Was Daniel O’Connell a Catholic absolutist? Did he want to establish a Catholic state? The answer, I would suggest, is no, he was not, and no, he did not. This conclusion is I believe supported by the evidence. However, there is a thread in Irish historical interpretation which would suggest otherwise and Colin Barr, insofar as he discusses O’Connell in The Irish Pope, his recently published scholarly biography of Paul Cullen, Ireland’s first Cardinal, would appear to lean in that direction.

Everyone living in Ireland knows that in the twentieth century the Catholic Church exhibited authoritarian and exclusivist characteristics as part of a wider culture that facilitated the abuses with which we are all too familiar. If we want to learn how such an authoritarian culture developed and the broader social approval it enjoyed, and, just as important, the origins of the liberal inclusivist values which would eventually overthrow Catholic social power, there is one crucial thing to get right: the Ireland that developed following the Famine was very different from pre-Famine Ireland. Barr himself has written on this difference in relation to the church as an institution. Catholic authoritarian social power is a post-Famine phenomenon and to find the origins of the liberal inclusivist culture that, in our own time, overturned Catholic social power, we must look to the pre-Famine era and particularly to the liberal nationalism of the O’Connell era.

In an otherwise informative and interesting chapter Barr states that arguments included in a letter written to Cullen by O’Connell in 1842, represented ‘a manifesto for an unapologetically Catholic state’. He also complains of a letter written in 1847 by Fr John Miley, a close supporter and confidant of O’Connell. Barr criticises its ‘sheer Catholicity’, and ‘ostentatious piety’. Overall, he finds the letter ‘difficult reading’ and, without explaining how, maintains that it ‘sits poorly’ with O’Connell’s support for Jewish emancipation and his inclusive attitude towards Protestants. Barr also appears to see O’Connell’s hostility to the Tory government’s proposals on charitable bequests in the mid-1840s as constituting a rejection of Tory conciliation and a proffered ‘better way’ for Irish Catholics.

In addition, Barr argues that Cullen, architect of post-Famine Irish Catholicism, believed that O’Connell saw the interests of the Vatican and the interests of Ireland as coterminous. Barr does not distance himself from this idea and the tone of his commentary suggests he may accept it. To say the least, it is a highly questionable proposition.

One is puzzled as to what to make of all this. Was O’Connell one of the greatest hypocrites of all time? Were those who viscerally opposed emancipation on the grounds that Catholicism was an exclusivist conspiracy correct? Did O’Connell foolishly overplay his hand with the conciliation-minded Tories after the Clontarf monster meeting was proscribed, or has the author of The Irish Pope simply got it wrong? I will be arguing that the latter is the case, that Barr’s interpretation of the politics of the 1840s is wanting, with the result that the character of the repeal movement and the origins of the liberal nationalism that has proved a persistent and decisive part of the Irish political inheritance are obscured and perhaps even implicitly denied.

O’Connell was a liberal and sincere Catholic who became more personally religious over time. He did not believe one religion was as good as the next. However, he believed it was the right and duty of the individual to choose their own religion and was absolutely committed to the principle of the separation of church and state. Likewise, he was opposed to organised groups of proselytisers attempting to interfere with an individual’s conscience and was firmly opposed to state endorsement of religion. Commenting in 1837 on the civil war raging in Spain he denounced the traditionalist forces of Don Carlos, fearing they would restore ‘that disastrous connection between church and state which for two centuries has plunged Spain into the deepest moral degradation’.

Historically, some people, including certain priests and bishops, have had difficulty with the distinction O’Connell made between religious affiliation and political autonomy. Yet it is clearly possible to be a Catholic and an inclusivist liberal. O’Connell was one and there are, I believe, numerous such figures in Ireland today. Some would see the current pope as leaning in that direction.

At the time of the Veto controversy, O’Connell said:

‘I am sincerely a Catholic, but I am not a papist. I deny the doctrine that the Pope has any temporal authority, directly or indirectly, in Ireland [I] would die to resist it. [The Pope] cannot, therefore, be any party to the Act of Parliament, nor shall any Act of Parliament regulate our faith and conscience.’

This was typical of his utterances on the subject. There are numerous other examples available in the record.

In the 1820s there was a massive Protestant campaign of proselytism directed at the Catholic poor. It was primarily political and ideologically based on the unyielding and absolutist dogma that Catholicism was a ‘false religion’. O’Connell’s opposition to this movement was based on an ideology of freedom of conscience for all. Significantly, there was no comparable movement of Catholic proselytism. O’Connell was not interested in converting Protestants, rather he wished them to join with him in a nationalist campaign for Irish legislative autonomy. Indeed, he spent a great deal of his career working to win Protestant political collaboration. One of the central and, indeed, tragic political realities of the era is no matter what O’Connell did, his efforts in this area were close to a total failure. He appears to have become increasingly aware of this failure in the 1840s.

The Protestant political intellectual Thomas Davis is often referred to in this context. Davis is undoubtedly an important figure, not least in his contribution to the development of the romantic current within Irish nationalism. He was one of a number of individual Protestants who joined the Repeal Association. However, the crucial political fact is that no significant or representative body of Irish Protestants followed him.

The movement led by O’Connell took a sympathetic attitude towards Greek independence, Jewish civil rights, the 1830 French Revolution, national liberation struggles in South America, liberal reform in Italy, Spain and Portugal, the ending of African slavery and the Polish struggle against Russian oppression. It was not just O’Connell; such attitudes characterised the movement he led politically and were frequently voiced by its political and literary intellectuals. Many examples could be given, including Thomas Moore’s memorable and highly successful Lalla Rookh, where oppression and intolerance in Persia, India and the Islamic world are metaphorically understood as similar to that experienced in Ireland.

After emancipation O’Connell wrote to Isaac Goldsmid, leader of the Jewish emancipation movement:

‘I entirely agree with you on the principle of freedom of conscience, and no man can admit that sacred principle without extending it equally to the Jew as to the Christian. To my mind it is an eternal and universal truth that we are responsible to God alone for our religious belief and that human laws are impious when they attempt to control the exercise of those acts of individual or general devotion which such belief requires.’

O’Connell’s inclusivist attitudes were not shared by the Vatican. Under Cullen’s patron, Gregory XVI, the Vatican condemned liberalism and national autonomy movements. It would be hard to identify a figure as wholly opposed to O’Connell’s liberal Catholicism and liberal nationalism as Gregory, whose politics were unreconstructed ancien régime. In his 1832 encyclical Cum Primum, Gregory argued that the Poles should be loyal to their Russian rulers, who had been appointed by God.

In Mirari Vos Gregory argued in favour of Catholic absolutism and against civil liberty in religion. ‘This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone.’ ‘Nor can we,’ he added, ‘predict happier times for religion and government from the plans of those who desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state.’

Cullen was born in Kildare to a family of large farmers who became strong supporters of O’Connell. Members of the wider family had business interests in Liverpool and became prominent members of the Liverpool Catholic business elite. They retained a close connection with the Kildare branch and with Cullen himself, whose career appears to have been a source of pride. As strong farmers and members of the emergent and politicised Catholic bourgeoisie, the family were representative of a social class which strongly supported O’Connell during both the emancipation and repeal campaigns.

Cullen’s alignment with his family’s politics was from afar. He left Kildare for Rome’s Pontificium Collegium Urbanum de Propaganda Fide in 1820 when he was seventeen. He didn’t have much political or other experience before that, apart from the family memory of having suffered during the 1798 rebellion. As he became embedded in Vatican life, he appears to have been unaware, or at least to have underestimated the fundamental conflict between Gregory’s political opinions and those of O’Connell, whom he and his family supported and admired.

That conflict had been evident from the very beginning of Gregory’s pontifical reign. In 1831, following events in France, there was an extensive revolt in the papal states. It was a liberal democratic revolt. Cullen was appalled and hostile to the rebels, defending the harsh measures which were ‘regrettably necessary’ to restore order and papal authority.

O’Connell, on the other hand spoke out in support of the rebellion.

The leading liberal French Catholic thinker of the time was the priest Félicité de Lamennais who argued in favour of extending the electoral franchise, a free press and the separation of church and state. Predictably, his views were rejected by the Vatican. Cullen, as a favoured protégé of Gregory, was embedded in the Roman milieu that rejected Lamennais’s liberalism.

O’Connell, as we might expect, was sympathetic and entertained one of Lamennais’s close supporters, Count Charles de Montalembert, at Derrynane. To digress briefly into what might be called Catholic political theology: O’Connell, Cullen, Gregory and Lamennais were all ultramontanist. For O’Connell and Lamennais this meant the Vatican was the sole authority on religious matters and should stay out of temporal affairs. For Gregory and Cullen it meant the Vatican was the supreme and ultimate authority on both spiritual and temporal affairs.

Cullen’s failure to address the conflict between his inherited political nationalism and Vatican thinking was, in the 1840s, to lead to a dramatic humiliation, which Barr describes in some detail. Following this humiliation, it seems Cullen drew in his horns and doubled down on his Vatican loyalty, which would characterise his domination of the Irish church after 1850. His Irish tenure was to take place in an Ireland transformed by the defeat of the O’Connellite bourgeoisie and the destruction of the peasantry, the two most dynamic forces of the pre-Famine era. Both were socially and politically destroyed at the hands of Westminster. These twin catastrophes allowed for a new institutionalised and devotionally conformist modern Irish church to emerge under the leadership of Cullen.

Before looking in more detail at what Barr says, a very brief account of O’Connell’s political vision may help illuminate what I would maintain are the flaws in Barr’s analysis.

O’Connell was a publicly committed nationalist from the time of the union in 1800. He said on numerous occasions that he would prefer no union with no emancipation to union with emancipation, not that he had any love for legislative discrimination against Catholics. He became a political activist who sought Irish legislative independence so that Ireland might prosper commercially and industrially in the interests of its people and, as it were, take its place among the nations of the world. In the meantime, he wanted full civil rights for Catholics and an improvement in the lot of tenant farmers and the peasantry. His politics were in the Enlightenment pre-romantic tradition. Indeed, his liberal ideological orientation has long been established. (See note below.)

He devoted his life and considerable genius to the nationalist cause. However, the imperial centre was equally determined not to yield, seeing Irish nationalism, despite the sop of dual monarchy offered by O’Connell, as separation and a threat to empire. After a gargantuan political struggle that amazed and inspired many in Europe and the wider world, O’Connell was defeated by the empire nationalists of the English political elite. However, in the process, liberal, democratic and inclusivist thinking became a structural feature of Irish political culture. Without this, the democratic independence achieved in the early twentieth century would be inconceivable, as would the liberal revolution of our own time.

O’Connell’s method was simple: organise, organise, organise; agitate, agitate, agitate; calculate, calculate, calculate.

His calculations varied from time to time as opportunities for progress came and went. His underlying calculation, however, was that the more political forces he could gather behind the objective of national autonomy, the greater would be its chance of success. He expended enormous energy cajoling and encouraging people to join him with varying degrees of success.

His view was that the best way to force Westminster to concede was to unite the peasantry, the emerging Catholic bourgeoisie, comfortable Catholic farmers, the Catholic Church and the Protestant community in support of repeal. Had he achieved that unity, repeal might well have been won. He was very successful with the first three. His winning over of the peasantry from the tactics of guerilla action was a major success. Propertied Catholics, apart from minute aristocratic elements, willingly fell in. However, results with the Catholic Church were at best mediocre. The church was naturally positive about emancipation but far from united in support of the struggle for repeal, a struggle which the Vatican consistently declined to support. When it came to the Protestant community, O’Connell’s efforts were a complete failure, individuals excepted. Despite endlessly pointing out that civil liberties were sacred to repeal politics and that there was no conceivable danger of a Catholic ascendancy, the entire leadership, intelligentsia and press of the Protestant community would not countenance repeal. The Protestant leadership, despite the presence in their political culture of strong national sentiments, were unable to embrace a political nationalism which did not fall under its control.

The loyalty of the peasantry and of the emerging Catholic bourgeoisie were never going to be enough to win repeal. This was a political reality particularly evident in retrospect and one which, in his heart, O’Connell probably knew at the time.

Throughout his career he took it as given that violent resistance would play into the hands of Westminster and would be ruthlessly smashed. He made considerable propaganda from his non-violent methods but was not in fact a pacifist. His methods were based on sound strategic calculation and a genius which enabled him to appreciate the political possibilities of electoral and moral force in the emerging democratic world. These insights were internalised by successive Irish politicians at home and abroad, including in the years immediately before independence.

As noted, Barr’s analysis of O’Connell is based chiefly on a consideration of three matters, a letter written by Dr John Miley to Cullen in May 1847 on the morning following O’Connell’s death in Genoa, a letter O’Connell wrote to Cullen in 1842 and finally O’Connell’s opposition to the charitable bequests proposals of 1844-45. Let us look at this first.

Following the prohibition of the mass meeting at Clontarf in 1843, under threat of military violence against unarmed civilians, O’Connell’s great campaign for legislative autonomy was over. He was sufficiently insightful to realise this, even if his lieutenants and supporters did not. The Westminster elite both Whig and Tory hated O’Connell. Speaking of Lord John Russell O’Connell said ‘I know him well. He has a thorough, contemptuous, Whig hatred of the Irish.’ The Tory prime minister Sir Robert Peel was the figure apparently ready to unleash trained soldiers on a peaceful gathering of civilians at Clontarf. There are no grounds for imagining he had any affection for the Irish or their democratic leader. After Clontarf, in a singularly hostile act, Peel ensured, with the aid of a packed jury, that O’Connell was arrested and sentenced to a prison term.

Peel wanted to drive home his advantage and definitively defeat and bury repeal. Instead of offering genuine concessions he settled on a stratagem for permanently separating the leadership of the Catholic Church in Ireland from the nationalist movement. He effectively bribed the episcopacy with a charitable bequests and donations proposal designed to make it easier to bequeath monies to the Catholic Church. O’Connell railed against the measure from Richmond gaol. For Peel’s measure to work, a level of episcopal support was necessary. In the event, a sufficient number of church luminaries backed it, and it became law. Peel’s Irish adviser was exultant:

‘The ‘Roman Catholic Party’ as such has ceased to exist. O’Connell can no longer rely on the support of the church.’

This was not conciliation aimed at popular grievances; this was a calculated measure to prevent a revival of O’Connell’s repeal campaign.

Peel had been opposed to Catholic emancipation and was even more hostile to repeal. In 1834 he said: ‘I feel and know that … it must lead to the dismemberment of this great empire; must make Great Britain a fourth-rate power of Europe …’ He was no less hostile in the 1840s and triumphant when the tide turned against O’Connell.

Barr, it would seem, understands Peel’s approach as an attempt to show ‘Ireland’s Catholics a better way’. This seems to me a point where his analysis takes less than full cognisance of the political context. Indeed, his account takes on a tone suggestive of Peel as a reasonable man looking for a solution to a problem generated by not quite reasonable people, rather than as a politician viscerally hostile to Irish autonomy and engaged in what he understood could become an existential struggle for the empire.

With O’Connell having suffered a major defeat, Barr says that Peel could ‘afford to be generous’. The problem is that he appears to view the charitable bequests measure as constituting generosity. But Peel and his advisers were clear as to its purpose: to render O’Connell’s defeat permanent.

Knowing he was defeated O’Connell offered a compromise. He was no purist and his visceral concern for the welfare of the people triggered a return to what he termed ‘my usual doctrine of instalments’. Thus, he proposed two measures of land reform including fixity of tenure, disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, taxation of absentee landlords and reform of the Irish franchise to bring it into line with the British practice. These measures, he indicated, could end the repeal campaign. This is where Peel might have been strategically ‘generous’. He chose not to be. London was not interested in killing repeal with kindness; killing it outright was the objective.

Barr describes O’Connell’s proposals as ‘a deliberately impossible laundry list of demands’ and referred to those for land reform as ‘a significant revision in land law’. On the other hand, the O’Connell scholar and biographer Oliver Mac Donagh characterised the land measures proposed by O’Connell as ‘modest’.

Whatever one thinks of the disparaging term ‘laundry list’, they were not ‘deliberately impossible’ and could have been the basis for negotiation had Peel chosen a conciliatory approach. O’Connell’s proposals were an honest attempt to enhance equality in Ireland. Something similar had worked in the early 1830s when he called off the first repeal campaign and negotiated with the Whigs, which saw the appointment of the fair-minded Thomas Drummond as under-secretary. Drummond, who led a transformative administration from 1835 to 1840, famously declared that property had its duties as well as its rights. He based his rule on the principle of equality for Catholics and Protestants under the union. His equitable administration was welcomed by Catholics. Indeed, his statue stands in City Hall today alongside those of O’Connell and Davis. There are many statues of Peel in England, including in Parliament Square but, unsurprisingly, none in Ireland of the man dubbed ‘Orange Peel’ by Daniel O’Connell.

In his criticism of Miley’s letter to Cullen in 1847 Barr accuses him of ‘implicit abasement before the pope’. Here Barr’s language is reminiscent of the voluble and absolutist evangelical critics of emancipation who saw Catholicism as an evil in itself. (Incidentally, there is nothing in the sections of Miley’s letter quoted by Professor Barr which would support the claim.)

Miley also stands accused of another comparable disorder, that of ‘ostentatious piety’. Here Barr could be said to echo that strain of contemporary Irish liberalism which is hostile to Catholicism per se. These criticisms of religious expression are puzzling. It is hardly unusual for priests to refer to their shared religious beliefs when communicating and surely somewhat intolerant to object.

Placing consideration of Barr’s reservations to one side, it is clear that Miley wrote to Cullen in Rome to ask a political favour. Dealing with a conflicted if not innocent figure, he kept politics to a minimum in his efforts to win the help of the unusually well-placed Kildare man. O’Connell’s heart was to be removed from his body, embalmed and placed in a silver urn. Miley’s request was that Cullen use ‘that tact and prudence which belong to you in so eminent a degree’ to arrange for O’Connell’s embalmed heart to be installed in St Peter’s in Rome. Why did Miley want this? Repeal was lost but there were future nationalist struggles to consider. Miley hoped in the future Irish agitators would have better luck with Irish episcopal support. If O’Connell’s heart were honoured in St Peter’s, it could be presented as proof of papal approval for O’Connell’s repeal campaign in the 1840s. It was a long shot, and it seems Miley knew that. The Vatican, of course was having none of it. The Liberator’s heart ended up in St Agatha’s which was attached to the Irish College. It was a resting place with near zero political capital attached. From a political point of view, it was no better than Glasnevin or Goldenbridge.

Miley later delivered an eloquent and passionate eulogy at O’Connell’s funeral mass in Marlborough Street. Fr Miley, who was O’Connell’s close political confidant and effective pastor at the end of his life, took time to make numerous political points. On the issue of civil liberty and inclusivity, he remarked that ‘O’Connell determined to place the fallen on a perfect equality with the aggressor.’

Even more interesting he said:

‘Often has he [O’Connell] proclaimed in my hearing, that the monster difficulty – the great obstacle to be surmounted – was to persuade the hierarchy and the priesthood of Ireland, that a man could be sincere in his attachment to the altar, and yet ardent in prosecuting civil liberty.’

It seems the monster difficulty persists.

The remaining item to come under Barr’s examination is the letter written by O’Connell to Cullen in May 1842. Barr, I believe, once again misreads the politics involved. His view of the letter’s sixteen points as envisioning a Catholic state is not supported by the text.

Barr makes his case in strong language. He describes the document as ‘breathtakingly frank’ adding:

‘had the letter fallen into the wrong hands it would have confirmed every British prejudice and every Protestant suspicion. It would also have rendered collaboration with nationally minded Protestants [ such as Thomas Davis] impossible …’

Barr’s alarm is quite overblown. If we place the moral panic to one side, it is not difficult to discern what O’Connell was up to in what was a hastily written letter calculated, at least in part, to influence through flattery and perhaps something approaching dissimulation. O’Connell was a street-fighting politician and well capable of both abuse and flattery when in pursuit of a political purpose. Moreover, he could waffle to beat the band but always stuck to his principles.

He was making a pitch for Vatican assistance in two main areas, support for repeal and opposition to English influence with the Vatican. The idea was that Cullen would place the letter or its arguments before Gregory. O’Connell was probably aware that he had no chance of turning Gregory into a repealer but might convince him to push back on the matter of English diplomatic influence, which he feared would be used to damage repeal.

He needn’t have worried: Gregory had no intention of allowing the English, any more than O’Connell, to direct his actions.

O’Connell tried a carrot-and-stick approach. In the most pleasant and unthreatening of language, he echoed the threat made to Irish bishops at the time of the veto campaign, if the Vatican took a pro-English position, it could lose influence with its Irish flock.

He quickly moved on to the sixteen carrots. In this not-for-publication letter O’Connell lards it on in support of an argument that repeal would be ‘of the most magnificent importance to Catholicity’. Barr comments: ‘There were sixteen points and they represented a manifesto for an unapologetically Catholic state.’ They did nothing of the sort.

O’Connell’s first point was the far-fetched, if not ludicrous, speculation that under repeal Protestantism would disappear of its own accord and without persecution of any sort which would be anathema to the Irish. This was because Irish Protestantism was a political phenomenon and its raison d’être would disappear with repeal. One can imagine Gregory with a raised brow thinking: ‘Does he think I came down in the last shower?’

Throughout the sixteen points O’Connell argued that under repeal Ireland would be very prosperous and that this would allow Irish Catholics to support their church financially. The suggestion was that in these circumstances, Catholicism would flourish. While O’Connell does lay it on with a trowel, he does not talk of a Catholic state. It is always the Catholic people he speaks of as supporting their church.

After outlining his sixteen points and before closing his letter O’Connell did add a few words which could, with effort, be construed as a smoking gun. Indeed, it is surprising Barr does not make more of them. In a difficult and confused sentence O’Connell wrote that under repeal Ireland would be,

‘So rich, so prosperous a country with a legislature devoted to Catholic doctrine, discipline and submission to authority, with an undeviating attachment to the authority of the Holy See, a legislature devoted to civil liberty, to peaceful arts, to science, to the promotion of every virtue, abhorrent of crime, giving a glorious example to the nations.’

This is an unclear and confusing sentence which talks of both Catholic doctrine, authority and civil liberty. It seems to me certainly something from which it would be dangerous to draw overarching historical conclusions.

The major public debate on repeal occurred some months after the letter to Cullen. Arguments for and against repeal, which were covered widely by the Irish, British and international press, took place over three days in the reformed Corporation of Dublin at the city assembly house on William Street. Those lucky enough to get tickets thronged the interior. Hundreds gathered outside. The proceedings were widely published and constitute a key document for understanding the ideology, motivation and political vision of the repeal movement and also the thinking of Dublin’s unionist commercial community. O’Connell spoke at great length over several hours on the first day and more briefly on subsequent days. His performance was an intellectual and political tour de force. Early on the first day he dismissed the idea of a Catholic ascendancy as absurd. He did not return to it. He didn’t have to as none of the unionists who spoke against repeal focused on it. It was not an issue. O’Connell constantly spoke in inclusive terms which were accepted by his opponents, including Isaac Butt, who was a unionist at that point, and O’Connell’s main opponent. One unionist speaker, Councillor Symes, conceded that the arguments for repeal were strong. He did not for a moment believe Protestants would suffer under repeal. If it were carried tomorrow ‘he and his fellow-Protestant countrymen would be ten thousand times better treated than they ever treated the Catholics.’ Symes’s objection, echoing that of Peel, was that repeal would lead to separation and damage to the empire.

Richard Pine recently quoted historian Roderick Beaton as saying: ‘To study history is to look for patterns.’ In the case of O’Connell’s commitment to civil liberty, religious toleration and the separation of church and state, the pattern is surely clear. Repeal was not about Catholic ascendancy and the bulk of those who lived at the time knew that.

Notes:

Recognition of O’Connell as an advanced liberal is not new. O’Connell’s liberalism has long been established in historical scholarship, Including in the work of Fergus O’Ferrall, Oliver MacDonagh, Maurice O’Connell and Patrick M. Geoghegan. In 1973 MacDonagh wrote in The Irish Parliamentary Tradition that O’Connell was ‘one of the great carriers of the historic liberal tradition of the Enlightenment.’ In 1985 Fergus O’Ferrall treated the subject in detail in Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy 1820-1830. Maurice O’Connell wrote on O’Connell’s liberalism in Daniel O’Connell, The Man and his Politics in 1990. In his preface to that book Conor Cruise O’Brien noted that O’Connell was ‘a resolutely advanced liberal and internationally recognised as such.’ The theme is also central to Patrick M. Geoghegan’s 2008 biography of O’Connell.

Barr’s scholarly achievement is remarkable. In writing The Irish Pope he has made his way through an extraordinary volume of Cullen’s letters, documents and other literary remains written in four languages, to produce the first major biography of the individual who was unquestionably the most important cleric in nineteenth century Ireland. Our concern here, however, is confined to his characterisation of O’Connell in the chapter entitled, ‘The Great, the Glorious Daniel O’Connell’. Observations made are not intended to have any application to the remainder of the book.