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I am very pleased to be with you this evening to mark the 250th anniversary of a man who remains one of the greatest political leaders in the history of these islands.
Daniel O’Connell is not some interesting but small historical footnote. After O’Connell, nothing remained the same.
He made an impact which changed and continues to influence our countries.
He set out values which were and remain deeply modern.
And I can think of few if any political leaders from his time whose concerns remain relevant
– even urgent – at this critical moment in world affairs.Speaking in this place almost 30 years ago, former President Mary Robinson delivered a wonderful exploration of O’Connell’s world and mindset. She talked of the impact of generations of dispossession and insecurity which Catholics had endured – and why this son of relative privilege found a greater sense of belonging with the poor of Ireland than the elite salons of those who deplored his rejection of their codes of behaviour.
He was intellectually and politically fearless. Often violent in his language and always dismissive of his opponents.
He was undoubtedly a flawed man, given to great self-regard and chaotic in his financial affairs.
Yet underpinning everything was his resolute commitment to the two great causes of his life: equal rights before the law and democratic nationalism.
His campaigns were not narrow. They were not limited to promoting the interests of his own community.
Catholic Emancipation and Repeal were always promoted as representing values which should be universal – and his influence was felt through much of the world.
This was recognised by no less a figure than Gladstone, who had known and disliked him early in his career but took a very different view many years later. O’Connell was, wrote Gladstone, “the greatest popular leader the world has ever known”.
While we can discuss whether this is still the case, there is no doubt whatsoever that the great Liberal leader was correct at that time.
For me, the breadth of O’Connell’s influence is difficult to summarise, but I believe that there are consistent threads to be found through his life and afterwards.
O’Connell stood for far more than liberating Irish Catholics from the impact of legal restrictions. He believed in religious freedom and civil equality.
He did not want to swap places with the Anglican church. He rejected the very concept of a church establishment as was then the universal practice.
O’Connell described the union of church and state as “an adulterous connection” and through his entire life he sought equality for all religions.
He explained this belief saying that it was “an eternal and universal truth that we are responsible to God alone for our religious belief and.. human laws are impious when they attempt to control the exercise of those acts.”
And that was why his first initiative when finally admitted to the House of Commons was to call for the emancipation of British Jews.
O’Connell was equally passionate in his opposition to slavery in all of its forms and wherever it was found.
As his most famous statement said, “wherever the miserable is to be succoured, and the slave is to be set free, there my spirit is at home.” He was true to this – and in return he was honoured as a friend of the oppressed.
He was willing to throw aside social conventions to denounce slavery in America. He insulted and called for a boycott of a slave-owning US Ambassador in London. He addressed anti-slavery meetings at every available opportunity throughout these islands.
And most importantly, he refused to compromise with pro-slavery elements even when it might benefit his campaigns on Irish issues.
He refused to negotiate with MPs who supported slavery in the West Indies. And within his own political movement in Dublin, he rejected a demand that he stop talking about slavery in order to raise more money in America.
In fact he went further, and wrote an open letter to the Irish in America calling on them to identify with enslaved people and understand that their cause should be Ireland’s cause.
The number, passion and consistency of his denunciations of slavery made him a genuinely global figure – honoured by anti-slavery activists in many countries including the great American abolitionist Frederick Douglas who travelled to Ireland to meet him.
O’Connell called for solidarity between peoples – often using language which might today have seen some groups denounce him as ‘woke’.
He celebrated revolutionary movements in South America – becoming a regular correspondent with Simon Bolivar. He called for civil rights and freedoms in Spain and Greece.
And he was fiery in his denunciation of British imperialism.
For example, in 1831 he told a House of Commons debate on India,
“Their country is really theirs, not ours, and we are criminal in not considering their interests and indefeasible rights as the paramount object of our solicitude”.
He of course did not have an evolved and modern concept of anti-colonialism – but he was remarkable in the scale of his criticism of the behaviour of empires. He told the Commons in 1839:
“All our eastern acquisitions were made by violence, treachery, and bloodshed. […]; and our policy to the native of the East was [as] injudicious as it was tyrannical and oppressive”
I find it particularly striking how often O’Connell drew attention to the spectre of famine in India. Addressing a large public meeting in Manchester in 1840, he called for action to help the starving in India – placing the blame squarely on maladministration, legal repression and imperial disinterest.
Only a few years later his fading voice was raised in increasingly desperate pleas for the starving in Ireland.
I have always rejected the idea that nations should promote historical resentments centuries after events. John Curry, a Catholic historian who was widely read in O’Connell’s youth, talked of the danger of people using history to “oppress the living through the abuse of the dead.”
But we do have a duty to seek to understand. And in this context, I cannot help remembering the great Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s insight that famines do not occur in functioning, free democracies.
Daniel O’Connell may not have been an evolved modern democratic theorist – but he was a truly important advocate for democracy.
For him, democracy was, at its most basic, the idea that the people should choose their representatives freely, and that those representatives should defend and promote the interests of all of the people.
As he said in 1841, without democracy “governors are tyrants and the people are slaves.”
It was exactly this belief which underpinned his campaign for a return to a separate Irish state through the repeal of the then still young Act of Union.
Repeal for him was not about sectarian power, it was about creating a democratic state which would best serve the interests of the people.
This was a modern and liberal nationalism – very similar to the European reformers who inspired the 1848 year of revolutions in Europe.
O’Connell’s dramatic campaign for Repeal was the first organised, mass democratic movement in world history.
A national network of local organisations. A system of reading rooms for meetings and spreading information.
Funding through large numbers of small donations.
Speeches delivered to hundreds of thousands of people.
These are not small innovations.
And while he did not even come close to achieving Repeal during his life – I believe his campaign established a fixed nationalism as the political identity of the majority.
It is one of the great tragedies of much of the last hundred years that we have so often faced the rise of an illiberal and exclusionary concept of nationalism.
A nationalism which seeks to find identity in opposition to others – and an obsessive focus on separateness rather than solidarity.
One of the manifestations of this type of illiberal nationalism is the attempt to use shared symbols as political weapons.
For me, the Irish tricolour has always been a symbol of diversity – a call for all to understand that our identity must respect both green and orange.
Yet we have repeatedly seen different groups attempt to hijack it and use it for their own regressive purposes – claiming that national identity is a fixed and unmoving idea which can never be allowed to evolve.
This is, of course, a crass and sinister misreading of the history of most of what we most value in our past.
Democratic, values-based, liberal nationalism has been the absolute foundation for sustained progress in Ireland and elsewhere.
I believe we have to be far more assertive in protecting our national symbols and our patriotism from the fear and division which so many are trying to promote in these turbulent times.
And for Irish people should always remember the central role which Europe has played in protecting our identity, allowing it to grow and enabling our sovereignty.
Daniel O’Connell was profoundly shaped by the European context.
His primary international orientation was, as it had been for Irish people for centuries, towards Europe.
This went well beyond his two years of education in France which was cut-short through the need to flee growing violence at the start of the period of the Terror.
O’Connell’s uncle was a French general and his son served as an Austrian Hussar. He followed European events and never doubted that Ireland was part of a wider European culture.
And while authors in English dominated his later reading, his core sense of justice and shared rights was emphatically based on wider European ideas.
O’Connell was influential in Europe to a degree that has never been properly acknowledged.
The crowds which gathered to honour him in European capitals as his body was returned to Ireland were an eloquent demonstration of this.
During his life and immediately after his death, three biographies of O’Connell were published in Germany. One of the biographies published in France was written by Charles de Gaulle’s grandmother.
He was regularly covered in journals throughout the continent, with readers eager to follow his words and his actions.
Many studies have shown how movements for religious freedom in France and Germany were directly inspired by the O’Connellite movement. For example, the German Catholic Association, founded to seek religious liberty in Prussia and which still exists, named itself after the Irish association.
And it is not just as a Catholic figure that he inspired others. For example, he influenced the campaign for the end of the Robota, the form of serfdom found in the Habsburg monarchy. He was also written about extensively by the early leaders of the cultural and national revival in Bohemia and Moravia.
He was honoured in Poland for his advocacy of Polish independence and in the Low Countries for his words on religious freedom.
For them, O’Connell was not a regional curiosity, or a faintly-known agitator from the edge of Europe – he was a vital and universal figure.
250 years after his birth, Daniel O’Connell reminds us not just of his enormous personality and the stories which surrounded him.
He reminds us of the ideals which motivated him.
Freedom of religion.
Equality before the law.
Free democracy.
Solidarity between nations.
These are timeless ideals which O’Connell was a genuinely historic leader in promoting.
They are timeless ideals which are today under threat in many places and must never be taken for granted.
For me, the words of the great Irish writer Seán Ó Faoláin still resonate: “O’Connell thought a democracy, and it rose”.
This, above all, is why remembering and honouring Daniel O’Connell remains as important as ever.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.
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