Moral force
More often than not we find ourselves living within a society which has not officially declared history dead but has largely forgotten about its past.
To move forward and become stronger, a democracy needs to look back and reflect on what it went through, to learn from past mistakes,to re-read and re-evaluate the works and lives of active and passive leaders, politicians and various intellectuals. This, to my mind is both necessary and definitely positive. Revisiting past events and confronting them with our daily experiences would be educational and formative. In reality very few are willing to go down this road and are more interested in the exciting advances in technology that have admittedly brought progress but have also contributed to many negative effects on the fabric of our society.
Daniel O’Connell
Some time ago, while on a visit to the Emerald Island, Ireland, following as I usually do the popular Michelin tourist guide book’s advice, I visited what turned out to be an interesting call, Derrynane House situated on the Ring of Kerry, built in 1825 by an Irish politician who had been previously unknown to me, Daniel O’Connell (17751847). Tersely described as “a Roman Catholic lawyer, known as the Counsellor and the Liberator, campaigned for recognition of the rights of Catholics, he was elected MP for Clare in 1828; he denounced violence and organised mass meetings to rally support for repeal of the Act of Union.”
O’Connell was born on 6 August 1775 and was the eldest son of ten children. He became a very well-known lawyer in his time one, who it is said was renowned for his fearlessness in court. But his handicap had been that he was a catholic and thus excluded as his fellow Catholic country men from holding public office in Parliament, in corporations, law, the army and the navy, as the Protestants could. The argument, that time would prove to be mistaken, had been that Catholicism was destructive of civil liberties and intolerant, and that those professing the faith were subversive with a dual allegiance for pope and king.
Emancipation
There were various discriminations and civil disabilities against Catholics which had still been existence after the Act of Union. The basic issue was that though a catholic could run for office he was precluded from taking an oath which declared the catholic religion as “superstitious” and “idolatrous”.
This led O’Connell to assume the leadership actively campaigning for emancipation. This he achieved in different steps. In 1823 he set up the Catholic Association mobilising the majority of Irish Catholics.
Then, in 1828 he forced the issue when he ran for a By-election in County Clare,was elected but refrained from taking his seat until the offending oath was abolished. His engaged campaigning and his eloquent speeches finally led the British Prim Minister, the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel to carry the Emancipation Act of 1929. This paved the way for Irish and English Roman Catholics to all but a limited number of public offices.
His achievements
Undoubtedly the Emancipation Act will always remain his strongest legacy to the Irish nation. But his speeches remain today a source of inspiration.
He was against violence and for active democratic participation as he is recorded to have said, “The principle of my political life and that in which I have instructed the people of Ireland is, that all ameliorations and improvements in political institutions can be obtained by persevering in a perfectly peaceable and legal course, and cannot be obtained by forcible means, or if they could be got by forcible means, such means create more evils than cure, and leave the country worse than they found it.”
He was always unmistaken about church state relations as he stated, “I am sincerely a Catholic, but I am not a Papist. I deny the doctrine that the Pope has any temporal authority, directly or in-directly, in Ireland.”
Lastly as Fergus O’Ferrall put it, “His whole life was dedicated to the proposition, which the Protestant Establishment and many European Catholics could not understand, that it was possible to combine the fullest civil liberty with the utmost religious fidelity to the faith and the doctrine of the Catholic Church.”
Today we celebrate the memory of this great irish politician the true liberator but we must admit that the prejudice, bias, intolerance and at times injustices still persist against professed Catholics in political life.