Daniel O'Connell and the Leadership Crisis within the Irish Repeal Party, 1843-1845

Abstract

The main source of the criticism of the political leadership of Daniel O'Connell during the last three years of his life emanated from inside his own Irish Repeal Party. These attacks crystallized around the conflict that arose between the moral force tactics of O'Connell and the more militant and republican and separatist critics of these policies. The indictment of these critics, who became known as the Young Ireland group, has not been seriously challenged by Irish national historians since. Oliver MacDonagh admitted that before 1843 O'Connell had “blazed the trail at Westminster” and had begun the political enlightenment of the masses, involving the Church in his movement. Yet “in the end he failed ingloriously. After 1843 his creation began to disintegrate until two decades later his purposes and techniques seemed almost to have vanished.”O'Connell's flexible and pragmatic genius during his prime has remained unquestioned. Then he forged, out of the defeat and division of the Act of Union, a political link between the Irish Catholic Lower Nation and the English Protestant Upper Nation, and thereby created the first Irish parliamentary party that could speak with a national voice. What, then, was the basis of these imputations against his last three years? An answer to this question may be provided through a study of O'Connell's particular application of his moral force tactics during his last three years. Two major events will be selected to pinpoint these policies of O'Connell and the conflict within Repeal that ensued. The first occurred in 1843 at Clontarf where O'Connell made a firm declaration on the physical limitations of his objectives. For this he has been reproached for his insincerity and timidity when threatened by the British government. The second occurred in the debate over the College Bill in 1845 in the Repeal Association. There the ideological emphasis of his moral force tactics, namely, his Catholic alliance, was criticized as too divisive and outdated for the Irish national movement. Thus, to O'Connell was attributed both the failure to show bold leadership in a moment of national peril, and an unrealistic and autocratic inability to overcome the sectarian and religious division within Repeal.