Search Results

This chapter demonstrates the complexity and porous nature of Irish nationalism and shows that, until 1848, neither revolution nor a violent uprising were the aims of any section of the Repeal movement, not even the radical John Mitchel. In 1846, O'Connell had engineered a public debate concerning the so-called ‘peace resolutions’, as a way of either taming Young Ireland or ousting it from the Repeal Association. The ensuing division in the Repeal movement between Young and Old Ireland was acrimonious. The split was welcomed by the Whig government, which had no majority in parliament, and therefore relied on O'Connell's support. Little was given in return for his cooperation and, like previous administrations, the Whigs continued to undermine Irish nationalism, oscillating between coercion and conciliation. The loss of Young Ireland weakened the Repeal movement, both in Ireland and overseas, and it demonstrated that O'Connell's long reign as the Liberator was almost at an end. More importantly, released from O'Connell's control, a new form of nationalism took root that was more inclusive, egalitarian and independent. The challenge, though, was to rebuild a united movement, which proved to be particularly difficult since the backdrop was a devastating famine. Moreover, despite the endeavours of Young Ireland, under John O'Connell's brief leadership, the identity of the Irish nation was increasingly being aligned with a Catholic Ireland.

Young Ireland rhetoric dominated Irish cultural institutions from the 1840s through to the Revival period. In the early 1890s, a young William Butler Yeats was embarking on his project to instil aesthetic revivalism in Ireland, a project that was, in part, a response to the rationalizing ideologies of improvement modernization. For Yeats, those ideologies were literary as well as social and political in nature, achieving their most coherent expression in the 19th-century tradition of English realism. This chapter explores how Yeats's Revival was directed against those discourses of progress, counteracting realist assertions of linearity and causality with supernaturalism and ‘orality’. It is thus unsurprising that Yeats was to find himself at odds with the Young Ireland orthodoxies of the period. This chapter speculates that the Revival writings of Yeats, Douglas Hyde, and J.M. Synge were a product of the inevitable failures of both improvement discourse and Young Ireland nationalism.

This chapter begins with a brief look at Daniel O'Connell, the man who was inextricably linked with the nationalist movement in the early decades of the nineteenth century. It examines the key issues that shaped the policies of the Repeal Association after 1840, in particular the emergence of a dynamic group of writers who founded the Nation newspaper. The Nation embodied a new type of cultural nationalism that had its roots both in European romantic nationalism and in the political debates that accompanied the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the 1798 uprising in Ireland. Despite the tradition of physical force, the Nation and its supporters were firmly committed to achieving independence though the constitutional methods advocated by Daniel O'Connell. The emergence of Young Ireland added a fresh dynamism to the Repeal movement, but its energy, popularity, and strict code of behaviour brought it into conflict with O'Connell and his favourite son, John. These differences became more pronounced following O'Connell's retreat at Clontarf in 1843. The seeds, therefore, were sown for a battle, not with the British government, but between the two main sections of the Repeal movement. At the same time, the revival of a nationalist movement that was confident, organized, highly visible, and increasingly Catholic, alarmed a number of Protestants and, while Young Ireland actively sought to win Protestant recruits, a new form of militant loyalism was emerging simultaneously.

This chapter explores how improvement writers attributed agrarian unrest in rural Ireland to the absenteeism, decadence, and irresponsibility of landlords as well as to the difficulty of civilizing the peasantry. William Carleton's stories and novels represent the plight of a small farming class throughout the economic depression of the post-Napoleonic wars. In his fiction, the sufferings of a hardworking, improving peasantry are depicted against the context of absenteeism and the anarchy of agrarian unrest. Improvement writers attempted to counter all extremism — of religion, politics, language, and temperament — with a ‘rhetoric of moderation’. This chapter argues that this rhetoric of moderation shaped the nationalist discourse of Young Ireland. In keeping with his project to mould a disciplined and orderly citizenry for the eventual creation of a nation state, the essays of Thomas Davis are steeped in the tropes of improvement.

This chapter delineates the different paths taken by political and cultural nationalism in Ireland with regard to the language question from the late 18th century to the beginning of the Gaelic Revival. Almost all of the major political nationalists of this period, O'Connell principal amongst them, considered that the Irish language was of secondary interest and relatively unimportant in the fight for political independence. Cultural nationalists, on the other hand, most importantly the Young Ireland group, believed that the language was of central importance to the project of establishing Irish identity as part of the independence struggle. The story of the relative arguments in favour and against the revival of the language is set against the rapid decline of the use of Gaelic — notably after the Famine and its social effects.

This chapter surveys the multiple dilemmas faced by the supporters of Young Ireland in the early months of 1848, especially in the wake of the French Revolution. The French Revolution had awakened hopes that a similarly quick and bloodless revolution could take place in Ireland: hopes that underestimated the determination of the British government to keep the Empire intact. The visit to Paris in April made it clear that no help could be expected from there, but a new development in Irish nationalism was the support it was evoking in the United States. Just as worrying was the alliance between radicals in Britain and Ireland, linking Chartism with Repeal and democratizing both movements in the process. The Repeal movement had become more divided than ever. The government had in place draconian legislation, a network of informers and a large military and police presence within Ireland. The Chartist petition had ended in fiasco, the Irish delegation to France was rebuffed, and the most radical political figure in Irish politics was about to be successfully convicted and transported to Bermuda.

By 1849, after the catastrophic Famine, the Young Ireland rebellion, the renewed Coercion Acts, the botched Encumbered Estates Act, and the collapse of the plan for Catholic endowment, Russell’s claim to understand and govern Ireland better was open to question. His failure damaged his own party’s belief in him as an expert on Ireland. In 1850, important changes took place in Ireland, within the Catholic Church, and in Russell’s own relations with Catholics that rendered a resumption of his plan for Catholic endowment or any other major reform more difficult. Meanwhile, althoguh there was some contradiction between Clarendon’s outburst against the bishops for interfering in national affairs and his own willingness to appeal to the pope, he was determined that the scheme should go ahead with as much approval as possible; and the chances of success, he believed, were good.

This chapter examines the considerable legacy of the Nation, Young Ireland and the Irish Confederation. The Fenian Brotherhood, the Home Rule movement, the Land League and the cultural revival of the late nineteenth century all had their roots in the writings or personal involvement of the leaders of the 1848 rising. This extraordinary group of individuals also inspired later generations of male and female radicals and revolutionaries whose prose, poetry, plays and political activities culminated in the Easter Rising. The participants in this rebellion made it clear that they were the latest phase of a revolutionary continuum that had commenced in 1798, resumed in 1848 and 1867, and was completed in 1916. What is apparent when looking at the legacy of the 1848 uprising is that the men and women who played a part in it left an intellectual and ideological legacy that continued to reverberate into the twenty-first century.

Historians—Protestant and Catholic—associated with the Nation newspaper who were identified as members of Young Ireland constructed a romantic narrative of Ireland’s history in English verse that lauded heroes who had created an Irish nation by resisting English intrusion. This successful venture was designed to cultivate national sentiment among people with limited schooling. The more serious intellectual endeavour of Young Ireland was to sponsor a reasoned prose narrative of Ireland’s past to honour all—regardless of origin or denomination—who had fashioned an inclusive Irish nation. This proved less successful because it required their Catholic members to suppress memories of past injustice. Also, Catholic Church authorities, suspicious of the liberal agenda of Young Ireland, encouraged a counter-narrative that would dwell on past sufferings and celebrate those who had become martyrs for Catholicism rather than heroes of some imaginary Irish nation state.

This chapter examines the rise and fall of the American wing of the Irish movement to the repeal of the Act of Union. Much attention is given to Daniel O’Connell, the leader of movement in Ireland. After surveying the rise of the movement in Ireland the chapter turns to the United States, where a network of repeal organizations grew up during the 1840s. The way that O’Connell’s abolitionism affected the US movement is discussed, as is the collapse of the movement in 1845. The chapter ends with the 1848 rebellion in Ireland, led by the offshoot of a group called Young Ireland, and the support that the rebellion attracted in America.

This chapter focuses on the Young Ireland movement in the nineteenth century. The Young Ireland movement sought to politicize the Irish nation. Committed to both cultural and political nationalism, members saw the potential of reading rooms to shape the political and moral direction of the nation. Through these efforts reading rooms eventually took root in the second half of the nineteenth century ‘as both the most appropriate forum for the development of national consciousness, and also as the most promising quasi-public institution for the development and promotion of civil society’. The reading rooms also provided some relief from the paucity of booksellers and scarcity of cheap literature in Ireland in the 1840s.

The mass movements led by Daniel O’Connell were perceived as ‘democratic’ not only within the British Isles but also on the European continent. O’Connell presented himself as a democrat – meaning by this that he championed the cause of the people, not that he advocated any particular form of government. In fact the emphasis in the Repeal movement was above all on a rather vaguely conceived national regeneration. O’Connell's control over his followers impressed some observers: it seemed that he had contained democracy's disruptive potential. When his unionist opponents called him a democrat they by contrast invoked the term's negative associations. ‘Young Ireland’ nationalists were initially cool about democracy, but warmed to it, especially from 1848. It is unclear whether the language of ‘democracy’ had currency among O’Connell's followers, though both words and imagery impressed upon them the idea that the movement promoted the cause of the Irish people.

The Nation newspaper was founded in 1842 by a group of Irish nationalists (later known as Young Ireland) to assist the campaign for greater political independence. Allying itself with Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union, it strongly advocated the re-establishment of an independent Irish parliament. It also devoted considerable space to cultural matters to recreate an authentic nationality rooted in Ireland’s past. Arguing that pre-conquest Ireland was a land of sophisticated culture and learning, it stressed Ireland’s proud record of resistance to conquest in prose and verse. Accusations that they excessively glorified violence contributed to the secession of the Nation group from O’Connell’s Repeal Association in July 1846. By this time the country was gripped by famine and the Nation began to adopt ever more extreme positions, which led to the paper’s suppression in the summer of 1848. Revived in 1849, it continued until 1891, its influence helping to establish the newspaper as an integral part of all subsequent nationalist movements.

This chapter reminds us of the importance of Irish lawyers in nineteenth- century political and constitutional debates. Utilising the treason-felony and sedition charges that were brought against the young Irelanders in 1848, the essay shows that their legal defences were ‘saturated in political dissent’ and makes the often-overlooked point that the courtroom was a theatre not only for the accused but for those who held the defence and prosecution briefs as well. The impassioned ‘speeches from the dock’ of successive Irish political prisoners—from tone and Emmet through to the young Irelanders and the Fenians—formed a cornerstone of Irish nationalist culture and development during the nineteenth century. As the essay brings to light, however, the lawyers also helped secure their place in the public spotlight through the medium of judicial rhetoric. For men such as Isaac Butt and James Whiteside in 1848, the courtroom provided a forum to express Irish Conservative unease with the workings of British constitution in Ireland.