Ирландский национализм XIX века: Движение «Молодая Ирландия»

19th century Irish nationalist movement

Young Ireland (Éire Óg, ) was a political and cultural movement in the 1840s committed to an all Ireland struggle for independence and democratic reform. Grouped around the Dublin weekly The Nation, it took issue with the compromises and clericalism of the larger national movement, Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, from which it seceded in 1847. Despairing, in the face of the Great Famine, of any other course, in 1848 Young Irelanders attempted an insurrection. Following the arrest and the exile of most of their leading figures, the movement split between those who carried the commitment to "physical force" forward into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and those who sought to build a "League of North and South" linking an independent Irish parliamentary party to tenant agitation for land reform.

Many of those later identified as Young Ireland first gathered in 1839 at a reconvening of the College Historical Society in Dublin. The club at Trinity College had a history, stretching back through the student participation of the United Irishmen Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet to Edmund Burke, of debating patriotic motions. Not for the first time, the club had been expelled from college for breaching the condition that it not discuss questions of "modern politics". Those present for meeting in the chambers of Francis Kearney were, in Irish terms, a "mixed" group. They included Catholics (first admitted to Trinity in 1793), among them Thomas MacNevin, elected the Society's president, and (later to follow him in that role) John Blake Dillon. Chief among the other future Young Irelanders present were law graduate Thomas Davis, and the Newry attorney John Mitchel.

With others present, these four would go to join Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association. In 1840 this was a relaunch of a campaign to restore an Irish parliament in Dublin by repealing the 1800 Acts of Union. O'Connell had suspended Repeal agitation in the 1830s to solicit favour and reform from Whig ministry of Lord Melbourne. In April 1841 O’Connell placed both Davis and Dillon on the Association's General Committee with responsibilities for organisation and recruitment. Membership uptake had been slow. In the south and west, the great numbers of tenant farmers, small town traders and journeymen O'Connell had rallied to the cause of Emancipation in the 1820s did not similarly respond to his lead on the more abstract proposition of Repeal. Patriotic and republican sentiment among the Presbyterians of the north east had surrendered, since the Rebellion of 1798, to the conviction that the union with Great Britain was both the occasion for their relative prosperity and a guarantee of their liberty. Protestants were now, as a body, opposed to a restoration of the parliament in Dublin whose prerogatives they had once championed. In these circumstances, the Catholic gentry and much of the middle class were content to explore the avenues for advancement opened by Emancipation and earlier "Catholic relief". The suspicion, in any case, was that O'Connell's purpose in returning to the constitutional question was merely to embarrass the incoming Conservatives (under his old enemy Sir Robert Peel) and to hasten the Whigs return. The Nation was an immediate publishing success. Its sales soared above all other Irish papers, weekly or daily. Circulation at its height was reckoned to be close to a quarter of a million. With its focus upon editorials, historical articles and verse, all intended to shape public opinion, copies continued to be read in Repeal Reading Rooms and to be passed from hand to hand long after their current news value had faded. but the journal's role in the revived fortunes of the Repeal Association has to be weighed against other contributions. Legislative independence was powerfully endorsed by Archbishop McHale of Tuam. Beyond Davis and Dillon's Historical Society companions, the paper drew on a widening circle of contributors. Among the more politically committed these included: the Repeal MP William Smith O'Brien; Tithe War veteran James Fintan Lalor; prose and verse writer Michael Doheny; author of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, William Carleton; militant nationalist priest, John Kenyon; poet and early suffragist Jane Wilde; republican and labour rights activist Thomas Devin Reilly; former American journalist (and future "Father of the Canadian Confederation") Thomas D'Arcy McGee; and the renowned Repeal orator Thomas Francis Meagher. It was an English journalist who first applied to this growing circle the label "Young Ireland".

The Nation was loyal to O'Connell when, in October 1843, he stood down the Repeal movement at Clontarf. The government had deployed troops and artillery to enforce a ban on what O'Connell had announced as the last "monster meeting" in the Year of Repeal. (In August at the Hill of Tara crowds had been estimated in the hostile reporting of The Times at close to a million). O'Connell submitted at once. He cancelled the rally and sent out messengers to turn back the approaching crowds. Although in Duffy's view, the decision deprived the Repeal movement of "half its dignity and all of its terror", the Young Irelanders acknowledged that the risk of a massacre on many times the scale of "Peterloo" was unacceptable. Pressing what they imagined was their advantage, the government had O'Connell, his son John and Duffy convicted of sedition. When after three months (the charges quashed on appeal to the House of Lords) they were released, it was Davis and O'Brien who staged O'Connell's triumphal reception in Dublin. The first sign of a breach came when Duffy through an open letter in The Nation Duffy pressed O'Connell to affirm Repeal as his object. While insisting he would "never ask for or work" for anything less than an independent legislature, O'Connell had suggested he might accept a "subordinate parliament" (an Irish legislature with powers devolved from Westminster) as "an instalment". A further, and more serious, rift opened with Davis. Davis had himself been negotiating the possibility of a devolved parliament with the Northern reformer William Sharman Crawford. The difference with O'Connell was that Davis was seeking a basis for compromise, in the first instance, not at Westminster but in Belfast.

When he first followed O'Connell, Duffy concedes that he had "burned with the desire to set up again the Celtic race and the catholic church". Davis was a keen promoter of the Irish language in print, at a time when, while still the speech of the vast majority of the Irish people, it had been all but abandoned by the educated classes. Such cultural nationalism did not appear to interest to O'Connell. There is no evidence that he saw the preservation or revival of his mother tongue, or any other aspect of "native culture", as essential to his political demands. His own paper, the Pilot, recognised but one "positive and unmistakable" marker of the national distinction between English and Irish—religion. O'Connell "treasured his few Protestant Repealers", but he acknowledged the central role of the Catholic clergy in his movement and guarded the bond it represented. In 1812/13 he had refused emancipation conditioned on Rome having to seek royal assent in the appointment of Irish bishops. Throughout much of the country the bishops and their priests were the only figures of standing independent of the government around which a national movement could organise. It was a reality on which the Repeal Association, like the Catholic Association before it, was built. In 1845 O'Connell, in advance of the bishops, denounced a "mixed" non denominational scheme for tertiary education. The Anglicans could retain Trinity in Dublin; the Presbyterians might have the Queens College proposed for Belfast; but the Queens colleges intended for Galway and Cork had to be Catholic. When Davis (moved to tears in the controversy) pleaded that "reasons for separate education are reasons for [a] separate life", O'Connell accused him of suggesting it a "crime to be a Catholic". "I am", he declared, "for Old Ireland, and I have some slight notion that Old Ireland will stand by me". O'Connell rarely joined the Young Irelanders in invoking the memory of 1798, the union of "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter". His one Repeal foray to the Presbyterian north (to Belfast), organised by Duffy in 1841, was cut short by hostile demonstrations. For the key to an Irish parliament, O'Connell looked to liberal England, not Protestant Ulster. Once a parliament restored to Dublin had retired their distinctive privileges, he was content to suggest that Protestants would, "with little delay, melt into the overwhelming majority of the Irish nation".

Thomas Davis's sudden death in 1845 helped close the matter. But his friends suspected that behind the vehemence with which O'Connell opposed Davis on the colleges question there also the intent, again, to frustrate Peel and to advantage the Whigs. This was not a strategy, Meagher argued, that had paid national dividends. The last concession wrung from the Melbourne administration, the 1840 municipal reform, had elected O'Connell to the Lord Mayoralty of Dublin. But with the Grand Jury system of county government untouched, it left the great majority of people to continue under the local tyranny of the landlords. In return for allowing a "corrupt gang of politicians who fawned on O'Connell" an extensive system of political patronage, the Irish people being "purchased back into factious vassalage". In June 1846 the Whigs, under Lord John Russell, returned to office. Immediately they set about dismantling Peel's limited, but practical, efforts to relieve the gathering Irish Famine. Barricaded behind laissez faire doctrines of "political economy", the government left O'Connell to plead for his country from the floor of the House of Commons: "She is in your hands—in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself. One fourth of her population will perish unless Parliament comes to their relief". A broken man, on the advice of his doctors O'Connell took himself to the continent where, on route to Rome, he died in May 1847.

In the months before O'Connell's death, Duffy circulated letters received from James Fintan Lalor. In these Lalor argued independence could be pursued only in a popular struggle for the land. This alone could bring about a union of North and South, without which separation from England was impossible to contemplate. But recognising that "any and all means" that employed in this struggle could be made "illegal by Act of Parliament", the Young Irelanders would have, at the very least, to ready themselves for a "moral insurrection". He proposed that they should begin with a campaign to withhold rent, but more might be implied. Parts of the country were already in a state of semi insurrection. Tenants conspirators, in tradition of the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen, were attacking process servers, intimidating land agents, and resisting evictions. Lalor advised only against a general uprising: the people, he believed, could not hold their own against the country's English garrison. The letters made a profound impression, particularly on John Mitchel and Father John Kenyon. When the conservative Standard observed that the new Irish railways could be used to transport troops to quickly curb agrarian unrest, Mitchel responded that the tracks could be turned into pikes and trains ambushed. O’Connell publicly distanced himself from The Nation, appearing to some to set Duffy, as the editor, up for prosecution. When the courts failed to convict, O'Connell pressed the issue, seemingly intent on effecting a break. In July 1846, the Repeal Association tabled resolutions declaring that under no circumstances was a nation justified in asserting its liberties by force of arms. Meagher argued that while the Young Irelanders were not advocating physical force, if Repeal could not be carried by moral persuasion and peaceful means they believed a resort to arms would be a no less honourable course. In his O'Connell's absence, his son John forced the decision: the resolution was carried on the threat of the O'Connells themselves quitting the Association. An offer by United Irish veteran, Valentine Lawless (Lord Cloncurry) to chair a committee to adjust the dispute between Old and Young Ireland had been rejected by John O'Connell in reportedly "very saucy and unbecoming language". An offer of mediation from the abolitionist and pacifist James Haughton was also spurned.