Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd Read Free Book Online

labourers, fisherfolk and farm workers walked to hear him: and his speeches, delivered in English by a man keen to prick the conscience of newspaper-readers in the centre of power in London, had a mesmeric effect. By his ringing eloquence, his parliamentary cunning and his back-slapping cajolery,O'Connell achieved an ideal rapport with the Irish peasantry, a rapport which would be the envy and aspiration of many

writers of the Irish Renaissance. It was said that up to 100,000 flocked to O'Connell's last monster meeting at Clontarf in 1843, the site of a famous victory by which the Irish had terminatedViking power in Europe. The authorities, sooner than see such self-confidence grow, prohibited the meeting; and its organizer, who believed that the freedom of his country did not justify the shedding of a drop of blood, submitted. It was a fatal climb-down: O'Connell never reached the old heights again, and the movement for Repeal foundered. The lessons of a failed parliamentary and democratic system were not lost on O'Connell's more tough-minded critics in the national movement. Yet it would not be an exaggeration to call O'Connell one of the inventors of the modern Irish nation: for a heady period, he gave its members a corporate identity and a sense of their own massed power. The sense of disappointment when that power failed to register with the authorities was all the greater.
    Disappointment gave way to desperation in the years offamine during the 1840s. Almost a million people died from starvation and associated disease: and, in the same decade, one and a half million emigrated. Irish-speaking areas were among the hardest hit, with the result that only a quarter of the population was recorded as speaking the language after 1851. Through the earlier years of hunger, the British held to their laissez-faire economic theories and ships carried large quantities of grain from the starving island. Arguments raged (and still do) as to the degree of British culpability, but Irish public opinion was inflamed. While some landlords behaved with great callousness towards their ruined tenantry, others were heroic in generosity and in organizing counter-measures: but pervading all was a sense that this was the final betrayal by England. As so often, the balance of the debate was well registered in the popular peasant saw: "God sent the potato-blight, but the English caused the Famine".
    If Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen had looked to revolutionary France for support in 1798, the post-Famine generation turned its eyes toward America. TheFenian Brotherhood stepped into the political vacuum, spurning O'Connellite agitation for the older, trusted methods of an oath-bound secret society which had been favoured by Tone. Ever afterward the cultural as well as political leaders would look to the new world for funds, for manpower, above all for a republican example. Hence the mandatory American tours not just by subsequent revolutionary leaders but also by intellectuals such as Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde. Hence also the eventual adoption by Irish writers ofWalt Whitman as the model of a national bard. The Fenian philosophy

was summed up by one of the leaders, John O'Leary, who opined that it was useless for an Irishman to confront an Englishman without a gun in his hand. This was a view reflected in another popular proverb which warned children against three things: "the horns of a bull, the hoof of a horse, and the smile of an Englishman".
    Through all these decades, Protestant Ireland continued to produce more than its share of idealists, who sought to hold a middle ground. TheYoung Ireland leader,Thomas Davis, had founded The Nation newspaper in 1842 with the help of Catholic friends. Sometimes described as naïve dreamers by caustic critics, the Young Irelanders included a few such among their numbers: one vowed to abstain from intoxicating liquor "until Ireland was free, from the centre to the sea", a rather