Thursday August 29th at 21:35
The second part of ‘Daniel O’Connell: Forgotten King of Ireland’ charts his latter years when he began his movement to repeal the Act of Union of 1801 which dissolved the Irish parliament.
By 1830, Daniel O’Connell was finally a member of the British parliament, the first Irish Catholic ever elected. His strident politics had helped achieve rights for Catholics, but his eyes were now set upon a far greater challenge: to repeal the Act of Union that had taken away Ireland’s political autonomy. But would he be able to assail the British establishment with the same success that he enjoyed when he achieved his crowning glory: Catholic emancipation?
Series overview: Renowned broadcaster Olivia O’Leary journeys from Kerry to Glasnevin to Rome to chronicle the trailblazing life and the contemporary legacy of Daniel O’Connell – the man that King George IV of England grudgingly called ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland.’
Olivia O’Leary recalls a history lesson from her schooldays about O’Connell’s cancelling the monster meeting at Clontarf in 1843 to avoid violent confrontation with the British authorities. Her teacher dismissed O’Connell with the words: “When it came to the crunch, O’Connell couldn’t step up to the plate”. The young O’Leary begged to differ, and challenged her teacher – wasn’t he avoiding innocent bloodshed? Ever since, O’Leary believes that O’Connell has been downgraded by the received historical narrative and wants to explore just why this is so today.
Peppered throughout this narrative will be the stories of O’Connell’s life and a hard-nosed interrogation of his legacy. We meet with republicans and royalists, revisionists and biographers whom we will be asking just why is it that he inhabits a dusty old shelf in the back of the nation’s psyche. Is O’Connell the catholic emancipator losing his relevance for a pluralist Irish society? He has the capital’s main street named after him and yet his name is scarcely mentioned in the role call of Ireland’s liberators.
For the supporters of violent resistance, O’Connell was a conservative Catholic landlord who failed to lead his people in violent rebellion. To others, he is an Irish version of Gandhi, liberating his people without resorting to the gun. He was an emancipating giant at a time when Ireland was bereft of leadership. Is it possible for us to laud the father of Irish democracy whilst wallowing in the centenary celebrations of armed insurrection?
Here, O’Leary explores O’Connell in an international context – it is difficult to imagine today the esteem in which the emancipator was held. O’Connell welcomed liberated slave Frederick Douglass to Ireland and equated the African American fight for emancipation with that of his own country, much to the chagrin of his peers in parliament. He was a man of his moment, a true modernist when it came to women’s rights and slavery, and it is difficult for us to picture today how he gave a sense of pride back to the Catholic Irish of that time.
In the documentary, Olivia wonders how O’Connell himself would view his own legacy – his achievement of catholic emancipation brought a downtrodden people off their knees, but his failure to repeal the Act of Union was a blot on his copybook by his own admission.
As we enter this centenary period celebrating violent armed insurrection, perhaps now is the perfect time to explore the non-violent liberator’s influence on today’s Ireland.