SIGHING FOR DUELLING PISTOLS by Donal Kennedy

 (FIRST PUBLISHED IN IRISH POLITICAL REVIEW 2013)

Whenever I read damned fool commentary on Daniel O’Connell I sigh for the time when every gentleman worthy of the name kept at least one brace of duelling pistols. But alas, I’m no gentleman, nor even a scholar, and must rely on my laptop to secure satisfaction . Since this article first appeared the very learned Seumas Murphy SJ has claimed that O’Connell never shot anybody. Every Irish schoolboy and schoolgirl of my generation, not now suffering dementia, will remember being taught that O’Connell shot a man called d’Esterre dead in a duel. In County Clare I saw the grave of a famous duellist whose pistols were named “Bas gan Sagart” – Death without a Priest. The duellist was known as “Fireballs MacNamara.”  I’m afraid the Jesuit commentator might, without injustice, be labelled “Writeballs Murphy” and his effusions be put down to “Sagart gan Stair” – Priest without History”

.Some time back Fintan O’Toole wrote in The Irish Times that O’Connell had been written out of Irish history. Some time  later that newspaper .sought suggestions for naming the new bridge over the Liffey, so, inspired by O’Toole’s complaint, I  wrote to his Editor suggesting it be dedicated to his forgotten hero.But my suggestion wasn’t published.

Of course, Dublin has long had an O’Connell Bridge, spanning the Liffey,  an impressive boulevard leading to it, named after O’Connell, which has hosted an O’Connell Monument carrying his likeness.Dublin’s main cemetery in Glasnevin contains, together with the remains of many  hundred thousandsof  other decent people,  those of great numbers of outstanding  persons in many walks of life. Dwarfing all memorials there is a Round Tower built over O’Connell’s grave. Other Irish cities  and towns have streets, squares and other public places dedicated to O’Connell’s memory.

For the best part of two hundred years a  major school in Dublin, O’Connell Schools, has flourished.It was the Alma Mater of at least two Taoisigh, John A Costello and Sean Lemass, the renowned comedian Jimmy O’Dea, and,for a time, not often ackowledged, James Joyce. The school was recently the scene of one of the silliest, if not infamous commemorations in world history.

O’Connell, who once killed a man in a duel, and whose family for over a century  smuggled young men to France to fight in its Irish Brigade, is reputed to have said that the freedom of Ireand was not worth the shedding of a drop of blood. O’Connell said a lot of things in his long career, in the Courts, in Parliament, in private meetings and in public, even “Monster” meetings, in Irish (his native language) and in English.  He tailored his speeches according to his aims and his audiences, and organised masses of common people on an unprecedented scale. Like Parnell and de Valera and Gerry Adams in later years he earned the hatred of THE TIMES, No greater compliment is possible.

But erstwhile supporters whom he derided as “Young Ireland” after the “Young Italy” movement, split with him. Amongst them Thomas Francis Meagher whose speech on “The Sword” is an eloquent and principled defence of  its use in a good cause. Meagher played a hero’s part in the Union Army during the American Civil War.

But back to Dublin’s O’Connell Schools, where there was recently unveiled a plaque commemorating an ex-pupil killed serving with the British Air Force in the Second World War. The late British historian AJP Taylor maintained that the  Royal Air  Force was founded as a terrorist body. The British magazine History Today, founded by the renegade Irishman Brendan Bracken, carries, in its June 2013 issue,  a 1923 photogaph of a burning Iraqi city following an RAF raid and says it was the custom of their pilots to machine-gun women and children during their “policing” of that country. Ths was some  fourteen years before the Luftwaffe bombed Guernica and the genius of Picasso ensured that that later atrocity was not forgotten..

Anyhow the ex-pupil honoured by O’Connell Schools was Brendan Finucane, known to his comrades as “Paddy Finucane” and referred to, in his end of war speech as “Paddy Finoocane” by WinstonChurchill, and held up by him as a “good” Irishman to differentiate him from the “naughty” Irish who served their own country.

The O’Connell school event was organised by an  ex-pupil, a dentist, not, as one might imagine,some pig-ignorant oaf. His oration praised Finucane’s blowing numerous Germans to Kingdom come, and said that he had thus served Ireland’s freedom. I read the report in the Irish Times which did not appear to note the irony.  I can think of a genuine Patrick Finucane, a more deserving subject for Irish commemoration and international respect.

In praise of a speech by Enda Kenny, which I’d be surprised if he wrote himself, Irish Times political Correspondent  Stephen Collins invokes, you guessed it, Daniel O’Connell. It was a speech where O’Connell praises the separation of Church and State. O’Connell had been hailed as “The Liberator”not in the derisive way he had himself christened the “Young Irelanders”, but in earnest. The title had been bestowed on Simon Bolivar, who had used the Sword to wrest territories from Imperial Spain and shed blood with the same instrument.. O’Connell had used no sword, shed no blood nor wrested a square inch of territory from Imperial Britain. The oath which O’Connell took to enter Parliament did not require him to abandon his Catholicism, but did require him to uphold the Protestant Succession, and to grass on anyone trying to upset it.

O’Connell died on a Pilgrimage to Rome, where the Pope held not not only the Keys of St Peter, but Temporal Power over a significant swathe of the Italian Peninsula. Whilst most of his mortal remains lie in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, O’Connll’s heart remains in Rome in accordance with his wishes.

In Ireland great oceans blood, and other matter, were shed, not in warfare, but in Famine, as “the Bloody Flux” as Dysentery was then called, led waste to the nation, and agricultural produce which would have prevented the catastrophe was escorted to the docks for export: it was escorted by the bayonets,swords, and other weapons of Britain’s imperial troops.