Irish historian Kevin Nowlan wrote his landmark work The Politics of Repeal to examine how the Irish Famine influenced politics in Ireland and Britain. He soon realised that most factors pre-dated the Famine and found that 1841 was a better starting point. This was the year Daniel O’Connell began agitating to repeal the Act of Union, and Robert Peel became prime minister for the second time. O’Connell put Irish Repeal at the centre of British politics and it became Peel’s greatest headache as premier.
The Act of Union dates to 1801 when prime minister William Pitt dissolved the Protestant-only Dublin parliament. Following the 1798 rebellion, Pitt wanted to head off French revolutionary ideas in Ireland and believed political integration and free trade would encourage English capitalists to invest in Irish cheap labour. Pitt promised Catholic Emancipation within the United Kingdom, safeguarded by an overall Protestant majority. However George III’s objections denied Emancipation until Daniel O’Connell won it in 1829. The “Liberator” O’Connell then supported a Whig government in parliament and won modest reforms, including national schools, commutation of tithes, fairer municipal government and Catholic appointments to public office. The Whigs were defeated in the 1841 election and though new prime minister Peel accepted the need for reform in Ireland, O’Connell could not consider an alliance with him. They had a long and acrimonious relationship, almost fighting a duel in 1815 when Peel was Irish Chief Secretary. Peel viewed O’Connell as a violent demagogue while O’Connell derided him as “Orange Peel” reliant on Irish Tories. O’Connell would now concentrate on Repeal of the Union.
The Catholic Church initially showed little enthusiasm for O’Connell’s new Repeal Association. The liberal-minded O’Connell tried to win non-Catholic support and important Repealers including Thomas Davis, William Smith O’Brien and John Mitchel were Protestant. Some Northern Protestant reformers like Sharman Crawford wanted a more federal model, but most Irish Protestants preferred the Union. With the electoral system allowing only the wealthiest to vote, Irish Tories trounced Repealers in the 1841 election.
Initially Peel left management of Irish affairs to the parallel unelected administration in Dublin Castle. The Castle’s top officials were Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary, both Protestants, with the distinction between their roles ill-defined. Peel claimed his government would show no religious favour but Dublin Castle filled key roles with Protestant appointees. Irish issues filtered to the top of Peel’s agenda over the question of funding Catholic education, especially Maynooth College, the Catholic seminary founded in 1795. The college survived with inadequate state funding and the Catholic hierarchy petitioned Peel to increase the grant. Peel saw merit in the proposals but Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary were divided on the issue, so the prime minister ignored the requests. This was dangerous as O’Connell’s Repeal movement was gaining momentum.
Repeal was an elastic concept. O’Connell wanted a Catholic-influenced Irish parliament but was vague about whether a Dublin parliament would be answerable to London. Nowlan says O’Connell’s genius was not precise definitions but his emphatic, simple propositions as symbols of Irish claims. This gave O’Connell wiggle room to negotiate but it meant his views often did not match the expectations of some supporters, especially the group that became known as Young Ireland. That this was an intractable problem, was shown in Young Ireland’s own later split between moderates like Charles Gavan Duffy and William Smith O’Brien and radicals like John Mitchel. Duffy’s and Thomas Davis’s influential Nation newspaper, founded in 1842, had considerable literary quality and was a rallying point for Young Ireland demands for a new nation of Ireland. Young Ireland tried to win over landlords and middle-class Protestants but were no more successful than O’Connell. Young Ireland would remain wedded to British constitutional links, even as it edged towards revolution.
Initially, O’Connell emphasised that only Repeal of the Act of Union would ensure Irish social and economic progress. He criticised the unpopular Irish Poor Law with its rigid workhouse test and wanted security of tenure for small farmers, though he postponed precise fixes to his future Irish parliament. He hosted large popular meetings across the south, which became the “monster meetings” of 1843. In February 1843 he led a three-day Dublin Corporation debate on Repeal and promised to settle for a “dependent parliament”, a moderate position which attracted widescale interest in Britain, and the important support of the Irish middle class including Catholic bishops. O’Connell pledged to gain three million members in three months. The Nation eagerly backed the campaign. O’Connell’s Repeal rent jumped substantially that year as the monster meetings spread belief that “Repeal was coming”. The scale, orderliness, and respectability of his meetings alarmed Dublin Castle which wanted new legislation to repress it. They were supported by the still formidable 80-year-old Duke of Wellington who managed government business in the House of Lords.
Home Secretary James Graham advised Peel to be cautious about changing the law as the British Anti-Corn Law League was organised on the same lines as the Repeal Association. But Peel could not ignore O’Connell and in May 1843 he warned parliament he would “prefer civil war to the dismemberment of the Empire”. O’Connell responded that he was obeying the law and he “set their blustering at defiance”. Dublin Castle dismissed magistrates sympathetic to O’Connell, but that just made the cause more popular.
O’Connell was at the height of his powers, but could not get London to budge. He began to argue for lesser reforms, unwilling to face Peel’s “civil war”. When the Repeal Association announced a final monster meeting at Clontarf, the notice mentioned “Repeal cavalry” and other military terms. O’Connell denounced the notice, but the damage was done and Dublin Castle banned the meeting. The government arrested O’Connell and others on charges of seditious conspiracy. The so-called “Traversers” were charged, convicted and jailed for several months, before the House of Lords overturned the verdict.
Peel had emerged triumphant from 1843 and began to wean Catholic support away from O’Connell. He ordered a commission under Lord Devon to examine Irish land issues, and he supported Catholic causes. Irish charities were run exclusively by Protestants but Peel’s Charitable Donations and Bequests Bill created a new ecumenical board including Catholic bishops. O’Connell opposed the bill as a state bid to control the Church but Peel’s bill passed with support from the moderate archbishops of Dublin and Armagh.
While his organisation was buoyed by his release from prison, O’Connell seemed chastened and backed away from major Irish reform. He courted Federalists like Crawford which alarmed Nation founders Charles Gavan Duffy and, especially, Thomas Davis who wanted “unbounded nationality”. Even when O’Connell abandoned federalism, the Protestant Davis began to find fault with O’Connell over religious matters.
In April 1845 Peel introduced a Maynooth Bill to raise the annual grant. Ultra Tories condemned it and Peel needed Whig support to pass the bill. While it was well received in Ireland, it was followed by the more problematic Academic Institutions (Ireland) bill. The Colleges Bill, as it became known, proposed to establish ecumenical university colleges in Belfast, Cork and Galway to complement the Protestant Trinity College in Dublin. Though it was based on the pioneering work of Waterford Catholic MP Thomas Wyse, Peel did not confer with clergy on the bill and both Protestant and Catholic bishops objected to its proposed secular nature. One Protestant Tory MP called them “godless colleges”, a refrain O’Connell soon made his own. As with the Bequests Bill, the Catholic hierarchy was divided. Moderates requested safeguards such as Catholic college appointees, paid chaplains, and penalties for proselyting, which the British government supported. This compromise was unacceptable to firebrand Catholic Archbishop of Tuam John MacHale who called it an “infidel, slavish and demoralising scheme.” The Repeal movement split over the bill. O’Connell decried the lack of a chair in Catholic theology at the colleges while his son John ramped up animosity by criticising Young Ireland supporters of the bill, especially Davis who worried that a Catholic ascendency would replace the Protestant one. As tensions over the bill bubbled, the Devon Commission released its report into Irish land problems. It found that superior prosperity in the north was due to the “Ulster custom” of tenant rights but its response offered nothing new apart from compensation for improvements. Even this modest proposal failed to pass parliament.
In autumn 1845 the first reports appeared of a potato blight in Ireland. Peel became convinced the protectionist British Corn Laws needed repeal, unlike the Act of the Union. His cabinet split on the matter and Peel resigned on December 5. Whig leader Lord John Russell was unable to form government, forcing Peel to change the Corn Laws in an unstable new government with the goodwill of the Whigs but without the support of protectionists. With an early election likely, O’Connell argued that Ireland needed to see what could be “squeezed out” of the Whigs.
The Young Irelanders disagreed, believing they needed not just defy the Tories but stand aloof from the Whigs, who also opposed Repeal. Peel was concerned with a breakdown of law and order in Ireland, not just due to the growing food shortage but because the Orange Order was threatening clashes with Repealers. Peel progressed a drastic coercion bill in tandem with Corn Law reform saying relief measures would be useless if lawlessness prevailed in Ireland. Under the Protection of Life (Ireland) bill, police could be drafted into proclaimed areas, curfews imposed, and collective fines levied to compensate victims of outrage, with penalties of 15-years transportation. The Whigs favoured the bill, but Irish MPs were outraged and obstructed it in parliament. The delay robbed Peel of the urgency he claimed was needed. Once the Corn Laws were passed, Russell’s Whigs joined O’Connell and the Tory Protectionists to defeat the coercion bill on a second reading. Peel’s government resigned and the path opened up for a new alliance between Russell and O’Connell. The potato failure was almost ignored during these debates. Peel had secretly bought American corn and introduced relief measures but his belief was that Irish property should support Irish poverty, a view the Russell government also held. In Opposition, Peel backed government famine measures with little criticism.
As Russell prepared to take power in July 1846, Irish disagreements exploded in public. O’Connell wanted to be rid of political embarrassment to get the best deal from the Whigs and looked for ways to expel Young Ireland from the Repeal Association. He set an elaborate trap with a proposal to insist on the use of peaceful and constitutional methods in the Association’s constitution. While no one was yet proposing the use of force, Young Irelanders objected to the universality of the “peace resolutions”, believing a more militant policy might some day be required. Following a tempestuous meeting where Thomas Francis Meagher made his “Sword” speech, Young Irelanders walked out of the Association.
Most saw this as a victory for O’Connell. Catholic bishops approved, ensuring that Young Ireland would never gain the trust of the religious people of the countryside. But shortly afterwards the potato crop failed a second time. O’Connell’s alliance with the Whigs was tarnished as Russell offered little beyond “promises and inadequate expedients”. Their Poor Unemployment Act provided some work but offered little to help people get affordable food. Young Ireland leader William Smith O’Brien took a step backwards after the split but Meagher and Richard O’Gorman wanted to take a more active part in Irish affairs. They took part in a Dublin protest meeting on December 2 with a promise to get organised in 1847.
O’Connell was stung into action. He met Young Irelanders on December 15 but the “peace resolutions” remained a stumbling block. In January Young Irelanders created the Irish Confederation as a new political movement, though O’Brien remained a reluctant leader. The Confederation urged landlords to embrace Repeal and formed Famine committees. The poor, meanwhile struggled through a harsh winter, with three quarters of a million people surviving on inadequate relief works. Treasury secretary Charles Trevelyan implemented government policy with great industry and sense of duty but also with a narrow, doctrinaire approach to state intervention. Russell and Trevelyan believed the Irish gentry were not doing enough. But those same landlords had influence in Whig circles including cabinet members Palmerston and Lansdowne and they ensured that little meaningful change would disturb established interests. Russell proposed to change the law to place the burden of supporting the poor on the Poor Law Unions. Russell’s Soup Kitchen’s Act saved lives in winter but there was no grand scheme to get people out of poverty. He refused to support Protectionist leader George Bentinck’s proposal to fund major railway development in Ireland.
The Repeal Association offered a feeble response, as its great leader was dying. While O’Connell went on pilgrimage to Rome, his son John met with Confederation leaders in May to discuss reunion. He admitted the Whig alliance had failed and wanted Young Ireland to return to the fold but he would not agree to dissolving both organisations and creating a new body. He also refused to stamp out “placehunting” as that would simply give Orange Protestants a monopoly of Irish public offices. His father died in Genoa on May 15 leaving Ireland without a capable leader. O’Connell’s death briefly spurred the Repeal Association in the general election that followed and the disloyal Young Irelanders failed to win any seats except O’Brien in Limerick and his Tasmanian friend Chisholm Anstey in Youghal. Yet it was not clear what the Repeal Association stood for under the younger O’Connell.
Meaningful action on the land question after the Devon Commission was foiled by property interests. The situation was worsened in 1847 by the Quarter Acre clause in the new Poor Law Bill which forced landholders with more than a quarter acre to quit their land to gain relief. Tenant leagues sprang up across Ireland and a new and original thinker’s work appeared in the Nation. James Fintan Lalor’s thesis was that Repeal was irrelevant and land tenure was a “mightier question”. Lalor accepted private land ownership but believed the “ultimate proprietor” was not the Crown but the people of Ireland. He wanted landlords to give tenant security and pledge allegiance to Ireland.
Moderate Young Irelanders including Duffy and the landlord O’Brien were sceptical but a radical wing led by John Mitchel enthusiastically backed Lalor. Mitchel’s proposals to extend land rights were defeated, leaving the Confederation without a cohesive land policy. Devin Reilly attacked the government for allowing export food to leave Ireland during the Famine, leaving a nation “coolly, gradually murdered”. Mitchel and Reilly resigned from the Confederate committee and founded the radical newspaper the United Irishman.
Ireland descended further into the mire. Relief schemes lapsed and many poor law unions became bankrupt, a situation worsened by a London financial crisis due to over-extended banks. Rural Irish people expressed their anger by refusing to pay rent. Troops were called out to support rent collectors, as landlords began largescale eviction of smallholders. By November 1847 agrarian outrages were a serious problem and Irish Lord Lieutenant Clarendon demanded a new coercion bill. The Crime and Outrages (Ireland) Bill enabled Clarendon to proclaim disturbed districts and draft in additional police but he believed it did not go far enough.
Confederate leaders Duffy and O’Brien had not opposed the bill, causing disquiet among younger supporters such as Meagher and O’Gorman. Having left the fold, Mitchel was less circumspect. Following Lalor, Mitchel was convinced Ireland’s political and social structure needed radical change. In February 1848 his United Irishman mocked the Lord Lieutenant as “Butcher Clarendon”.
The relationship between the Whig government and the Repeal Association was also fracturing. John O’Connell contacted Confederate moderates to seek reconciliation. Again reunion negotiations stalled over placehunting and the format of a combined organisation. When O’Connell’s brother Daniel resigned as Waterford MP to accept a British consular position, Meagher contested the February by-election against a Repeal candidate, hoping the contest would determine whether O’Connellites or Confederates would prevail in Ireland. But Meagher’s hometown support was mainly among those without the franchise and a Whig-aligned third candidate defeated both Repeal factions.
The disappointment both sides of the Repeal movement felt was replaced by exciting news of the overthrow of the French monarchy that same month. The near bloodless and classless revolution impressed Irish moderates and radicals alike. Many believed that a fearful Britain would capitulate to a united Irish call for Repeal supported by republicans in the new French government like Interior Minister Ledru-Rollin. Even the conservative O’Brien called for the formation of an Irish guard while Meagher demanded admission to the court of St James as Irish ambassadors. Both were charged with sedition for these statements. Once released on bail they joined a Confederate Irish mission to Paris.
New foreign minister Lamartine’s “Manifesto to Europe” seemed to encourage democratic movements across the continent, but the British embassy leaned on him not to support revolution in Ireland. Lamartine overruled Ledru-Rollin ensuring cordial Anglo-French relations was the top priority. The Irish mission got only vague words of sympathy. As Mitchel said, “Lamartine has let us know distinctly we must rely on ourselves.”
As Young Ireland statements became warlike, Clarendon urged more coercive action though the government turned down his request to suspend habeas corpus. In April the government did pass the Crown and Government Protection Bill to get around antiquated and harsh Treason laws. The law introduced a new statutory offence of treason-felony by which capital offences, including speeches, could be dealt by transportation.
In May, O’Brien, Meagher and Mitchel faced court on the more minor charge of sedition. O’Brien and Meagher were acquitted after juries could not agree on a verdict. But Clarendon dropped the sedition charge against Mitchel and tried him under the new treason-felony legislation. The sheriff packed the jury with unsympathetic Protestants and the defence had no argument against the open defiance Mitchel had shown in his newspaper. He was sentenced to 14 years’ transportation. The verdict brought Repealers closer together with even John O’Connell calling Mitchel an Irish martyr. By early June the two sides agreed to dissolve the Repeal Association and Irish Confederation to form the new shortlived Irish League.
Yet Young Irelanders continued to secretly plan for an uprising. Dublin Castle infiltrated their meetings and Clarendon told London of a possible revolution around autumn harvest time. After Duffy and other newspaper editors were arrested on treason-felony, Meagher held a meeting on Slievenamon mountain urging followers to arm themselves. In mid-July Clarendon finally convinced Russell’s government to suspend habeas corpus. Young Ireland leaders dispersed, and with no clear plan of action, a ragtag army under O’Brien was defeated by armed police at Ballingarry. Though O’Gorman also led skirmishes in Limerick and John O’Mahony raided barracks in Tipperary and Waterford, the revolution was over.
O’Brien, Meagher and others were charged with high treason, which proved an embarrassment for the government when they were found guilty. The punishment of being “hung, drawn and quartered” could never be carried out but the prisoners refused to accept the lesser sentence of transportation. In July 1849, the government passed the Transportation for Treason (Ireland) Bill to force them to accept the sentence. Fintan Lalor led one final assault on a Waterford barracks in September. Though it too was a failure, many of those involved would become leaders of the Fenian movement in the next decade.
Repeal was dead but so were millions of Irish people. The Famine exhausted Ireland, with food shortages accompanied by cholera. Landlords, many in deep debt, responded with large-scale evictions. Though Russell wanted to introduce measures to relieve tenants, it was again defeated by cabinet vested interests. In a rare enlightened measure in 1850, the government extended the Irish electoral franchise which quadrupled the number of voters. A united group of 48 Irish members led by Duffy was elected to parliament in 1852, devoted to fixing the land question. It proved no more disciplined than the Repeal Party and quickly broke up. Nowlan believes Fenianism was the most striking outcome of the British government failures of the 1840s but there was also the tentative beginnings of reform that would convince later prime minister William Gladstone to champion Irish land rights and home rule.
Woolly Days 