Daniel O’Connell: The liberal who despised trade unions

The 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell has been declared one of those ‘vital acts of remembrance’ by Micheál Martin.

Academic historians, RTÉ, and the state’s resources have been mobilised to ensure that he joins the pantheon of constitutional nationalist heroes. 

In his book, Labour and Irish History, James Connolly wrote a section entitled A chapter of horrors: Daniel O’Connell and the working class. It revealed some inconvenient truths about our hero. Connolly concluded the chapter by noting that ‘the history writing scribes have consented to, and hence approved of, the suppression of the facts of history in order to assist in perpetuating the blindness and the subjection of labour.’ 

It was an apt description of how many academic historians have lined up behind Martin’s project.

As a young person, Daniel O’Connell was sent in 1791 to a Jesuit College in France to ‘finish off’ his education. It was during the French Revolution, and O’Connell soon fled in terror.  It left him with a hatred of mass revolutionary action.

Yet when he arrived home, O’Connell found that an Irish version of the French Revolution was underway. The mass of people had turned their backs on the clergy and were supporting the United Irishmen. O’Connell joined the Lawyers Artillery Corps, the Government’s volunteer Yeomanry, which was established to suppress the revolutionaries. 

Later, as a cunning politician, he claimed to have been a secret United Irishman all along. His true attitude, however, was on public display during the insurrection of 1803. When Robert Emmet was hanged, O’Connell declared that ‘A man who could coolly prepare so much bloodshed, so many murders—and such horrors of every kind has ceased to be an object of compassion’.

O’Connell was a classic liberal, dabbling in Enlightenment ideas and, for a brief period, embracing the Deist philosophy of Thomas Paine. But like many liberals, then and now, he quickly withdrew once the mass of people entered the stage of history.

Nothing better illustrates this than his relationship to the Chartists. This was a mass democratic movement of both English and Irish workers that sought universal suffrage, annual parliaments, and the abolition of the House of Lords. O’Connell was initially involved in discussions to establish the movement but quickly retreated.

He then boasted that he had kept Ireland free from Chartist ‘pollution’. He noted that there was ‘something fascinating for the poorer classes in the principles of the Charter’, but he ‘drove them from Ireland’. 

O’Connell joined in the Whig attack on trade unionism. In a speech to the House of Commons, he claimed that, 

“There was no tyranny equal to that which was exercised by the trade-unionists in Dublin over their fellow labourers. One rule of the workmen prescribed a minimum rate of wages so that the best workman received no more than the worst. Another part of their system was directed towards depriving the masters of all freedom in their power of selecting workmen…”

O Connell is famously known for his saying that ‘no political change is worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood’. It is a phrase that constitutional nationalists love to repeat, even as they, overtly or covertly, support the US military machine. But O’Connell did not apply the same sentimentality to children. 

In 1833, an act was passed banning the employment of children under nine years of age in factories. When a subsequent effort was made to enforce this ruling, O’Connell opposed it.  In an appalling speech, he argued that the parliament should not “go about parading before the world their ridiculous humanity, which would end by converting their manufacturers into beggars.”

 O’Connell has been credited with winning Catholic emancipation, and many on the left fail to appreciate its significance.  Yet Britain’s identification as a Protestant state led to discrimination against the Catholic religion. Not surprisingly, its colonising mission in Ireland was undertaken under the rubric of the Penal Laws.  Even when the Catholic Relief Act was introduced in 1793 to wean away the Irish population from republicanism, it continued the ban on Catholics sitting in the House of Commons. O’Connell’s campaign to end this discrimination was therefore totally legitimate. 

But Irish nationalists often fail to mention the wider politics behind O’Connell’s agitation. Namely, that Catholic emancipation was accompanied by a measure which reduced the number who could vote by raising the property threshold of those eligible. It is estimated that the Irish electorate fell from 216,000 voters to just 37,000. O’Connell had no problem with the new franchise restrictions, claiming that it would ‘give more power to Catholics by concentrating it in more reliable and less democratically dangerous hands’.

After emancipation, O’Connell launched a campaign against the payment of tithes to the Church of Ireland but failed to press for their abolition.  Instead, he accepted the Tithe Commutation Act, which reduced payments and included them in rents.

O’Connell buried the legacy of the United Irishmen, which sought to unite Catholics, Protestants, and Dissenters. Instead, he identified Irish nationalism with an exclusively Catholic cause. He declared that Catholicism lay at the core of the Irish nation. Not only was the Catholic Church “a national Church”, but, he declared,  “if the people rally to me they will have a nation for that Church’.

Like many Protestant bigots, he supported denominational education – separate education according to religion. He acted as a spokesperson for the Bishops who wanted to use Ireland’s opposition to colonialism to further Catholic power. He supported their opposition to the Irish language, adding that ‘the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication is so great, that I can witness, without a sigh, the gradual disuse of Irish.’

Instead of republicanism, O’Connell created a Catholic brigade that formed an alliance with the Whig party within the British Empire. In return, he got to divvy out patronage and jobs for his supporters. When the Whigs lost office, O’Connell launched his Repeal campaign, holding monster meetings, sometimes of even a million strong. Yet when the British banned a meeting in Clontarf, O’Connell backed down. He wanted mass support but despised mass revolution.

There was, however, one bright spot in O’Connell’s career that does deserve celebration. He was a committed anti-slavery campaigner and welcomed the former slave, Frederick Douglass, to Ireland. He refused to shake the hand of the US ambassador to Britain because he was a ‘slave breeder’.

Ironically, the Irish establishment that celebrates O’Connell today cannot follow such a courageous example. Can you imagine Martin or Harris openly attacking Trump and ICE for their mass deportations? Or telling Trump to his face that he supports genocide?

Instead, they love O’Connell because of his cute marriage of Irish Catholicism and Western liberalism. They like his cunning, his ability to speak out of both sides of his mouth, winning the support of the masses while attacking trade unionism, or bowing the knee for a British monarch while claiming he wanted Repeal.

This is who they are too – no wonder they add O’Connell to their list of heroes.