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Message: <blockquote data-quote="scolairebocht" data-source="post: 135005" data-attributes="member: 8">– Of course, as pointed out above, the basic reason why Daniel O’Connell is revered as the ‘Liberator’ is because he is, alongwith the Duke of Wellington, credited with the gaining of ‘Catholic Emancipation’ in 1829, bringing to an end the terrible Penal Laws against Catholics which in some shape or form had persecuted Catholics in Ireland (and Britain) since the Reformation of the 16th century.But I think the beneficial effect of the 1829 Act could be a little exaggerated. While Catholics could vote before this, they couldn’t be elected as an MP and that was the concession that was won in 1829, and precious little else. The incredibly severe Penal Laws which certainly existed throughout much of the 18th century, and earlier of course, on land holding by Catholics, on education and restricting the professions etc etc, had almost all been abolished long before 1829. 1780 is probably the real key date in the relaxation of these laws (the year of the Gordon Riots of course) but they were under legal and other pressure for quite a few years before that. For example this is a legal summary of the decision of the British House of Lords to overthrow a judgement of the Irish Court of Exchequer which was based on the Penal Laws:This is the Hobson v Meade judgment of 1767, so if even the House of Lords is taking that view at that early date you can see that the government probably had to relax at least some of those laws by about 1780.So the beneficial effect of the 1829 concession could be greatly exaggerated in the sense that most concessions had been made long before, but also it could be disputed by arguing that the actual British government policy from 1829 on, was to continue in an anti-Catholic vein, despite ‘Emancipation’. 1829 is about the beginning of the ‘Second Reformation’ in Ireland, the huge Protestant push to convert the Catholics away from their religion. This is the beginning of the ‘soupers’, the Protestant schools founded with the intention of giving food, clothing and education to Irish children provided they converted to being Protestant, and this was via some organisations that in fact received large government funding.So again what exactly were we liberated from if anti-Catholicism was rife in government circles post 1829? Here is an interesting example of this in reference to Mount Mellary, the great Trappist/Cistercian abbey founded in Waterford (and earlier in Kerry) in the years immediately after ‘Catholic Emancipation’. You might think that with the latter Act, the British government was now relaxed about the foundation of Catholic monasteries in Ireland, and you would be wrong! Here is the beginning of the government file on their attempt to stop the Trappists from setting up in Ireland in 1831/2:The point is that this is a high up serious police enquiry, tracking the Trappists, and they made enquiries from the police forces all across Ireland on this. In otherwords it feels like the Penal Law atmosphere against Catholics despite everybody knowing of Catholic Emancipation of only a few months earlier? The excuse they offered by the way, the law they were going to use if they could against the monks, was that if they were French they might have exceeded the terms of their visas in Ireland, which allowed them to visit but not to work. (The monks got around this because actually they were nearly all Irish and couldn’t be caught this way.)So the legend of the ‘Liberator’ can I think be challenged on the basis that he didn’t win much in 1829, the vast majority of concessions to Catholics been conceded decades before, and in fact the British government did not let up at all in its anti-Catholic activities, although it might have been much more indirect and secretive than before.The other point is to focus on what he did get in 1829, the right of Catholics to sit in the House of Commons. That was great but obviously it depended on the ability of Catholic voters to elect MPs to there, and on that they were plumb out of luck. As part of the 1829 Catholic Emancipation concession, the British government drastically cut back on the number of Catholic voters. Instead of the well known requirement where a voter had to have some property, or at least a long lease, exceeding 40 shillings in value, the government drastically increased that to £10 in 1829. With that stroke of a pen they reduced the Irish electorate from 215,000 to 40,000 overnight, in practice destroying the nascent Irish Catholic electorate. So even on the narrow question of electing Catholic MPs, it doesn’t seem that we were ‘liberated’ in 1829 at all, so the hype surrounding O’Connell on this deserves to be looked at again?Its been this writers experience that you can never take the political currents of the day at face value, the real story is always hidden, and the same is therefore true of history. If establishment historians are just going to repeat the then media version of events, they are always going to get it wrong, and exalt people undeserved of it and vilify those who do deserve our respect. Such I think is what has happened with Daniel O’Connell.by Brian Nugent, <a href="http://www.orwellianireland.com" target="_blank">http://www.orwellianireland.com</a></blockquote>

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