Four Green Fields: Trollheart's History of Ireland

[Trollheart]

Epilogue II: Four Grey Fields: The End of Ireland?

No single event in Irish history has had such a devastating effect on the country. Not even the ravages of the Black Death five hundred years earlier could come so close to destroying our small island. During the Great Famine, over a million people emigrated and never came back, either dying on the voyage that took them away from their native land, or reaching their destination and, again, either dying there or prospering, building a new life in a new land. Of those who remained, it’s estimated about the same number perished, from hunger, exposure, infirmity or by falling prey to any of the many diseases mentioned above. With a population calculated at the time as being in the region of almost nine million prior to the arrival of the blight and the onset of the Famine, that means almost a quarter of the people in Ireland left or died by the time it was over.

This had a huge and lasting effect on the country, which still today only numbers its citizens at around five or six million (seven including Northern Ireland). Had the Famine not occurred, or had it been dealt with properly, it seems likely that we would now be approaching the eleven or twelve million mark. This is probably, to be fair, far too large for such a small island, so in some very cynical and cold way you could look on the Great Famine as having been a sort of forced depopulation or reduction of the numbers living in Ireland. But due to the massive emigration from necessity and to save lives, the idea soon took hold and even now, when the only real factors driving it are financial and social prospects, when it is certainly more voluntary to leave the country than it was then (and a lot safer) Ireland has embraced emigration, with mostly younger, skilled people seeking an outlet for their talents - and the appropriate reward in monetary and promotional terms - abroad, to the extent that there used to be a funny poster on sale here with a map of the country and the request “would the last person to leave Ireland please turn out the lights?”

Another major effect the Famine had was to lead to the ending of smallholder leases on land, as landlords, many broken by the loss of their tenants and the cost of the Famine to them (oh boo hoo indeed!) gave up their lands and were replaced by Catholic farmers, who bought up the land and used it for pastureland, a practice that continues today, and has led to farmers becoming some of the richest men in Ireland (though they’ll tell you differently). Despite the abortive and mostly laughable “rising” of the Young Ireland movement spoken of briefly earlier, the country was so drained and exhausted that all thoughts of rebellion or independence died for about twenty years. There simply was no appetite (pun intended) for facing up to the almost-architects of the Great Famine, no strength and no spirit; the country was broken, though of course it would not remain so. For a long time, all people wanted to do was get back to some sort of normal, some sort of life, and give thanks that they had survived. Nobody wanted to push God on this one.

So despite 1848 being known across Europe as the “year of revolutions”, with particularly the Paris revolt that returned Napoleon to the head of the Second French Republic, and notwithstanding the efforts of Thomas Davis and Young Ireland, the country had been battered to its knees and had no fight left in it, and revolution, rebellion and rising all passed Ireland by. It would take the rise of the Fenians in 1860 before Ireland would again be able to stand up to its auld enemy and gird itself for battle. Needless to say, spoiler alert, such attempts would fail. It would in fact take another half a century before Ireland would finally be free, and even then, well, we’ll see when we get there, but let me just say that the course of independence never ran smoothly, nor did it with Irish freedom.

Politically, one thing the Famine did prove, even if the Irish were too bone-weary and heartsick to address it, was that the Act of Union was pure bollocks. The idea had been that Ireland would, as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, enjoy the same patronage and protection England, Scotland and Wales did, but of course the cold and uncaring response to the Famine showed this was nowhere near the case. Ireland was treated more as a troublesome colony that had been reined in, in the same way America could not be, and was once again firmly ground under the heel of the British boot. Very little, as we have seen, was done to help the “new recruit”, and in fact largely the problems of Ireland were ignored, scorned, derided and pushed to one side. So though the body may have been weak, the spirit, in some ways, was willing, and the Irish would not forget the way they had been treated. Nationalist fervour, only held for now at arm’s length, would soon return with renewed fury.

Just let them catch their breath first, all right?

Another, sadder effect of the aftermath of the Famine was that many young girls who had been lucky enough to survive were now orphans and had no visible means of support. This led to the rise of prostitution in Ireland. Of course, no doubt there had been ladies of the night in the country before, but now once-respectable women were forced out onto the street in order to simply earn enough to feed their families. One of the major ports of call, so to speak, for these orphaned girls was Curragh Barracks in Co. Kildare. With a permanent British military presence established there, and soldiers always horny, the business was brisk for them, but because they were not allowed stay in the barracks they were reduced to sleeping in and around its environs, in bushes and ditches, leading to their becoming known as “the wrens of the Curragh”.

In general, it seems the army treated the women well, allowing them to buy supplies at the market and making sure they had water, and some of them even married, though due to army regulations they were not allowed to live at the base. Locally, they were shunned and called “morally repugnant” and such terms by people who believed they brought disease and were thieves, so I must say it’s certainly nice to see how shattered Ireland banded together in a common cause to help those who had suffered through the worst humanitarian disaster in their living memory. Catholic Ireland my arse. It wasn’t as if these women chose to be sex workers; they simply had no other choice.

Although not the final death knell for the Irish language, emigration and the death of many native Irish speakers (the effects of the Famine being of course hardest felt in the poorer, more rural and therefore more Irish-speaking areas of the country) certainly hastened its demise. Although a sort of reverse reaction occurred in the countries to which the emigrants moved, especially in America, where a reawakened interest in all things Irish, including the language, grew as more emigrants arrived, back home the language of choice was quickly becoming English, and today, as already mentioned, few if any people can speak proper Irish, nor really want to.

Another thing the emigrants exported with themselves was the idea of nationalism, and independence for the country they had left behind, leading to a growing groundswell of support for the “Irish cause” which would lead to finance for and interest in Irish republican paramilitary forces like the IRB, the Fenians and later the IRA. As some Irish immigrants rose to positions of power and standing in the USA, they would use their new influence to do all they could to support and endorse and help to bankroll the rebellions and risings against the British back home.

While it may certainly be a biased view - how could any contemporary source be otherwise, on one side or the other? - the final word should perhaps be left to the man whose quote opened this chapter, writer John Mitchell, editor of the nationalist paper The Nation, which would inspire the creation of the Fenian movement twenty years later. You can certainly hear, in his damning words, the voice of every Irish person who died needlessly, whether they dropped from starvation or perished on one of the coffin ships, or in a foreign land, far from home. More than perhaps anything they ever did, even the outrages perpetrated by Cromwell or the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII, Irish people look to the brutally indifferent response by the British government to the Great Famine to fuel and keep alive their hatred of the auld enemy.

”I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a “dispensation of Providence”; and ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.”

No apology has ever been forthcoming from the British government, even now, almost 150 years later. In 1997 it seemed Tony Blair’s government had finally grasped the nettle, when his statement was read out by Gabriel Byrne at a Famine commemoration event. It said ”“those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy”. The sincerity of the message was however dampened when, in 2021, it was confirmed that Blair had not written, nor approved the message, and it had come from his private secretary, as a personal gesture. That’s all well and good, but it’s the head of state - the real head of state - we want the apology from, not some secretary, flunky or underling.

Even now, in these enlightened times, when relations between Ireland and Britain seem to be at the strongest they ever have been, even now, it appears we are still seen as inferior, no excuse or apology needed, no responsibility taken, and quite possibly, the ghosts of two million Irish cry out for reparations which will never come, and two simple words which will never form on the lips of the leader of the British government: “We’re sorry”.

[Trollheart]

Chapter XII: Under the English Heel II Part II: Rebuilding Ireland: Parnell, the Land League and the Rise of the Catholic Church

It’s a poor student who fails to learn the lesson they’ve been taught, and right or wrong, in the very starkest terms, Ireland had been taught a bleak lesson in survival which, if not taken to heart, could only be guaranteed to come back to haunt her. And so, with the conditions right for a change, almost a sea change, the day of the poor tenant labourer and the rich absentee landlord was drawing to a close as the world entered the second half of the nineteenth century. As already alluded to in the epilogue to the last chapter, many of the hated landlords had been ruined by the Famine and fucked off back to England, leaving their lands to be snapped up by wealthy Catholics, who did indeed learn the lesson of history and eschewed the practice of parcelling out the land in tiny plots and renting it out to poor tenants. Pasturage was the way to go, they saw, and landowners metamorphosed into actual farmers, helping to create the all but ruling class of rural Irish society.

Of course, change never comes easy, and as we will see as this chapter develops, there was no smooth transition from ownership and usage of the land that had, to use a broad and not very accurate term, supported the poor Irish in the years leading up to the Great Famine. As a matter of fact, the idea would kick off an actual war, which would come to be known as the Land War. With Catholic emancipation now in play, and no real reason for wealthy Protestant landowners to remain in Ireland, another power would begin an inexorable rise, which would eventually make it all but the de facto ruler of Ireland. The Catholic Church had of course been a powerful institution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - and before - but only in a spiritual sense. It was the Church which kept the people going, kept them loyal and faithful, and for which so many died, both its priests and their flock.

But once the hunting of clergy was done with, while still not recognised by the British government, the Catholic Church was free to flex its muscles, and over a relatively short period would become the dominant power in the country, having institutions, organisations and even governments bow before it. Well into the middle of the twentieth century the Catholic Church would establish an iron grip on education, entertainment, the morals of its people, and fight tooth and nail for their souls. From this overzealous, often cruel and brutal viewpoint horrible spectres would tower out of the darkness, casting their evil shadows so long and so far that they yet resonate in the Irish consciousness, and things like Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby homes, an absolute intolerance of (some might say tacit persecution of) homosexuality and other “deviant” behaviour, arranged marriages and the complete stamping down of any sort of rights for women would be the awful legacy of a country that seemed to believe Church and State were inseparable.

Unquestioning, unswerving and blind obedience to and belief in the Church would only begin to waver in the face of the most heinous allegations, which would turn out to be revelations, of child abuse within its auspices, and finally, too late for many, ordinary folk would see that priests and nuns were not saints on Earth, God’s unchallenged and pure representatives, but ordinary people with ordinary failings, some capable of as much evil as any wife-beating drunk or paramilitary killer. The foundations of the Church would be shaken to its bones, and even today the whole rotten institution rocks uncertainly as it tries to regain a foothold it will never again maintain.

But after the Famine, people remembered principally how the Church had opened its doors, fed the starving, clothed the naked, and actually done the sort of things Jesus said they should. Religion was a benison to the soul, and in some cases no doubt gave people with nothing the will to go on, the courage to endure, or perhaps the determination to leave their beloved home country behind and seek a new life. It’s both indicative of the awesome power of the Church, and of the sharp demarcation between the poor Irish who starved in the streets and the more affluent Catholics whose bellies were full, that more churches were built during the time of the Famine than at any other time, among them the Cathedral of the Assumption in Kilkenny, St. Mary’s in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary and St. Patrick’s in Armagh. Perhaps in a way it could be said that, despite all the horror and the death and the starvation, a cruel, uncaring and mostly vain God still demanded, through his priests and bishops, that palaces be built to his everlasting glory, and his subjects herded into them by those clergy to pray for their souls, even though their souls had been torn out of them.

For Irish Catholics, you might also say things had swung somewhat full circle. From being banned from going to mass, even executed if they were found to have done so, they were now forced and required to do so. Even in my day, anyone who did not regularly go to at least Sunday mass was seen as an outsider, a blasphemer and a pagan, and this in a time when Ireland had nothing but Catholics, so you couldn’t plead following a different religion. Sunday worship was almost like assembly at school; if you were missing, the parish priest would want to know why, and so would all your fellow parishioners. Few dared skip mass, and few, for a long time, even had the temerity to leave the church before being dismissed by the priest. Nobody wanted to take those first few steps towards the door, not because they didn’t want to leave, but because they did not want to be seen to be rushing out, not paying the proper respect.

As we go on, we’ll see how the Church squeezed and tightened its grasp on just about every aspect of Irish life, and I don’t just mean in the years after the Famine. It wouldn’t be at all unusual to find priests patrolling dance halls, cinemas, on the prowl for “ungodly” conduct by the young girls and boys, even going so far as to rush in and separate them when they go too close for the slow dance. I’m not kidding. Priests were treated with, well, reverence well into the middle of the twentieth century. I’ve noted before how my aunt told me you were supposed to genuflect (go down on one knee and make the sign of the cross) if you even passed one in the street! And it was true. I saw a programme only a few days ago (as I write) where a priest arrived at a house and as the woman answered the door to him she did indeed genuflect.

Though dampened and even forgotten about for some time after such a horrendous human holocaust, the cause of Irish independence could never be fully extinguished, and it would come blazing back to life towards the latter part of the century, as organisations such as the Fenian Brotherhood, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and of course eventually the Irish Republican Army were born. Though in fairness it would be political exigency and a general pragmatism and all but exhaustion with the Irish that would eventually lead to us gaining that independence, despite the failed heroics of the Easter Rising, as late as 1916. But it would probably be fair to say that the late 1850s and 1860s were when the first real, organised opposition to English rule would spring up, not secret societies or a ragtag militia, but actual what would become known as nationalist, and later republican organisations; not quite military, not quite armies, but the most coherent resistance to the British that had come out of Ireland. In a small way, post-Famine Ireland, as it would come to be known, was making slow, dogged steps towards its freedom, and somewhat like Yeats’ rough beast, was shambling towards a new life for this island.

The very character of Ireland changed after the Famine, with the Irish language spoken less, even more hatred for the English and a total reorganisation of the available land. With over a quarter of its population gone, either to starvation and death or to emigration, it could be said that Ireland teetered for some time on the edge of all but extinction. Though there were those, as mentioned, who had weathered the storm by virtue of being wealthy, the poorer class was all but wiped out and the idea of tenant farmers soon vanished as the Land Wars began. As is often the case though with history, it’s necessary to step back in time a little, though we’ve actually come through the Great Famine and stand on the edge of the chasm looking back, with the year around 1850 or so. While nobody really cared - too busy dying of hunger - the seeds of, if you will, the new generation of Irish rebels were sown in that awful time, and though they failed miserably (vaguely alluded to in the timeline), without the first real organised opposition to the British since the United Irishmen in the eighteenth century, true resistance to the occupying force might never have sprung up. And so we need to trace back the genesis, evolution and eventual metamorphosis of that resistance.

[Trollheart]

Young Ireland

In all but direct opposition to Daniel O’Connell’s “Old Ireland”, Young Ireland, or Éire Óg, grew out of the first real nationalist newspaper, appropriately titled The Nation, and like most attempts at uprising, theirs was doomed to failure from the start. Quite why they thought trying to raise the country to arms when so many were dying of starvation or abandoning it is open to debate, but they did set down the marker for those who later followed, and so are seen almost as the grandfathers (despite the name) of the Irish resistance movement that would eventually swell up into an army. Perhaps surprisingly, The Nation was not run exclusively by Catholics, but was in fact set up by two Catholics and a Protestant, and would feature contributions from eminent authors, barristers, at least one M.P. and the editor of the London Magazine. Originally members of O’Connell’s Repeal Organisation, the three founders would lose faith in the Great Liberator’s constant compromise with the Crown and split off to form their own, more radical organisation.

Sir Charles Gaven Duffy, KCMG (1816 - 1903)

Is it of any significance that the editor of this first nationalist newspaper, and therefore one of the fathers of Irish resistance should have been born one hundred years before the great, doomed event that would nevertheless presage Irish independence, the Easter Rising? Probably not, but you know how I like remarking on such things. A poet and journalist, again it’s one of those weird coincidences that though he was born in Dublin Street, this was in Co. Monaghan, which is just on the border with Ulster, and in fact, though a Catholic, it was in the North that he edited his first journal, The Vindicator, after having befriended a member of the United Irishmen when only ten years old. This was in Belfast, but he later moved south and studied law in Dublin, becoming then one of the founders of The Nation.

Cracks began to appear in the alliance with O’Connell when the Great Liberator refused the call for Catholic and Protestant children to be educated together in non-denominational colleges, championing the cause of Catholic Ireland - Old Ireland - and predicting and wishing for the virtual elimination through absorption into the Catholic Church of the Protestant Ascendancy. Duffy and The Nation were more in favour of an all-inclusive Ireland (as I said, one of their founders was a Protestant) and disagreed with O’Connell’s ideas, seeing them as outdated and counterproductive to the cause of eventual Irish independence. Duffy and his colleagues were, too, it has to be said, reluctant to get involved in the abolitionist cause which O’Connell trumpeted, mostly because they relied on funding from America, and with the Civil War yet twenty years and more off, the overall feeling in the new colony was that it was nobody’s business but theirs if they kept slaves. In this, at least, it has to be said that O’Connell was on the right side of history and Duffy has to be seen as something of an apologist at best, a coward at worst.

Between 1845 and 1847 the cracks between O’Connell and what would become Young Ireland widened, at first due to O’Connell’s denouncing the “seditious” articles in The Nation and even pressing for the conviction of Duffy (which did not happen) and then later, when he (O’Connell) refused to countenance the use of violence as any sort of last resort to gain independence, while Young Ireland saw it as a valid method of persuasion if all else failed. In this difference of opinion it can be clearly seen that the Repeal Association was destined to fade into the background of history, despite Daniel O’Connell’s undoubted gains for the Irish people (though see previous chapters for qualification as to who that covered) while Young Ireland would be the springboard for the more militant arm of Irish resistance. As a result of what was seen as intransigence and perhaps also cowardice, or at least a lack of will to do what needed to be done to free Ireland, by the Repeal Association, Duffy and his Nation compatriots split from O’Connell and formed the Irish Confederation, the forerunner of Young Ireland.

After the minor rising they tried to prosecute, Duffy was the only one not sentenced to transportation, and toured Ireland during the Famine and in 1850 formed the Tenant Right League, of which more soon. His hope was to unite Protestant and Catholic, North and South in a non-sectarian assembly that would campaign together for the rights of poor tenant farmers, but like all such ventures that sought to join the two diametrically opposed sides, it was doomed to failure. Perhaps one of his biggest miscalculations was to go head-to-head with the Catholic Church, in the shape of the Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, whom he accused of caring more about Rome than Ireland. Cullen, for his part, disliked Duffy, calling him an “Irish Mazzini”, referring to the Young Italy revolt which deposed the Pope in 1849, setting up an Italian Republic.

Disillusioned and losing faith in the cause of Irish independence, especially in the face of the opposition from the Church, which seemed to want Ireland to remain as part of the United Kingdom in order to “convert by stealth”, or something, Duffy emigrated to Australia in 1856, where he finally flourished, realising his talents and became premier of Victoria. He married three times, had a total of eight (surviving) children, and died in 1903 in Nice, but was buried back home in Ireland, in Dublin.

Thomas Davis (1814 - 1845)

Born in Mallow, Co. Cork to a Welsh father and a Protestant Irish mother, Davis never knew his father, the man dying a month after the boy’s birth, so he was brought up by his mother, who had been left enough of a legacy by her husband to be financially independent and allow her to move back to her native Dublin, where Thomas went to Trinity College to study law. Having set up The Nation with Charles Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon, he fiercely opposed Daniel O’Connell’s willingness, even eagerness to do away with the Irish language, fighting through the paper for not only its retention but its supremacy as the standard tongue of Ireland. Perhaps due to his mother’s ancestral ties to the great Gaelic families of the O’Sullivan clan, he developed a great affinity and respect for the ancient heritage of Ireland, and fell in love with the rural countryside, wishing for Ireland a separate national identity and independence from Britain.

“The country of our birth, our educations, our recollections, ancestral, personal, national; the country of our loves, our friendships, our hopes; our country: the cosmopolite is unnatural, base - I would fain say, impossible. To act on a world is for those above it, not of it. Patriotism is human philanthropy.”

Despite his opposition to O’Connell, Davis did not get to be a member of Young Ireland nor take part in the abortive mini-rising, as he died of scarlet fever in 1845, aged only 30.

John Blake Dillon (1814 - 1866)

Again the coincidences: both he and Thomas Davis were born in the same year, though he lived 21 years longer. Dillon was the only one of the three founders of The Nation who had any sort of connection to the nobility, being related through his father to the Earl of Roscommon. While studying law at Trinity he met Thomas Davis, and then encountered Charles Duffy when both men worked for the Morning Register newspaper. The three would then set up Ireland’s first nationalist journal. With the inevitable failure of the Young Ireland rising he fled to France and then America, returning to Ireland in 1856 with vastly changed views, advocating the union of Ireland and Britain. He died of cholera ten years later, and like Duffy, is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

Although these were the three founders of The Nation, it doesn’t seem to me that they took any real part in the rising, so to speak (one of them being dead, of course, before it took place) so it is perhaps important that we look at the other members of Young Ireland who were more instrumental in attempting to, perhaps foolishly, rebel during the worst ecological disaster Ireland had ever faced, or ever has.

John Mitchel (1815 - 1875)

Given what we’ve heard he wrote about the Famine in the previous chapter, it comes as something of a surprise to me to find that he was a Protestant, born in Londonderry (Derry) the son of a Presbyterian minister. He probably got his Catholic sympathies from his father, who had begun to shy away from support of Ascendancy candidates for parliament, to the extent of earning the nickname “Papist Mitchel”, not a tag you wanted to have in Protestant-ruled Ulster! John was one of those who welcomed Daniel O’Connell to Ulster - though his attempt to garner support for repeal of the Act of Union naturally fell on stony ground and failed - and moved to Dublin in 1843, having seen a copy of The Nation and begun work there as a writer. When Thomas Davis died suddenly, two years later, he was made editor by Charles Gavan Duffy.

Showing the depth of his dedication to both the paper and the Irish cause, Mitchel shut down his law practice in Newry and moved his family to Dublin, taking up the post at The Nation. When the Great Famine hit, as we have seen, he spoke out about it, writing editorials blaming cruel and heartless and greedy landlords, and deploring the lackadaisical attitude of the British Government, culminating in, as above, his blaming them for the Famine and the deaths of over a million poor Irish. In March 1846 he wrote ”The Irish People are expecting famine day by day… and they ascribe it unanimously, not so much to the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England. … They behold their own wretched food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth, and they see heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England; they see it and with every grain of that corn goes a heavy curse.”

His views too radical even for The Nation, he resigned from his post at the end of 1847 and a few months later published his own newspaper, The United Irishman, in which he attempted to show his fellow Irish in Ulster how they were being treated: "My Lord Enniskillen . . . is apprehensive not lest you be evicted by landlords, and sent to the poorhouse, but lest purgatory and the Seven Sacraments be down your throats… . . The Seven Sacraments are, to be sure, very dangerous, but the quarter-acre-clause [conditioning access to poor relief][38] touches you more nearly . . . end all your energies to resisting the “encroachments of Popery” you thereby perpetuate British dominion in Ireland and keep the “Empire” going yet a little while. Irish landlordism has made a covenant with British government in these terms—“Keep down for me my tenantry, my peasantry, my ‘masses’ in due submission with your troops and laws, and I will garrison the island for you and hold it as your liege-man and vassal for ever.”

A true example of what would be seen as one of the first republicans now, advocating total independence from the British government, “passive resistance” to their efforts to export grain out of Ireland, refusal to pay rents and other modes of civil disobedience, without promoting an actual rising (which he had enough good sense to know would fail, given the state of the country and most of its people), Mitchel wrote the following mission statement for the United Irishman, after quoting the heroic Wolfe Tone:

That the Irish people had a distinct and indefeasible right to their country, and to all the moral and material wealth and resources thereof, … as a distinct Sovereign State …;
That the property of the farmers and labourers of Ireland is as sacred as the property of all the noblemen and gentlemen in Ireland, and also immeasurably more valuable;
That the custom called ‘Tenant Right,’ which prevails partially in the North of Ireland, is a just and salutary custom both for North and South …;
That every man in Ireland who shall hereafter pay taxes for the support of the State, shall have a just right to an equal voice with every other man in the government …
That all ‘legal and constitutional agitation’ in Ireland is a delusion;
That every freeman, and every man who desired to become free, ought to have arms, and to practise the use of them.
That no combination of classes in Ireland is desirable, just, or possible, save on the terms of the rights of the industrious classes being acknowledged and secured; [and]
That no good thing can come from the English Parliament, or the English Government.”

This was provocative, but he went further, calling the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon, “Her Majesty’s Executioner General and General Butcher of Ireland”, and declaring his intention, through his journal, to “resume the Holy War to sweep this island clear of the English name and nation.” Unsurprisingly, the British government did not take this lying down, and after, I suppose, providing him with enough rope to hang himself, Mitchel was arrested and his paper suppressed. Even from jail however he did not shut up: [My] gallant Confederates … have marched past my prison windows to let me know that there are ten thousand fighting men in Dublin— ‘felons’ in heart and soul. I thank God for it. The game is afoot, at last. The liberty of Ireland may come sooner or come later, by peaceful negotiation or bloody conflict— but it is sure; and wherever between the poles I may chance to be, I will hear the crash of the down fall of the thrice-accursed British Empire.”

When charges of seditious libel did not stick (well, he was telling the truth, even if the British didn’t want to hear it, so how could it be libel?) the charge was changed to treason felony, and under this crime he was found guilty and transported, first to Bermuda (don’t even think about it: it’s nowhere near as good as it sounds!) and then after a year to Tasmania (then called Van Diemen’s Land) where he was reunited with his fellows from The Nation and his own paper, Thomas Francis Meagher, William Smith O’Brien and John Martin, who had been sent there after their abortive Young Ireland rising.

[Trollheart]

James Fintan Lawlor (1809 - 1849)

It has certainly been said that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that powerful words can win the heart and minds of the people, so it’s not too surprising to find that one of the principle architects of the Young Ireland Rising was a celebrated author, perhaps one of the country’s best during this period, and a man whose writing had major influence on such colossal figures in the cause of Irish independence as Padraig Pearse, James Connolly and Arthur Griffith. One of twelve children (I’m not sure if they all survived or indeed where he came in the pecking order) he was born in Raheen, Co, Laois (leesh) and due to an accident as an infant was partially crippled. As a result, he did not go to school but was home tutored, however he did enrol in Saint Patrick’s, Carlow College where he made close and lasting associations with people like Father William Kinsella, the future Bishop of Ossory, and Father Andrew Fitzgerald, who would be imprisoned during the Tithe Wars.

However, despite being a capable student, familiarising himself with both chemistry and law, his poor health told against him and he lasted a mere year in college, whereafter he was forced to return home. Later he fiercely opposed the tithes imposed on the Irish people by England, and was very active in the war of the same name. Though his father Patrick was involved in Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association, James saw little future in this and when Father Matthew set up his temperance society in 1839, James joined but then suggested it could expand its influence and had it named the Shamrock Friendly Society, essentially one of those secret societies that the Irish Catholic clergy hierarchy would come to despise, as we will see in the next chapter, and who would raise once again the flag of Irish freedom. Father and son were so much opposed that in the end their house could not hold both of them, and so James was obliged to leave.

The year was 1844, a mere three years before the Great Famine would grip the country in icy dead fingers, and James travelled to the capital and then to Belfast in his quest to try to find ways to help the Irish poor, but again his bad health was his worst enemy, and having been diagnosed with what it believed to have been consumption (TB) he was forced to mend bridges with his father and return home. It was from here, perhaps ironically, that he would begin to make his voice properly heard, as he wrote articles for The Nation and The Felon, putting across clearly and concisely his views on Irish independence and his contempt for Repeal, no doubt to the chagrin of his father: “I will never contribute one shilling, or give my name, heart or hand for such an object as the simple Repeal.”

He was soon recognised as one of the brightest new writers emerging in Irish nationalist circles, and on the subject of the nascent Irish Confederation (which would become Young Ireland) he had this to say: “in what form of words you please; but denounce nothing—proscribe nothing, more especially of your own freedom of action. Leave yourselves free individually and collectively.” He continued “if any resolution, or pledge, be adopted to seek Legislative independence by moral force and legal proceedings alone, with a denunciation, or renunciation of all or any other means or proceedings, you may have millions better and stronger men than I to join you; but you won’t have me. . . . There has already, I think, been too much giving in on this question of means and force.” He wrote extensively about tenants’ rights, the poor, the Irish landlords, and, as it hit, the famine.

[i]“Famine, more or less, was in 500,000 families—famine with all its diseases and decay; famine, with all its fears and horrors; famine, with all its dreadful pains and more dreadful debility. All pined and wasted, sickened and drooped; numbers died—the strong man, the fair maiden, the infant—the landlord got his rent… The 8,000 individuals who are owners of Ireland by divine right and the grant of God, confirm (by themselves) in sundry successive acts of parliament have a full view of these coming results and have distinctly declared their intention of serving notice to quit on the people of Ireland…The landlords have adopted the process of depopulating the island and are pressing it forward to their own destruction, or to ours…” Fintan Lalor’s view was that the Landlords were “enforcing self-defence on us.”

Still, gifted writer though he was, he soon had to admit he was no orator, as a planned public meeting at Holycross, Co. Tipperary failed miserably, his lack of effectiveness as a public speaker and his own poor health showing him he was better conducting his battle from behind a desk and with pen and ink rather than trying to rouse the people personally. But his words continued to resonate through Ireland (or at least, in the ears of those who weren’t dying of hunger or disease, or making for the coffin ships, one assumes) and brought him to the notice of John Mitchel, among others, for whom he would write in both nationalist journals, campaigning, indeed, against the transportation of both he and his fellow writer John Martin.

Both appeals failed, and Lawlor blasted the decision, writing that “The rights of property may be pleaded. No one has more respect for the than I have; but I do class among them the robber’s right by which the lands of this country are now held in fee for the British Crown. I acknowledge no right of property in a small class which goes to abrogate the rights of a numerous people… I deny and challenge all such rights, howsoever founded or enforced. I challenge them as founded only on the code of the brigand, and enforced only by the sanction of the hangman.”

Inevitably, of course, with such bold and (in the eyes of Dublin Castle and Westminster) treasonous pronouncements as "We hold the present existing government of this island and all existing rights of property in our soil, to be mere usurpation and tyranny, and to be null and void as of moral effect; and our purpose is to abolish them entirely, or lose our lives in the attempt. The right founded on conquest and affirmed by laws made by the conquerors themselves, we regard as no other than the right of the robber on a larger scale. We owe no obedience to laws enacted by another nation without our consent, nor respect to assumed rights of property which are starving and exterminating our people…” and “We have determined to set about creating, as speedily as possible, a military organisation, of which the Felons office shall be the centre and citadel. As a first step of proceeding, we are now founding a Club which, it is intended, shall consist of one, two or more persons from each parish throughout Ireland who are to be in immediate connection and correspondence with this office. . . . A prospectus and set of rules are in preparation, which we will publish when completed. But without waiting for such publication, we earnestly request every man in Ireland who desires to enrol himself as a colleague and comrade, and as a member of the Felon Club, will signify his wish by letter to the provisional secretary, Mr. Joseph Brenan, Felon office, 12 Trinity Street” to say nothing of his final article, wherein he asked “Remember this—that somewhere and somehow, and by somebody, a beginning must be made. Who strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who draws first blood for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that will be green forever?” Fintan Lawlor was arrested, but this time, in a way, his bad health came to his rescue and he had to be released.

This did nothing to stop him campaigning against the English, and in fact - surprisingly, given the state of his health at the time - he went on to help organise yet another abortive rising in County Waterford. Poorly planned, as ever, badly conceived and with no real direction it fizzled out, and Lawlor finally passed away three months later, at the age of forty-three.

[Trollheart]

Father John Kenyon (1812 - 1869)

In the spirit of his forebears who died at Vinegar Hill and who took Wexford the previous century, Father John Kenyon was one of what I have referred to in a previous chapter as a “warrior priest”, which is to say, he didn’t just support the cause of Irish freedom, but physically fought for it, in the process going against the Catholic hierarchy. Coming from a fairly well-to-do family, all but one of his six siblings went into the priesthood, but he was the only one to get involved with Young Ireland. He was part of Father Matthew’s temperance movement, but whether or not this brought him into contact with either James Fintan Lawlor or the Shamrock Friendly Society I don’t know. What I do know is that when Young Ireland was established in 1842 he was quick to join up, seeing the new movement’s goals align with his.

During the Famine - which he blamed, perhaps unfairly, exclusively on the British, preaching hatred of all things English from his pulpit - he was a tireless worker for relief of the poor, even providing work to the poor tenant farmers by establishing his own small “public works”, a wall he needed built around his house. Ah, I see he did meet Fintan Lawlor, as well as others such as John Mitchel, John Martin and James Blake Dillon. He was able to argue for and justify his belief in independence through violence by showing that the Old Testament God had not been above ordering murder, rape and even taking a hand in the demolition of certain cities, and basically laying bare the whole dark hypocrisy of such a god bleating “Thou shalt not kill” while advocating his followers to do just that to the people who wouldn’t bow down and worship him. Take that, Christianity!

He had a lot to say about Daniel O’Connell, too, none of it good: “We have been guided, step by step, self-hoodwinked to such an abyss of physical and moral misery – to such a condition of helpless and hopeless degradation, as no race of mankind was ever plunged in since the creation. We are a nation of beggars – mean, shameless, and lying beggars. And this is where O’Connell has guided us.” Not for Father Kenyon the hypocrisy of lamenting his enemy after he had passed on, as he made clear in no uncertain terms at the Liberator’s death, even going so far as to castigate those of Young Ireland who eulogised him: “On the contrary, I think that Mr. O’Connell has been doing before his death, and was likely to continue doing so long as he might live, very grievous injury to Ireland; so that I account his death rather a gain than a loss to this country.” Well, he was nothing if not consistent.

When the Irish Confederacy was set up it was not trusted by the Catholic powers, since it also included Protestants and Presbyterians, so the patronage of Father Kenyon was of immense value to the new society, and when John Mitchel was transported in 1848 Kenyon became the loudest voice agitating for action within the society, even pushing for it to become a secret society, capable of becoming a stand-in government for Ireland should an uprising succeed. Naturally, his actions brought him into conflict, even head-on collision with his superiors in the Church, and he was given an ultimatum: to get out of politics or get out of the clergy. He hedged his bets, agreeing not to support armed rebellion, but still giving it his blessing.

Perhaps hard to understand now, but like John Mitchel, Kenyon (and indeed John Martin - the three of them known informally as “the three Johns”) was against abolition, leading to his epithet of “the slave tolerating priest from Tipperary”. Political affiliations aside, I do find it hard to credit how men like Kenyon, Mitchel and Martin could fight for the freedom of their own people yet tolerate, even support the enslavement of their American brothers. Might be worthy of a later article, but I don’t want to stray too far down unfamiliar roads in the dark here: might never find my way back.

[Trollheart]

We Rise (Again), We Fall (Again) - The Young Ireland Rebellion

Throughout our long and troubled history, there does not seem to have been a single instance of a rebellion, uprising or even civil disturbance taking place that succeeded in its aims, and of course this latest would be no exception. I’ve already pointed out my own amazement that such a thing should be contemplated in a time when people were quite literally dying in the streets of hunger and disease, but it does seem as if their hand was forced. When the British government set about plans to arrest the Young Irelanders, having suspended habeas corpus, there really was no choice for the fledgling secret society, and they prepared to revolt. Not waiting to be arrested, William Smith O’Brien, Francis Meagher and John Blake Dillon were headed through Counties Wexford, Kilkenny and Tipperary when they were accosted by a squad of policemen near Ballingarry Mines.

When the police saw the strength of the opposition they faced in attempting to arrest O’Brien - miners, tradesmen and tenant labourers had all come to his aid and helped erect barricades to prevent his being taken - they instead took refuge in a local house, taking the children there hostage. When the tenant, Mrs. McCormack, demanded to be let in to her house she was refused entry, and turned to O’Brien, demanding to know what he intended to do about her hostage children? O’Brien was negotiating with the police when a shot was fired, and all hell broke loose. For the next few hours, the rebels and the police fought to a stand-off, until reinforcements for the police arrived, and the rebels had to melt away, ending the short-lived and almost humorous Young Ireland rising. I don’t know what happened to the McCormack children after that, though I read the family emigrated to America in 1853, so I guess they survived.

Let’s take a quick look, then, at the main figures behind this (snigger) rising, shall we?

Thomas Francis Meagher (1823 - 1867)

Having spent time being educated in England, Meagher returned with plans to go into law, but was attracted instead at first to the Repeal Movement and then, when he became disillusioned with their policies, to Young Ireland. In 1846 he made his views quite plain when he delivered what has become known as “The Sword Speech”, in which he outlined the justification of the use of arms in order to gain independence for Ireland. It’s a long speech and I’m not going to transcribe it all here, but a relevant section will give you an idea of what he was talking about:

“Then, my lord, I do not disclaim the use of arms as immoral, nor do I believe it is the truth to say, that the God of heaven withholds his sanction from the use of arms. From that night in which, in the valley of Bethulia, He nerved the arm of the Jewish girl to smite the drunken tyrant in his tent, down to the hour in which He blessed the insurgent chivalry of the Belgian priests, His Almighty hand hath ever been stretched forth from His throne of light, to consecrate the flag of freedom—to bless the patriot sword.
Be it for the defence, or be it for the assertion of a nation’s liberty, I look upon the sword as a sacred weapon. And if, my lord, it has sometimes reddened the shroud of the oppressor—like the anointed rod of the high priest, it has, as often, blossomed into flowers to deck the freeman’s brow. Abhor the sword ? Stigmatise the sword? No, my lord, for in the passes of the Tyrol it cut to pieces the banner of the Bavarian, and through those cragged passes cut a path to fame for the peasant insurrectionist of Innsbruck. Abhor the sword? Stigmatise the sword? No, my lord, for at its blow, and in the quivering of its crimson light a giant nation sprang up from the waters of the Atlantic, and by its redeeming magic the fettered colony became a daring, free Republic. Abhor the sword? Stigmatise the sword? No, my lord, for it swept the Dutch marauders out of the fine old towns of Belgium—swept them back to their phlegmatic swamps, and knocked their flag and sceptre, their laws and bayonets, into the sluggish waters of the Scheldt. My lord, I learned that it was the right of a nation to govern itself—not in this Hall, but upon the ramparts of Antwerp.”

It’s a bit much isn’t it really? Glamourising violent uprising by cataloguing the - dubious and very much dependent on your view - benefits of taking up arms. It’s like saying war is terrible but it has its good points, or, to stretch the metaphor to breaking point, Hitler was a cunt but at least the trains ran on time!

Six months later, Meagher, along with William Smith O’Brien,Thomas Devin Reilly and John Mitchel formed the Irish Confederation, and the following year he and O’Brien travelled to France and returned with what would be the official Irish tricolour, given to them by sympathetic French women. After the failed uprising, he and his co-conspirators were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but public outcry led to the sentences being commuted to transportation for life, and Meagher found himself on the other side of the world, in Van Diemen’s Land, off the coast of Australia. In 1852 he escaped, leaving behind his heavily-pregnant wife, and fled to America where he founded a local Irish newspaper and became a naturalised American citizen.

By the way, if you’re wondering about his wife and child (he didn’t) they were not to last long. She died two years later - though she did join him in America for a short time - their son dying almost four months after his birth. Meagher went on to marry an American woman, and enlisted in the New York State Militia as a captain, then to the Union Army at the outbreak of the American Civil War.

He recruited and trained a specialised unit of Irishmen which he called the “Fighting 69th” (well, Irishmen do know how to fight!) and was quickly promoted to colonel and then brigadier general. After the war, he was elected governor of the Territory of Montana, and is believed to have died when he fell - or was pushed - overboard a steamboat on the way back from Fort Benton. He had made many enemies in his time in America, and in Montana, and there were rumours of his having been killed in reprisal, though no proof was ever offered and his body, having fallen into the Missouri River, was never recovered, leading to his being perhaps one of the only Young Irelanders not to receive any sort of burial, in Ireland or elsewhere.

William Smith O’Brien (1803 - 1864)

A man who could certainly not be described as having been born into poverty, O’Brien was the son of Sir Edward O’Brien, 4th Baronet, and could, in addition, trace his lineage right back to Ireland’s High King, Brian Boru. A Protestant and landowner, he was afforded the best education money could buy, and went to Harrow and Trinity College in Cambridge. Despite this, he became interested in the Repeal Movement, having previously clashed with the Liberator when he was an MP. He did what he could to secure famine relief for his people, but quickly came to the conclusion that the British government were doing and were going to continue doing nothing, and that the only way to help the Irish was to form a national government. This led him to Young Ireland, and the aforementioned excuse for a rising.

Sentenced at first to death and then to transportation with his colleagues, O’Brien attempted escape from Van Diemen’s Land, but unlike Thomas Francis Meagher he was unsuccessful, betrayed by the captain of the ship due to take him away, and he remained there for five years. Prohibited from returning to Britain, he settled in Brussels in 1854. Two years later he was granted a pardon and allowed to return to Ireland, but his health was failing and he died in Wales in 1864.

[Trollheart]

The Tenant Right League

When the Encumbered Estates Act was passed in 1849, as already discussed, as a way for absentee landlords to realise the best financial return from their failing estates, the rights of the small tenant farmer were of course ignored and trampled underfoot. Everything in the Act lent its support and power to the landlord, who could evict at will tenants unable or unwilling to pay their rent, and also refuse to compensate them for any work carried out on their land. In response to this injustice, Charles Gavn Duffy called for a tenant right convention, which met in Dublin in September 1850. From this came the all-Ireland Tenant Right League, which espoused three main tenets, which became known as “The three F’s”:

Fair Rent (assessed by land value and fixed to prevent the rack renting of tenant improvements)
Fixity of Tenure (so long as the fair rent is paid)
Free Sale (the right of farmers to sell their “interest” in their holding to an incoming tenant).

Though this of course angered the landowners, it could not be put down or dismissed as a Catholic agitation, as it had the support also of Protestant farmers, and many radical MPs in Westminster, as well as O’Connell’s Repeal supporters. Perhaps a rare, even unique instance of Young Irelanders (John Martin) and Old Irelanders working for common cause. The League won 48 seats in the 1852 general election, though of course, as always, such alliances were fragile and soon Ulster support began to crumble. Old suspicions and enmities came bubbling back up to the surface, and everyone must have known, Utopian ideal that it was, the idea of north and south linking arms and marching forward into a bright new future together was a fantasy. With Orangemen breaking up meetings, accusations of interference in religious and political affairs, and the opposition, or at least, lack of support of the Catholic hierarchy, the Tenant Right League was, like many idealistic Irish ventures, doomed to failure.

And fail it did.

With the death of its founder, Frederick Lucas, who had further alienated himself with the Catholic leadership by taking a - failed - complaint against Archbishop Cullen to Rome, the conviction and transportation of John Martin and Duffy’s emigration to Australia, the movement was dead in the water by 1855. There were some attempts to revive the League, but most met with little success until Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt would champion the Land League more than twenty years later.

Boycott: The Man, the Meaning, the Word

An interesting little aside, before we get into the whole Land War story and the people behind it, is the origin of the word “boycott”. I had heard the story but had forgotten it, so here it is for those of you who are unaware. We have to jump a little ahead, to the point where, as a result of the Land War and the rent strikes, tensions between landlords and tenant farmers were at perhaps their highest since the mass evictions during the Great Famine.

Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832 - 1897)

Having served in the British Army in Belfast, though it appears he became ill soon after and only lasted a year there, after which he resigned his commission and moved to County Tipperary, and then to the remote Achill Island, where he was involved in various controversies, including charges for assault, land disputes and a case in which he was said to have salvaged a wreck illegally. he next found himself in Lough Mask, Co. Mayo, where his infamy would spread back to his homeland, working as a land agent for the 3rd Earl of Erne. Land agents, or middlemen, were, as I think I have already pointed out in the previous chapter, almost more hated than the landlords themselves, who were seldom if ever seen by their tenants, and so became the embodiment of the oppression the landlord exerted over his tenant farmers.

Although Boycott himself seemed to think he was a fair man, the truth is far different. He laid down many petty restrictions, took privileges away from his tenants, and even refused to pay his own labourers an increase when they asked for it, causing them to strike. This was in August 1880. A local priest, and member of the Irish National Land League (see further), who fought for fair treatment for tenant farmers, had been involved in the labourers’ dispute, and when, the following month, Boycott demanded his landlord’s rent from the tenant farmers, Father O’Malley turned to the speech given by the leader of the Land League, Charles Stuart Parnell, only three days before, in Ennis, Co. Clare.

“I wish to point out to you a very much better way – a more Christian and charitable way, which will give the lost man an opportunity of repenting. When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him – you must shun him in the streets of the town – you must shun him in the shop – you must shun him on the fair green and in the market place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone, by putting him in moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of the country, as if he were the leper of old – you must show him your detestation of the crime he committed.”

In response to this call, Boycott’s tenants began a campaign of, perhaps you might say, civil disobedience. When he issued eviction notices against eleven tenants, the process servers were prevented from delivering them, attacked by the other tenants and had to withdraw. News soon spread to nearby Ballinrobe, from which a large crowd descended upon the estate and advised Boycott’s labourers and servants to desert him; in fear, most of them did, leaving the captain to be forced to run the place without help. But his troubles were only beginning.

A campaign of withdrawal of services began. The postman would not deliver his letters. The local laundress would not wash his clothes, the blacksmith would not shoe his horses. Soon, the local shops began refusing him service, leaving Boycott in a kind of siege, so that he had to import provisions from outside of the village. The phrase “to boycott someone or something” originates from the treatment this English land agent received from the people of Ireland he had treated so callously. Completely oblivious, it seems, to the reasons why he was being so treated, Boycott wrote a whining letter to The Times, in which he outlined his situation:

THE STATE OF IRELAND
Sir, The following detail may be interesting to your readers as exemplifying the power of the Land League. On the 22nd September a process-server, escorted by a police force of seventeen men, retreated to my house for protection, followed by a howling mob of people, who yelled and hooted at the members of my family. On the ensuing day, September 23rd, the people collected in crowds upon my farm, and some hundred or so came up to my house and ordered off, under threats of ulterior consequences, all my farm labourers, workmen, and stablemen, commanding them never to work for me again. My herd (?) has been frightened by them into giving up his employment, though he has refused to give up the house he held from me as part of his emolument. Another herd on an off farm has also been compelled to resign his situation. My blacksmith has received a letter threatening him with murder if he does any more work for me, and my laundress has also been ordered to give up my washing. A little boy, twelve years of age, who carried my post-bag to and from the neighbouring town of Ballinrobe, was struck and threatened on 27th September, and ordered to desist from his work; since which time I have sent my little nephew for my letters and even he, on 2nd October, was stopped on the road and threatened if he continued to act as my messenger. The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house, and I have just received a message from the post mistress to say that the telegraph messenger was stopped and threatened on the road when bringing out a message to me and that she does not think it safe to send any telegrams which may come for me in the future for fear they should be abstracted and the messenger injured. My farm is public property; the people wander over it with impunity. My crops are trampled upon, carried away in quantities, and destroyed wholesale. The locks on my gates are smashed, the gates thrown open, the walls thrown down, and the stock driven out on the roads. I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed as the object of the Land League unless I throw up everything and leave the country. I say nothing about the danger to my own life, which is apparent to anybody who knows the country.
CHARLES C. BOYCOTT
Lough Mask House, County Mayo, 14 October

As a result of this self-serving cry for help, the British press mobilised, and Englishmen came to Boycott’s rescue, to help save his crops, which, after all, if he could not harvest them would not reflect well on him with his lord and master back in England. The idea of so many Ulstermen - hundreds originally, and to have been armed, though this was reduced to fifty and no arms, on the orders of the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Lord Edward Forster - descending on the south spooked many nationalists, and was seen almost as a prelude to an invasion. There were protests and unrest as the trains travelled south, but no violence in the end. Boycott, not surprisingly, found that staying in Mayo after that was not a good idea, and was evacuated to Dublin, where again he received threats until he was transferred home to England. Using the word which would forever after become synonymous with his name, letters to the hotel in which he lodged in Dublin prior to his return to England threatened to “boycott” the place if he was not sent packing… After this, the term passed into common parlance, and anyone earning ostracisation was said to be “boycotted”. Apparently, the whole idea went back to our friend, Father John O’Malley:

I said, “I’m bothered about a word.”
“What is it?” asked Father John.
“Well,” I said, “When the people ostracise a land-grabber we call it social excommunication, but we ought to have an entirely different word to signify ostracism applied to a landlord or land-agent like Boycott. Ostracism won’t do – the peasantry would not know the meaning of the word – and I can’t think of any other.”
“No,” said Father John, “ostracism wouldn’t do.”
He looked down, tapped his big forehead, and said: “How would it do to call it to Boycott him?”

[Trollheart]

The Land War

William Ewart Gladstone (1809 - 1898)

What is it with these weird middle names? Ewart? Never heard of an Ewart before. Wonder if it’s a corruption of Stewart? Well, he was Scottish-born, so maybe. Reminds me of the old Simpsons line: “Attention! The Gift Shop has sold out of Bort licence plates! I repeat: there are no more Bort licence plates!” Ah, you had to be there. Having served under no less than four Prime Ministers - twice under Robert Peel - Gladstone was finally elected to the top position himself in 1868. He was seen as a liberal politician, and said to be the friend of the working man. Well, coming from Liverpool (yes yes! His father was Scottish: I never said he was born there, smartass) he would be, wouldn’t he? He campaigned against the previous administration’s policy of trade protectionism - which was chiefly to blame for the Famine, or at least the government’s response, or lack of it, to it - and believed in equality of opportunity. This would in turn lead to his passing the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870, which was not as good a thing for Ireland as it sounds.

He was also a supporter of Home Rule for Ireland (though his efforts were thwarted) and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. He is of course remembered as one of Britain’s greatest Prime Ministers, mentioned in the same hallowed breaths as Disraeli, Churchill and Peel. However let’s not shy from the issue of slave ownership, which his father practiced. Ah and I see now the middle name came from the surname of one of his father’s friends, William Ewart. Actually, I guess he may have been named for him, since his first name was William too. Though provided with his seat at Newark, a “rotten borough” - a small area where voting was tightly controlled by the landowner - controlled by his friend the Duke of Newcastle, he won his own seat in the general election easily, and quickly became a famed orator and rising star. Due to either his own or his father’s views on the subject, he spoke out in support of slavery, but also championed the cause of lower paid workers in England, especially children.

An interesting if slightly self-serving attitude towards slavery, I see. Apparently he and his father advocated for eventual freedom for slaves, but only after they had undergone “moral emancipation through apprenticeship”, which I take to mean a sort of Columbus-like idea of “adopt our laws and traditions, and while you’re at it worship our god, and we’ll talk about it”. Right. They also opposed the international slave trade, but only, it seems, because this helped push the price of slaves up. Charming. Even more charming (not), quite sickening in fact is the attitude of the British government towards slave owners after slavery had been abolished, in 1834. Incredibly, slave owners were paid, compensated for the loss of their slaves, with Gladstone’s father receiving the equivalent in today’s money of ten million pounds. Hell, at least the Americans went to war over the subject! No such payout for the Southern slaveowners! Yeah, he did soften his position later on, but fuck him: he’s not getting a pass for that. It seems that was mostly to piss his father off and shake off the influence Sir John had had on his politics, so again I say, in that instance, fuck him.

There is, however, setting that aside for the moment, no doubt that he was a friend to the Irish, as we will see, but also to those suffering in China under the opium trade, as well as “fallen women” whom he, um, “met late at night on the street, in his house or in their houses, writing their names in a private notebook” (certainly sounds dodgy, though I kind of see what they mean) and visited political prisoners in Naples. When he defeated Disraeli in the 1868 general election, his promise was to “pacify Ireland”. In the mouth of any other British Prime Minister, that might have sounded ominous for us, but he really meant it. Two years into his premiership, he passed the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 (often known for short as the Land Act), which proposed to ensure that The Ulster custom or any similar custom prevailing elsewhere was given the force of law where it existed.
Tenants not enjoying that protection (the vast majority) gained increased security by compensation for improvements made to a farm if they surrendered their lease (they had previously been accredited to the landlord, hence no incentive to the tenant) and compensation for ‘disturbance’, damages, for tenants evicted for causes other than non-payment of rent.

The ‘John Bright Clauses’, which Gladstone accepted reluctantly, allowed tenants to borrow from the government two thirds of the cost of buying their holding, at 5% interest repayable over 35 years if the landlord was willing to sell, though he was not compelled to do so.

Unfortunately the provisions in this Act were generally ignored or attempted to be circumvented by the landlords, and as I noted earlier, doing more harm than good, led to what became known as the Land War, a few months later. So that is where we leave Gladstone and turn our attention to two of the new rising stars of the Irish political scene, both of whom would be very much involved in the coming Land War.

Charles Stewart Parnell (1836 - 1891)

The son of a struggling miller, eking out a poor existence, an oppressed Catholic tenant farmer, these were just a few of the things Parnell was not. He was in fact the son of a wealthy Anglican landowner, and had a connection back to the Royal house of Tudor on his great-grandmother’s side. He came from a large family - eleven children in all, of which he was the seventh, and really does not seem at first reading to be the kind of man you would expect to be fighting for Irish independence, and indeed even on his sojourn through the southern states of the USA with his brother John Howard in 1871, neither troubled to associate with or seek out Irish-Americans. Why, then, did Charles become so deeply involved in the Irish cause? To be honest, I really can’t see, and other than reading a biography of the man - which I neither have the time nor interest for - I’m going to assume that it came about through his time as a landowner (seen as one of the more progressive in his High Sheriffdom of Wicklow) and his association with the Home Rule League.

Whatever the catalyst, he replaced John Martin as MP for the League when the Young Irelander died in 1875, and defended the Fenian Brotherhood against charges of murder in Manchester, bringing him to the attention of the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, forerunner of the IRA. The Manchester Martyrs - so known by the Irish; the British called the incident the Manchester Outrages, though in a way that would have suited both sides, given what happened - were three Fenians (Catholic nationalists) who, in attempting to free two of their brothers who were being transported to jail in a police van, accidentally (it’s claimed) shot one of the police officers as they tried to shoot off the lock. As a result, all three were hanged for murder. This we may explore in more detail when I write about the IRB, but for now it serves to show where Parnell’s loyalties lay, and how this would have helped ostracise him from his Westminster colleagues. Think, I guess, an MP standing up in the House of Commons and declaring that the Birmingham Six were innocent (they were) or maybe a senator claiming that Osama Bin Laden was killed illegally, maybe.

Parnell began to work with the Fenians, using his position in parliament to help obstruct business by making long, often irrelevant speeches (the filibusters of their day?) in order to concentrate and force attention on Irish affairs, which had largely been ignored. He also met Fenian leaders, and as he travelled around the country making speeches and I suppose you could say rabble-rousing, he reminded tenant farmers of the awful treatment they had received from wealthy landowners (notwithstanding that he was one) during the time of the Great Famine: “You must show the landlord that you intend to keep a firm grip on your homesteads and lands. You must not allow yourselves be dispossessed as you were dispossessed in 1847”.

In 1879 the Irish National Land League was founded by Parnell’s compatriot, Michael Davitt, and Parnell was elected its president. The Land League, as it was more commonly known, eschewed the previous idea of the Tenant Right League, that of gaining cross-border and cross-faith participation, and was exclusively a Catholic organisation, agitating for the rights of small Catholic tenant farmers. Unlike the previous “three F’s”, the Land League had two major objectives, which were “… first, to bring about a reduction of rack-rents*; second, to facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the soil by the occupiers [and that these]… can be best attained by promoting organisation among the tenant-farmers; by defending those who may be threatened with eviction for refusing to pay unjust rents; by facilitating the working of the Bright clauses of the Irish Land Act during the winter; and by obtaining such reforms in the laws relating to land as will enable every tenant to become owner of his holding by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years.”

• basically, exorbitant or unfair rents

Having already cultivated relationships with Clan na Gael (the American offshoot of the IRB) leader John Devoy, Parnell and Davitt were able to travel to the United States and secure funding and support, perhaps - unless I miss my guess here - the first time such assistance had been sought, other than for famine relief in 1847, and beginning the special relationship between Irish-Americans and their brethren at home. Scotland, traditionally no friend of the English, got in on the act too, setting up their own office of the Land League. Though two more Land Acts were passed in 1880 and 1881, neither went far enough for the League and Parnell and Davitt spoke out against them, earning themselves imprisonment in Kilmainham Jail, from where they issued the “No-Rent Manifesto”, calling for a total rent strike of all Irish tenant farmers, demanding all rents be withheld.

Of course, the landlords did not stand for this, and issued eviction orders against those who refused to pay, sending in the police and the bailiffs. Conversely, any farmer who did pay, and therefore defied the Land League’s edict, would be boycotted by its members, so in a very real way you can see that it was a lose/lose situation for the small farmers. The simmering tensions would lead, as I said, to the Land War, but also to an attempt to implicate Parnell in a double murder.

[Trollheart]

The Phoenix Park Murders

If one thing has remained constant about paramilitary organisations, especially but surely not limited to Irish ones, it’s that for every radical there is a more radical one who doesn’t think the current radicals are radical enough. In other words, when the procedures and strategies followed by the parent organisation don’t seem extreme enough, or fail to get the results they want, others in the the group splinter off into side-groups and launch their own, usually unauthorised and unsanctioned attacks. So it was with the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, also known as the Fenian Brotherhood or just the Fenians. In 1881 a faction calling itself the Irish National Invincibles broke off from the IRB, its mission to kill those responsible for implementing British policies in Ireland. Their main target was Chief Secretary William Edward Forster, but after repeated failures to kill him Forster resigned his office and was replaced by Lord Cavendish.

The INI now went after his Permanent Under-Secretary, Thomas Henry Burke. They shadowed him for days, and finally came upon him in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, just after he had stopped to offer a lift to his new boss, Lord Frederick, who had only arrived in Ireland that day to take up his new post replacing Forster. Tragically for him - but I suppose a stroke of good fortune for the Invincibles - Lord Frederick was not even known to the attackers, just happened to be there and could not be allowed to survive as a witness. It was Burke they were after, and they got him, and his new boss, stabbing both men with surgical knives.

Proving the old adage that there is no honour among thieves, and certainly none among killers, the leader of the Invincibles, in return for being spared when they were all arrested, agreed to testify against five of his members, who were all hanged. The clear implication that Parnell was involved in the planning, hard to refute (though also impossible to prove) because of his close association with the Fenians - if not the Invincibles - scuppered his political plans for home rule and lost him most of his allies in parliament. He did however make a speech in 1882 condemning the murders, and though letters were later printed purporting to show that he did in fact support the killings, these were proven to be forgeries. After his release from prison in 1882 Parnell set up the Irish National League which, as its name implies, was more concerned with home rule and independence than tenants’ rights and rents. The INL gained the support of both the Irish Independence Party (the loose collection of Irish MPs who supported home rule in the Commons) and, perhaps more importantly, the Catholic Church. However a split occurred when the scandal of Parnell’s becoming involved with the divorced wife of another MP, Katharine “Kitty” O’Shea.

Feckin’ women! The Downfall of Parnell

Before anyone jumps down my throat, the title is humorous, and meant to reflect the attitude of the times (and perhaps even now): I’m sure, to paraphrase Judge Judy, nobody forced Parnell at gunpoint to go to bed with the wife of his fellow MP, and it would be disingenuous and also, um, what’s that other word for blaming women for your troubles? Oh yeah: being a cunt. It would be stupid anyway to try to blame the woman just because he got caught. Damn fool knew what he was getting into (and where and with who he was getting into it with) and we can’t pretend he was a virtuous man tricked by a shameful woman.

But the fact does remain, without apportioning blame (because I’m not prepared to exonerate her either, though I will admit she probably had less say in things, this being the era it was and her being a woman and all) that the affair was the direct catalyst for the fall from grace and eventual removal from the political stage - and, not too soon after, this one on which we strut and fret the hours away - of the man who perhaps could have advanced the cause of Irish independence and prevented much of the bloodshed that was to follow his death.

So it’s therefore important, I think, not to just brush past Katharine O’Shea as a footnote in the political - and indeed, personal - life of Charles Stuart Parnell, and give her some historical space, let her tell her story, see what we can learn about her.

Katharine “Kitty” O’Shea (1846 - 1921)

The first thing I note is that she outlived both her husbands, so fair play to her, though I have a feeling she may not have had the easiest time of it after Parnell’s fall. Born Katharine Wood in Essex (yes yes, an Essex girl, what of it?) she was another, like Parnell, born into a life of luxury and privilege. Her father was the 2nd Baronet of Essex, Sir John Page Wood (seriously?) and granddaughter of the former Lord Mayor of London. My god, she even had an uncle Western! Western Wood! Wonder if he had siblings named Northern, East… yes okay I’ll get on. But it’s funny stuff.

Unfortunately, like many women who stand in the shadows of great men in history, I can find out nothing about her life before marriage, and while I could of course read biography of her, I’m not that interested. I just want to write a little about her and not skim over her. So I presume she was educated, probably in France, as was, to quote Grampa Simpson, the style at the time, and in 1875 she met Captain John O’Shea, who was an MP for Clare. The two were married but the marriage only lasted seven years, and as no children resulted I guess we can assume it wasn’t exactly a loving one. It should be remembered that back then, a woman getting separated or divorced was a huge deal. It was nothing like it is today, where women freely admit they had an ex-husband. Let me put this in perspective for you using my favourite medium, television programmes.

On the BBC period drama The Onedin Line, Ann Onedin leaves her husband, James. Now, so far as I remember, there was no legal separation in this instance; they had a falling-out which could not be resolved and she left him. Seeking work to support herself (a “respectable” woman in nineteenth-century England seldom worked of her own accord, and never a married one, who was expected to give up her job as soon as she was wed) Ann approaches a family about the job of governess to their children. The lady of the house asks when Ann’s husband died, assuming she is a widow. When Ann tells her that James is alive, but she has left him, the woman is so shocked and scandalised that she can’t consider giving her a position. In her eyes, Ann is a “fallen woman”, and she advises her to make amends with her husband before it is too late.

What happened? Did she? Meh, you’ll have to watch the show to see. But the point is, back then a separated or divorced woman was an object of scandal, gossip and the idea was held that it must be her fault, as women were blamed for just about everything then. So Kitty getting a divorce was a black mark against her. Now, she waited a whole five years before taking up with Parnell, but that wasn’t good enough for English society. To them, the wedding vows were sacred, and you could only marry again if your husband died. It was, most likely, not the same for men who divorced their wives, though I don’t know this for sure. I expect more latitude was afforded them, anyway, as, like I say, divorce was always blamed on, and seen as the failure of the woman. Really oddly, it seems that at that period, marrying again even if you were divorced was still seen as adultery! To me, adultery means you play away from home when you’re still married, not after you’re divorced! Oh, those Victorians, eh?

At any rate, as you would probably expect, our Captain O’Shea was none too pleased that his wife left him not only for another MP but a bloody Irish one! What surely got his goat though has to have been the fact that Katharine had not one, not two, but three children with Parnell, and while one of them died, the very fact of their ever having existed must have made him feel less of a man than his fellow MP. I don’t know the details of their relationship, but perhaps the fact that they had had no children might have been blamed by him on his wife being barren, and now it would emerge that the trouble lay in his direction, so that would have stung.

In another little historical quirk, it seems that when Parnell was languishing in Kilmainham Gaol the man sent to negotiate his release was none other than O’Shea, who, it’s believed, used his knowledge of the affair to emotionally and indeed politically blackmail Parnell into accepting compromises with the government. This might not be true, as unofficial gossip concerning the affair was already doing the rounds a year prior, and O’Shea had in fact challenged his rival to a duel that year, 1881. Presumably it never took place. Katharine was in fact not known as Kitty but Katie, however the popular press used the nickname for her as it was also a slang word for a prostitute, showing how little society in general thought of her. And what had she done? It wasn’t like she had slept with Parnell while still married to Captain O’Shea: the fucker had left her five years before hand! Some people just can’t let go, can they? Arsehole. Oh wait: a classic case of Trollheart not reading ahead before commenting. I see that although they separated in 1875, O’Shea only filed for divorce in 1889, perhaps because he was waiting for her rich aunt to die, and hoped to reap a windfall. Unfortunately for him, she left it in trust to a cousin. Probably knew what kind of a cunt he was. So then he filed, and I suppose in the eyes of Victorian society, Katharine was then seen as not having been divorced - and therefore, still married to the captain - when she hooked up with Parnell. Something similar to the plight of the abovementioned Ann Onedin, had she taken up with another man, which she did not.

Through her family connection with the Liberal Party, Katharine (whom, since I’ve just learned of the reason, I will no longer refer to as Kitty) brokered a meeting with Gladstone when Parnell presented his First Irish Home Rule Bill in 1886. Though it’s hard to find solid details, I believe she’s accepted as having been all but Parnell’s right-hand woman in politics, and a great help to the man, but it’s a story without any happy ending. After O’Shea had divorced her, Katharine was free to marry her lover, and did, in 1891, becoming Mrs. Katharine Stuart Parnell, but it was not to be a long and happy life of blissful marriage. They had only four months together before Parnell got sick and died (see below) and a further blow was to follow when the divorce court, ever on the side of the man, awarded custody of her two remaining children to O’Shea, so in almost one moment she lost both her lover and new husband and both her children. She also found herself vilified for outraging Catholic society by daring to marry again, and died in obscurity, friendless and alone.

She would have been forgotten, most likely, had it not been for Henry Harrison, Parnell’s bodyguard and aide-de-camp, who looked after her on his ex-boss’s behalf when Parnell died, and learned from her the true story of their affair, not the salacious one that the press were reporting. It’s through him that we have the real image of Parnell and of Katharine O’Shea, and her legacy was praised in 2022 when the Taoiseach Michael Martin said, during the annual Ivy Day memorial that commemorates Parnell’s (though not her) life that she has been treated “terribly” by Irish history and “We should honour her as an individual and as a pillar who enabled his work for our country."

It’s rather ironic, and yet totally expected, that on the one hand, Charles Stuart Parnell is lauded and praised as one of Ireland’s greatest heroes, yet the woman without whom his legacy might have been so tarnished it faded away altogether has been forgotten, misremembered and miscast, and relegated to a footnote in our struggle for independence and self-determination. She deserves more than that.

As for Parnell himself, his was perhaps the most shocking and total downfall in Irish politics. The scandal, and subsequent split of his party, destroyed both Charles Stuart Parnell and the chances of any Home Rule bill being passed. The wagging finger of morality is a hard one to avoid, and both Gladstone’s Liberal party and indeed - jumping somewhat on the moralising bandwagon a bit later - the Catholic Church pointed it hard at the man who had been called “the uncrowned king of Ireland”. Under such pressure, he toppled and despite frenzied attempts to revive his political career (or indeed, directly due to them, as he contracted pneumonia as a result of one of his campaigns) he died in 1891 at the age of 55.

Despite his fall and failure though, Parnell is still revered as one of Ireland’s greatest and most devoted sons, perhaps the more so because he was a Protestant but fought doggedly for Home Rule, and literally gave all he had for the country of his birth. It’s said that at his funeral, as more and more mourners joined the cortege, each time it stopped at the grave of an Irish martyr, three hours passed before it could move again. People (presumably women) fainted at the sight of his coffin. No less than thirty bands accompanied the procession, and estimates of the crowd range from 100,000 to 200,000.

Would it be fair to blame Parnell’s fall on Katherine O’Shea? Did a “fallen woman” contribute to, or even bring about his defeat and death? I don’t believe so: Parnell knew what he was getting into, and Katherine’s ex-husband, Captain John O’Shea, only refrained from starting divorce proceedings because of his relationship to her elderly aunt, upon whom he relied for financial help. She could not last forever, and once she died, Parnell must have known O’Shea would sue, and he did. It was a case of living - or, if you prefer and want to be a slight bit more colourful, loving - on borrowed time, and his time ran out. Perhaps he thought his standing in parliament was secure enough and dominating enough for him to ride out the divorce. In that one matter, he had reckoned without the po-faced Victorian morality, allied to the disapproval of an equally po-faced Catholic Church, and in the end, it was these two opposing forces, working for once in concert, which brought down one of Ireland’s greatest leaders.