up again the
Celtic race and the catholic church". Davis was a keen promoter of the
Irish language in print, at a time when, while still the speech of the vast majority of the Irish people, it had been all but abandoned by the educated classes. Such cultural nationalism did not appear to interest to O'Connell. There is no evidence that he saw the preservation or revival of his mother tongue, or any other aspect of "native culture", as essential to his political demands. His own paper, the
Pilot, recognised but one "positive and unmistakable" marker of the national distinction between English and Irish—religion. O'Connell "treasured his few Protestant Repealers", but he acknowledged the central role of the Catholic clergy in his movement and guarded the bond it represented. In 1812/13 he had refused emancipation conditioned on Rome having to seek royal assent in the appointment of Irish bishops. Throughout much of the country the bishops and their priests were the only figures of standing independent of the government around which a national movement could organise. It was a reality on which the Repeal Association, like the
Catholic Association before it, was built. In 1845 O'Connell,
in advance of the bishops, denounced a "mixed" non-denominational scheme for tertiary education. The Anglicans could retain Trinity in Dublin; the Presbyterians might have the Queens College proposed for Belfast; but the Queens colleges intended for
Galway and
Cork had to be Catholic. When Davis (moved to tears in the controversy) pleaded that "reasons for separate education are reasons for [a] separate life", O'Connell accused him of suggesting it a "crime to be a Catholic". "I am", he declared, "for Old Ireland, and I have some slight notion that Old Ireland will stand by me". O'Connell rarely joined the Young Irelanders in invoking the
memory of 1798, the union of "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter". His one Repeal foray to the Presbyterian north (to Belfast), organised by Duffy in 1841, was cut short by hostile demonstrations. For the key to an Irish parliament, O'Connell looked to liberal England, not Protestant Ulster. Once a parliament restored to Dublin had retired their distinctive privileges, he was content to suggest that Protestants would, "with little delay, melt into the overwhelming majority of the Irish nation".
Whig concessions Thomas Davis's sudden death in 1845 helped close the matter. But his friends suspected that behind the vehemence with which O'Connell opposed Davis on the colleges question there also the intent, again, to frustrate Peel and to advantage the Whigs. This was not a strategy, Meagher argued, that had paid national dividends. The last concession wrung from the Melbourne administration, the 1840 municipal reform, had elected O'Connell to the Lord Mayoralty of Dublin (Dublin's first Catholic mayor since
James II). But with the Grand Jury system of county government untouched, it left the great majority of people to continue under the local tyranny of the landlords. In return for allowing a "corrupt gang of politicians who fawned on O'Connell" an extensive system of political patronage, the Irish people being "purchased back into factious vassalage". In June 1846 the Whigs, under
Lord John Russell, returned to office. Immediately they set about dismantling Peel's limited, but practical, efforts to relieve the gathering
Irish Famine. Barricaded behind
laissez-faire doctrines of "political economy", the government left O'Connell to plead for his country from the floor of the
House of Commons: "She is in your hands—in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself. One-fourth of her population will perish unless Parliament comes to their relief". A broken man, on the advice of his doctors O'Connell took himself to the continent where, on route to Rome, he died in May 1847.
The Peace Resolutions In the months before O'Connell's death, Duffy circulated letters received from
James Fintan Lalor. In these Lalor argued independence could be pursued only in a popular struggle for the land. This alone could bring about a union of North and South, without which separation from England was impossible to contemplate. But recognising that "any and all means" that employed in this struggle could be made "illegal by Act of Parliament", the Young Irelanders would have, at the very least, to ready themselves for a "moral insurrection". He proposed that they should begin with a campaign to withhold rent, but more might be implied. Parts of the country were already in a state of semi-insurrection. Tenants conspirators, in tradition of the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen, were attacking process servers, intimidating land agents, and resisting evictions. Lalor advised only against a
general uprising: the people, he believed, could not hold their own against the country's English garrison. The letters made a profound impression, particularly on
John Mitchel and
Father John Kenyon. When the conservative
Standard observed that the new Irish railways could be used to transport troops to quickly curb agrarian unrest, Mitchel responded that the tracks could be turned into pikes and trains ambushed. O’Connell publicly distanced himself from
The Nation, appearing to some to set Duffy, as the editor, up for prosecution. When the courts failed to convict, O'Connell pressed the issue, seemingly intent on effecting a break. In July 1846, the Repeal Association tabled resolutions declaring that under no circumstances was a nation justified in asserting its liberties by force of arms. Meagher argued that while the Young Irelanders were not advocating physical force, if Repeal could not be carried by moral persuasion and peaceful means they believed a resort to arms would be a no less honourable course. In his O'Connell's absence, his
son John forced the decision: the resolution was carried on the threat of the O'Connells themselves quitting the Association. An offer by United Irish veteran,
Valentine Lawless (Lord Cloncurry) to chair a committee to adjust the dispute between Old and Young Ireland had been rejected by John O'Connell in reportedly "very saucy and unbecoming language". An offer of mediation from the abolitionist and pacifist
James Haughton was also spurned. ==The Irish Confederation==