Question 1
Evaluate the interpretations in both of the two passages and explain which you think is more
convincing as an explanation of the leadership and tactics of O’Connell in the 1820s.
Passage A
O’Connell’s campaign entered an even higher pitch of activity. Efforts were made to curb the distracting activities of agrarian secret societies and concentrate attention solely upon emancipation itself. Vast crowds gathered to cheer their hero. The hustings were aflame with green banners. He was triumphantly returned having sensibly taken the precaution of strengthening his position by the expenditure of association funds to support his popularity.
Certainly, O’Connell was more successful than the United Irishmen in aligning popular discontents to ‘modern’ issues and formal organisation. He well realised that the mass of countrymen saw emancipation largely as a token of some great and imminent violent uprising throughout society in general. Contemporary ballads pictured the whole business as involving direct practical benefits: better wages, regular employment, lower rents, and an end to evictions, abundant potato ground. The dramatic exaggeration of his language enabled him not only to inflame the deeper passions of his followers, but also to arouse expectations which, while immediately useful, were later to prove embarrassingly impossible to fulfil.
Intertwined with such practical considerations was another major strand contained in O’Connell’s language and within popular understanding of that language, namely, the religious or more specifically the Catholic element. As early as 1826, he publicly identified the Catholics with ‘the people, emphatically the people’ and two years later declared elections ‘in reality, a religious ceremony, where honest men met to support upon the altar of their country the religion in which they believed’.
Adapted from: K. Theodore Hoppen, Ireland since 1800: Conflict and Conformity, published in 1989.
Passage B
Significantly, O’Connell made his first appeals to popular sympathy by defending poor farmers and artisans in the courts. His main weapon was rhetoric, which he used inside the courts and outside. He specialised in the ridicule of his opponents; as the targets of his abuse were highly unpopular figures, his popularity increased.
The Catholic middle-class leaders, even in the 1820s, still remembered the disaster of 1798 and feared a repetition. The militarised organisation of the United Irishmen was regarded as a model to be avoided. The Catholic Association of 1823 was founded on different lines, had different intentions and was constitutional in its means. However, the tradition of a militarily disciplined and centralised extra-parliamentary movement persisted and even reached new heights under his leadership, and he was not above using the symbols of old radicalism to help legitimise his own causes. He often made a point of having ’98 veterans on the platform with him.
The first electoral breakthrough took place in 1826, the tenantry following their priests rather than their landlords to vote for the O’Connellite candidate. The new mood of independence spread rapidly. By 1828, these electoral demonstrations had broken down Tory resistance to emancipation. More importantly perhaps, electoral politics – in the robust form of massive demonstrations at the polls – had proved an effective political weapon and an alternative to physical force. The two traditions, constitutional and non-constitutional, had henceforth to live together, and whenever constitutionalism faltered, the other tradition tended to emerge.
Adapted from: Tom Garvin, The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics, published in 1983.
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Answer
