When President Obama stood outside the former Parliament House in Dublin’s College Green he made a speech which recalled the meeting of the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell in 1845. One would imagine, probably correctly,that not a single name of an Irish person previous to that 1945 meeting, who supported the abolition of slavery had ever been known to the President, or that of any Irish person who after raised their voices or their right arms to see that abolition was accomplished. And we might guess that if the President had mentioned those people his Irish political guests would have been very uncomfortable. With the exception of our Eirhead Taoiseach, who knows sweet fanny adams about history. No, Enda, not a relation of Gerry!
In 1791 in Belfast, while O’Connell was still a schoolboy, 21 year old Mary Ann McCracken was campaigning against slavery and in 1858, when O’Connell had been dead 12 years and Abraham Lincoln was still a private citizen, Mary Ann, at 89 was handing out abolitionist literature, at the Belfast docks, to emigrants bound for America. In 1791 her brother, Henry Joy McCracken and Samuel Neilson helped found the United Irishmen in that city, dedicated to the Freedom of Ireland and organised in support of the abolition of slavery. Henry Joy was hanged in Belfast in 1798 for his part in the Republican Rising and Wolfe Tone’s friend Thomas Russell, another abolitionist, was hanged in Downpatrick in 1803. Thomas Francis Meagher was sentence to death by the British in 1848 for insurrection in Ireland, but transported to Van Diemen’s land and escaped to America, and led an Irish Brigade in the American Civil War, which did more to speed the emancipation of Black people in America than all the moral suasion of Daniel O’Connell. Later the Fenian, John Boyle O’Reilly effected an amazing escape from Australia, and in the United States, his newspaper, the Boston Pilot, did more to support the rights of black people AND Native Americans than O’Connell never did.
O’Connell was a great man and did great things. He was also a professed Benthamite Utilitarian and a complete Philistine. The terms are synonymous. O’Connell is invoked by humbugs from Fintan O’Toole to the smearing Ruth Dudley Edwards to the sneering fantasist Seamus Murphy, S.J. , who, if left unchallenged, would inflict the greatest misery on the greatest number, like redcoated blighted potatoes.
There is a strain of thought in Ireland that holds that “Daniel O’Connell was great for Daniel O’Connell and his class, not for Ireland.” Anytime DoC is referenced his actions in 1798 should be highlighted.