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Message: <blockquote data-quote="scolairebocht" data-source="post: 135004" data-attributes="member: 8">[ATTACH=full]7625[/ATTACH]Maybe the story of Daniel O’Connell needs a little ‘revision’, to coin a controversial phrase in Irish historiography. He is obviously the Kerry barrister and MP who is known as the ‘Liberator’, because he won the concession of ‘Catholic Emancipation’ for Irish Catholics in 1829. But here are a few points to ponder that might point to a somewhat different story.– If you were to read the memoirs of somebody like Charles Gavan Duffy, the editor of the famous Nation newspaper and a leading figure in the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, you end up with quite a different impression of the ‘Liberator’ from that which is usually given.(1) He states that one of the key reasons why many of O’Connell’s early political projects collapsed was because he refused to have any kind of audit of the monies raised by these organisations. In practice any money raised, including the famous ‘Catholic rent’, went straight into his pocket so that as well as living like a king in Kerry all of the employees of these organisations were always completely beholden to him for their wages, not accidentally. He also says that O’Connell asked him and his associates on the Nation newspaper to stop their Nationalist activities, and tried to collapse the paper.– The basic story of the Irish Famine is pretty well known, and while the severity of it, and the overall degree of culpability of the British government, is obviously disputed, the basic facts are not I don’t think. The overall pattern is that when its severity was known to the British government, about 1845 to 6, they set up food distribution/soup kitchens (alongwith many voluntary organisations, frequently religious both Catholic and Protestant) and imported Indian meal in huge quantities from America and distributed it in a reasonably widespread and successful manner. This was under Sir Robert Peel, widely considered one of the greatest British Prime Ministers ever, but he was ousted in late June 1846.He was unseated basically by the Liberals, under Lord John Russell, but crucially assisted at all times by the Irish MPs under Daniel O’Connell. If you read somebody like Gavan Duffy the general agreement seems to have been that all government jobs in Ireland were to go through the hands of O’Connell (as political patronage of course, boosting his political position) while on the actual Irish policy O’Connell agreed not to interfere in any way. Russell then proceeded to completely butcher the relief efforts that had been underway, including stopping the importation of the Indian meal for a while, even declaring the emergency over before the disastrous winter of 1847 when actually it was at its worst.So O’Connell is at least partly responsible for propping up arguably the most disastrous government ever to rule Ireland, during which millions died who could have lived.– Obviously from about the middle of the 18th century, the Catholic Church has excommunicated anybody associated in anyway with the Freemasons, and remember O’Connell is usually cited as a great Catholic champion. He admitted once, in a letter to the newspapers, that he was involved with one Masonic lodge for a while, but actually he seems to have been a leading Freemason. Here is a few notes from a modern book that covers this subject, based on research among the archives of the Grand Lodge of Ireland in Molesworth Street in Dublin, Patrick Fagan, Catholics in a Protestant Country (Dublin, 1998), p.144-9:Daniel O’Connell joined Dublin Lodge no. 189 on the 2nd April 1799. This was a South Side lodge founded in 1758 and met at 82 Bride Street in the 1790s.O’Connell, with Revd John Blennerhassett and Stephen Henry Rice tried to form lodge no. 886 in Tralee in 1800 but didn’t pay the fee in time. In 1799 O’Connell was elected Master of that Dublin lodge 189 and as such attended meetings of the Grand Lodge of Ireland (the overall governing body of the Freemasons in Ireland obviously) “and in fact he proceeded without delay to take a prominent part in the business of that body.” In June 1800 he was appointed chairman of a  sub committee of the Grand Lodge, tasked with approaching Lord Donaghmore about his continuance as Grand Master. He was later employed as a legal counsel for the Grand Lodge in their proceedings against Alexander Selon from 1806-1816. He was referred to as “Brother Counsellor O’Connell”.</blockquote>

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