Dictionary of Irish Biography

Dictionary o f Irish Biography Relevant Irish figures for Leaving Cert history CONTENTS PART 3. Pursuit of sovereignty and the impact PART 1. of partition Ireland and 1912–1949 the Union 138 Patrick Pearse 6 Daniel O’Connell 150 Éamon de Valera 18 Thomas Davis 172 Arthur Griffith 23 Charles Trevelyan 183 Michael Collins 27 Charles Kickham 190 Constance Markievicz 31 James Stephens 193 William Thomas Cosgrave C 35 Asenath Nicholson 201 James J. McElligott 37 Mary Aikenhead 203 James Craig O 39 Paul Cullen 209 Richard Dawson Bates 46 William Carleton 211 Evie Hone N 49 William Dargan T PART 4. PART 2. The Irish diaspora E Movements for 1840–1966 political and N 214 John Devoy social reform 218 Richard Welsted (‘Boss’) Croker T 1870–1914 221 Daniel Mannix 223 Dónall Mac Amhlaigh 56 Charles Stewart Parnell 225 Paul O’Dwyer S 77 John Redmond 228 Edward Galvin 87 Edward Carson 230 Mother Mary Martin 94 Isabella Tod 96 Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington 99 James Connolly 107 Michael Davitt PART 5. 116 James Larkin Politics in 122 Douglas Hyde Northern Ireland 129 William Butler Yeats 1949–1993 239 Terence O’Neill 244 Brian Faulkner 252 Seamus Heaney Part 1. Ireland and the Union Daniel O’Connell O’Connell, Daniel (1775–1847), barrister, politician and nationalist leader, was born in Carhen, near Caherciveen, in the Iveragh peninsula of south-west Kerry, on 6 August 1775, the eldest of ten children of Morgan O’Connell (1739–1809) and his wife, Catherine O’Mullane (1752–1817). Family background and early years Morgan O’Connell was a modest landowner, grazier, and businessman. Within the peninsula the family were the leading surviving catholic gentry of the old Gaelic stock. By the time of Daniel’s birth English was already established as the family vernacular, as it was generally in Ireland among those of their social rank and education; but Irish was the language of the mass of the peasantry in late eighteenth-century Iveragh, and was the usual language of communication between the O’Connells (including Daniel) and the common people of the district. The O’Connells were resourceful survivors, the very remoteness of their residence, their business acumen, and the occasional connivance of protestant neighbouring gentry permitting them to maintain their hold on land and on a modest gentleman status in the difficult era of plantation and penal laws. Two of Daniel’s paternal uncles were especially important in his upbringing and for his future prospects. One, Daniel, was a count of France (with the rank of major general) and was an important ‘society’ connection for the family, not least in military circles (in France and later in England), during Daniel’s early years. Far more important, however, was Daniel’s uncle Maurice, better known as ‘Hunting Cap’, the eldest and incomparably the wealthiest of his father’s broth- ers, and clearly the patriarch of the family, who resided at Derrynane abbey, some 20 miles south of Carhen. Hunting Cap had amassed considerable wealth as a landowner, grazier, merchant, and smuggler, and, while he harboured a historical sense of grievance at the misfortunes that had befallen Irish catholics, he was a pragmatist who believed in operating, cautiously, within the political status quo. Daniel’s earliest years, until he was four, were spent – in the traditional Gaelic manner – in fosterage to a small herdsman’s family, after which he was in effect adopted by his wealthy uncle, Hunting Cap, with whom he went to live, probably from the age of five. Hunting Cap, without a child of his own, was to prove a reliable, if stern, patron and financial support for Daniel for more than thirty years. In 1790 Daniel went to Father Harrington’s small school in Cork. In . 6 . 1791 he and his brother Maurice, younger by one year, were sent, via Liège and Louvain, to the English college at St Omer, despite the anxieties of Count O’Connell that the political and security situation in France (and on its borders) was deteriorating. Within a year the boys moved to the more academically challenging and more austere English college at Douai. Here Daniel’s sharp intelligence, eloquence, and ambition were recognised by his superiors, who declared him destined to make his name as a remarkable public man. He was a studious if rather solitary boy, who quickly took to the close study of rhetoric and the classics. The accelerating descent of revolutionary France into bloodshed finally forced the O’Connell boys to leave for London in early January 1793, where their uncle the count, already ensconced with other outraged émigrés, undertook to supervise their education at Fagan’s ‘academy’. The French experience, and the fear engendered by the encounter with the sanguinary excesses of revolution, left O’Connell with an abiding antipathy to bloodshed, mob rule, and the ‘French way’ of political change. While Maurice was recalled by Hunting Cap to an army commission, in 1794 Daniel began terms at Lincoln’s Inn to prepare for the bar. The relaxation of the penal laws against catholics had by this time opened a career at the Irish bar (at least to the level of junior counsel) to catholics, and O’Connell was to be a beneficiary of these relief measures. The London years were formative in O’Connell’s intellectual and political development. Through his wide reading, which included Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon, Paine, William Godwin, and Adam Smith, and his quickening interest in public affairs, he was drawn towards a liberal, not to say radical, point of view. Civil and religious equality, freedom of conscience, and the extension of individual liberty became the basis of his philosophical and political position. This period also saw O’Connell enter a phase of religious scepticism, which was to last for several years before he eventually returned to an orthodox, indeed devout, catholic observance. On his return to Dublin in 1796 O’Connell was affected by the high level of political excite- ment that had gripped the Irish capital in response to the general state of European politics and Anglo–French tensions, and, in particular, the danger of a French invasion of Ireland. He was especially alarmed at the appearance of the French fleet off Bantry Bay in late 1796. Called to the Irish bar in 1798, Daniel, like many others in his profession, was caught up in the Volunteers, inspired by a broadly patriotic impulse and a resolve to defend public order. While mindful of Hunting Cap’s continuous exhortations and warnings that he devote his talents and energy to professional advancement rather than to political involvement, O’Connell was drawn to the public sphere, albeit in a most responsible and conventional way for a young ambitious barrister. Appalled by the bloodshed and socially subversive challenge of the 1798 rebellion, O’Connell was nevertheless opposed to the proposal for the ending of the Irish parliament and the enactment of the Act of Union. His public statement made in January 1800 in the debates on the union proposal – his first major public intervention in political debate – was significant. It exposed his credo on the historical and legal rights of Ireland as a kingdom, and his refusal to accept that any political group or generation of leaders had the right to abrogate or surrender them. He famously declared that ‘if the alternative were offered him of union, or the re-enactment of the penal code in all its pristine horrors, he would prefer without hesitation the latter, as the lesser and more sufferable evil’ (Life and speeches, i, 8–9). This was to be the sticking point of all his later demands, however embellished with utilitarian or opportunistic arguments, for the restoration of the Irish parliament in College Green or, as it became, the demand for the ‘Repeal of the Union’. O’Connell’s opposition to the union was voiced in the strong patriotic language of the late eighteenth century, and was essentially no different from the position of Henry Grattan, save that O’Connell was speaking as a young catholic barrister, and the catholic hierarchy had com- mitted itself to support of the union, on the grounds that the protestant parliament in Dublin offered less prospect of ‘equal’ citizenship and religious equality for catholics than the parliament . 7 . at Westminster. The primacy of Ireland’s historical rights over immediate confessional advan- tage was, therefore, the basis of O’Connell’s early political declarations. It is worth stressing, in this context, his enduring monarchism. He defended strenuously the rights of the ‘kingdom of Ireland’. In later decades his expressions of loyalty to particular British monarchs (notably George IV during his Dublin visit of 1821 and Victoria, ‘the young queen’, from the moment of her accession in 1837) were extremely – for some embarrassingly – fulsome. In the immediate post-union years O’Connell’s public stature largely derived from his professional work. He was twenty-five years old and had already made a mark. His political views placed him in the patriotic reform camp with regard to the conduct of government and adminis- tration, the discharge of the law, and religious and civil liberties, and he had a particular agenda of denouncing privilege and prejudice. From the more ‘quietist’ political perspective of Hunting Cap, he was outspoken to the point of incautious notoriety. Legal practice and family life Within a few years of his starting to practise, O’Connell’s professional reputation and his earnings at the bar began to grow. By 1806 he was earning £600 net in fees, and, as he became more sought after in the years that followed, his income grew accordingly.

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