With Ireland now totally under British control, robbed of her Parliament and now part of the United Kingdom, it was probably inevitable that another rising would be attempted. It was surely too soon after the last one though, and definitely the wrong man took on the job. Look, I don’t want to put him down, and he is definitely seen as a hero — perhaps a tragic one — in Irish history, but the more I read about Robert Emmet, the more I believe that while his heart may have been in the right place, his sense of planning, his idea of organisation and his, let’s be brutal, sense of reality was sadly lacking.
And he was a Protestant.
Emmet, brother of Thomas, who had taken part in the abortive 1798 rising and had been exiled, heading to America where he would become a respected and famous doctor, chose a terrible time to raise the flag again for Irish freedom. But it wasn’t just his timing that was off. Having failed to attract the interest of the French in his endeavour (Napoleon was a little busy, mais merci monsieur!) he went ahead anyway. When it turned out he had not amassed enough weapons for the over two thousand men who wished to join him, he lost most of them as they headed home grumbling no doubt about someone who was unable to organise a certain party at a certain place where it should be easy to do so. But he went ahead anyway. Then the coaches he was supposed to have come pick up his men in order to steal into Dublin Castle, on the pretext of being a gentleman’s party, failed to arrive (the leader had got into a fight in a bar — how Irish! — and shot a soldier) but he went ahead anyway.
It was coming on to night by the time his now only eighty men stumbled into the streets of Dublin, most having used the intervening time to fill the pockets of the many pubs along Thomas Street, and clearly in no condition to fight. But he went ahead anyway. Then he got word that the rockets and grenades which were to have formed the centrepiece of his rising were useless as the fuses did not work. But he went ahead anyway. Clearly, surely, aware that the entire thing had gone tits-up, and leading men who were casting longing glances at the warm, cheerful windows of taverns and menacing lamp posts with their guns, he went ahead anyway.
The entire thing lasted about three hours, from the first “attack”. One British dragoon was killed, dragged from his horse and piked to death, while the Lord Chief Justice, Arthur Wolfe, Viscount Kilwarden was killed when his carriage strayed into the street. Soon after, the army was mobilised and they easily chased the “rebels” off the streets. Emmet returned home in dejection and disgrace (legend has it his housekeeper gave him an earful for deserting his men) and was duly picked up a few days later, tried and hanged. Emmet’s speech at the dock during his trial has gone down in Irish history.
“Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance, asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain un-inscribed, and my memory in oblivion, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.”
I’m not going, as I say, to disparage Robert Emmet, but you can’t help but think that had he planned this a bit better, even called it off to regroup he might have done more good. As it was, all this so-called rising did was show the Brits that the Irish could never be trusted, that they (the British) had been right to have made Ireland a part of the United Kingdom, and given the Proddies in Ulster something to cheer about.
However the real hero of this time would indeed be a Catholic, and we have a street in our capital named after him. He was Daniel O’Connell, a lawyer who fought for the elusive Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Penal Laws against overwhelming odds. A man who understood the value both of the support of the masses and of public opinion, he created the Catholic Association and charged only a penny a month for membership, making it at the time the biggest public body with hundreds of thousands of members. This was very clever, as it allowed all the poor farmers and tenants of the rich landowners to join up and have their say, and more to the point, led to huge crowds whenever O’Connell spoke. This was both impressive and intimidating, and showed there was a clear appetite for Catholic rights, and that the issue would not just go away.
But his greatest and cleverest feat was to use English law against itself. When the vacant seat at Co. Clare came up in 1828 he stood for, and won, the seat. He knew that the Penal Laws still prohibited any Catholic from taking that seat in Westminster, but he used this to highlight the injustice of having been duly elected by the people of Ireland and unable to serve them in Parliament. Fearful of the outbreak of civil war in Ireland over the issue, Home Secretary Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, Prime Minister at the time, took the path of least resistance, bowed to public pressure and repealed the last of the Penal Laws with the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. O’Connell had done what he had set out to do; what no other Irishman had accomplished by force of arms in almost a century he had achieved by peaceful means, the pen mightier than the sword, the brain triumphing over the brawn, pacificism (of a sort) proving more effective than violence.
Ireland was not free, but her people had had their rights restored to them. Daniel O’Connell was hailed as the Great Liberator and “the uncrowned king of Ireland”, a title (in no way official but still) not held since Gearoid Mor Fitzgerald under the reign of King Henry VII.
It should, however, be borne in mind that the people who had helped him achieve this great victory, the so-called “forty shilling tenants”, those who paid that sum to work their land, and who made up the great majority of the Catholic Association, were to be sacrificed on the altar of O’Connell’s ambition. He allowed a measure to remain in the Act which raised the minimum rent payable on land to ten pounds, five times as much as they had been paying. This meant, of course, that most of the smaller farmers were wiped out — few could afford such an increase, but O’Connell was silent on the issue. So while he was certainly the Liberator of Ireland, in the end, he did little or nothing for, and in fact even worsened the plight of, the poor man, the ordinary man, the man for whom he had been ostensibly fighting, and who had helped win him his great prize.
Of course, Ulster hated him — or at least, the Protestants in power, the Ascendancy did — and they roundly chased him out of the province when he campaigned there. Ulster would, even after Ireland became a Free State and then a Republic, remain staunchly loyal to the monarch, to England, to the land of their forefathers, and to the Anglican church. Speaking of which…
Tithes (pronounced like scythes) were taxes levied on Catholics for the upkeep of the Church of Ireland, essentially a fine for not attending the “proper” mass. They were one of the most hated taxes in Catholic Ireland, and the enforcement of them led to what became known as the Tithe Wars. Essentially, if you hadn’t the money — a tithe was one-tenth of your income — or refused to pay, your goods, land or cattle could be taken in payment. When resistance to these incursions by the recently-formed Irish Constabulary (all Protestant, of course) reached fever pitch large crowds began fighting back. At Bunclody in Co. Wexford 12 people were killed when police opened fire on resisters, and a few months later at Carrickshock in Co. Kilkenny crowds ambushed police coming to collect tithes and killed twelve. Daniel O’Connell defended and procured the acquittal of the men, much of this due to his heartfelt oratory and his linking of the incident with the repression practiced upon Catholics for hundreds of years now, and much of it due to the huge crowds that gathered menacingly at the trial, showing the authorities surely that trouble was brewing and all hell would be set loose were the men found guilty.
The last incident in the Tithe wars took place in Cork, in a tiny village called Gortroe, where a widow being ordered to pay her tithe was defended by about 250 of her neighbours. Pelted by stones as the Irish took refuge behind barricades on the widow’s property, the soldiers (who had joined the police on the way, about 100 in all) opened fire, killing about twenty men. Voices began to be raised in outrage and protest, among them the politician Henry Grattan, while one collector moaned that “it cost a shilling to collect tuppence.” The tithes were abolished, folded into land rental and charged to the landlords, and another cruel injustice to Irish Catholics by their Protestant overlords vanished.
Over the next two decades, Ireland began to emerge as more a real country and less a collection of villages and towns as the railway arrived, connecting up the country, and schools began to appear, allowing Catholics finally to get the kind of education they needed and deserved without having to travel abroad. William Dargan (1799 — 1867) is remembered as one of Ireland’s greatest entrepreneurs; the “father of the Irish railways”, he had laid over a thousand miles of track across the island by the time of his death in 1867, and had also erected the National Art Gallery. He was among the fairest of employers, giving higher pay for better work and treating his employees well.
After centuries of being seen as a rural, backward wilderness of a country, populated by little better than savages who were good for nothing more than subservience, Ireland was finally standing on the cusp of what could very well have been a great new age.
And then something happened that would decimate the country for decades, even a century to come, rob her of the flower of her youth, and threaten to send her spiralling back down into the dark days of poverty and ignorance.