Fergus O’Ferrall writes: This year (and this day, August 6th) marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, the founding father of Irish democracy. The remarkable set of political principles enunciated by O’Connell, by which he sought to shape early Irish democratic practice, retain seminal significance for our democratic future in the twenty-first century. William Gladstone, in an 1889 essay in The Nineteenth Century, observed of O’Connell: ‘Besides being a great and good man he was also a disappointed man. The sight of his promised land was not given to his longing eyes. But as a prophet of a coming time, he fulfilled his mission.’
O’Connell was an advanced radical democrat and humanitarian with a European and worldwide reputation unparalleled by that of any other Irish political figure. His political principles, forged in a long public career beset by often virulent opposition from powerful vested interests, remain important in our time of toxic challenges to democracy and the rule of law. His biographer, Oliver MacDonagh, has astutely observed that his life ‘was singularly purposive and patterned’. In the critical decade of the 1790s we may observe from his youthful journal how he sought to think out for himself a coherent political philosophy – as he put it ‘a united train of ideas’. William Godwin’s Political Justice arguably was the most formative text in this process. As MacDonagh writes:
Where Godwin really struck home with O’Connell was, first, in his total opposition to violence and revolution as bound to hold back the long march of rational progress … and secondly, his conviction that the key to every beneficial change lay in the enlistment of public opinion … O’Connell’s entire political structure was to rest, ultimately speaking, on these two simple propositions.
The importance of ‘moral force’ as a key political principle is central to peaceful and progressive democratic societies, even if it is now under grave threat in many countries. Through his belief in ‘moral force’ O’Connell created popular mass democratic politics in the unpromising environment of the 1820s and won Catholic Emancipation in 1829. This was a unique democratic achievement in Europe at that time. The revolution he aspired to was one which would develop systematic continuous interaction between parliament and the ‘people power’ of engaged citizens at local level.
O’Connell’s own moral authority stemmed from his passionate commitment to civil liberty and equality of all people: he strove to unshackle people from all the fetters imposed by ascendancy, discrimination, prejudice or tyranny, no matter what their race, colour or creed or where they lived in the world. He was a universalist. He acted for Jewish emancipation; he vigorously opposed slavery; he spoke up for victims of colonialism such as the natives of Australia and New Zealand. He has been well described as a sedulous political egalitarian, an anti-racialist, an anti-imperialist and an unwearyingly humanitarian reformer. He sought the complete separation of church and state. As he declared in 1818: ‘My political creed is short and simple. It consists in believing that all men are entitled as of right and justice to religious and civil liberty.’
O’Connell’s concept of Irish nationality has continuing relevance in post-Good Friday Agreement Ireland. He envisioned a union of Protestant, Catholic and dissenter as the basis for self-government in Ireland. He expressed this in classic form in 1810:
The Protestant alone could not expect to liberate his country – the Roman Catholic alone could not do it – neither could the Presbyterian – but amalgamate the three into the Irishman, and the Union is repealed. Learn discretion from your enemies – they have crushed your country by fomenting religious discord – serve her by abandoning it forever …
His view of Irish nationality was essentially locational, to be determined solely by Irish birth or residence; he accepted the plural origins of the people on the island of Ireland and believed that they had the right to self-government. For his time O’Connell was a very advanced democrat and was committed to the then radical programme of universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, triennial parliaments and equal electoral districts. He desired a freely elected parliament, a government dependent on such a parliament, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech and assembly. All offices should be open to talent and all citizens should be treated equally before the law.
It is instructive to isolate O’Connell’s eight key political principles as to do so helps us to name the political philosophy which may be identified most closely with him: civic republicanism: first, total opposition to ‘revolutionist’ or underground violence in pursuit of political goals in the Irish context; second, the necessity to mobilise public opinion as a ‘moral force’ to effect beneficial change; third, civil liberty and equality for all people; fourth, a costly commitment to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements; fifth, applying advanced democratic reform within a novel enlargement of the constitutional and parliamentary framework; sixth, complete separation of Church and State; seventh, Irish nationality to be defined by birth or residence and through union of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter; eighth, legislative independence for the people of Ireland upon an equal footing with other sovereign peoples.
O’Connell, I would argue, in espousing such principles, is a civic republican even more than he is an advanced radical and liberal. His political philosophy ought not be too surprising. He received a classical education; MacDonagh notes his ‘furnishing of his mind according to the Ciceronian specification he had received at Douai’. Significantly the hero of his projected novel in the 1790s was to be ‘imbued with republican principles’.
Drawing upon his classical education and his reading of all the then novel political books of the 1790s, such as that of Godwin, O’Connell was able to conceive of the people as citizens of the modern polis: the common business, the public thing (res publica) of the people should be conducted by them, for the common good. Civic republicanism involves the belief that the state should be an integral part of a free, flourishing society, by serving the common good and being guided by the active participation of its citizens. Sadly, republicanism in Ireland is so often misunderstood as militant Catholic nationalism and separatism with an often-sectarian antipathy to Irish people who have different identities and aspirations. The principles of civic republicanism are democracy, citizenship and internationalism: liberty, equality and solidarity.
Where O’Connell ceases to be the straightforward liberal is in his understanding of liberty: liberalism defines liberty as non-interference by the state in the lives of individual citizens while civil or classical republicanism defines it, as O’Connell did, as non-domination by others, as non-vulnerability to the will of others. The central grievance addressed by civic republicanism and by O’Connell is that of having to live at the mercy of another, having to live in circumstances that leave one vulnerable to the arbitrary decisions or impositions of another person or group.
The modern Irish political theorist Philip Pettit has most completely set out what is implied by O’Connellite political principles for our times in his Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, published in 1997.
We will do well in marking the 250th anniversary of O’Connell’s birth if we revisit his political principles and see him indeed as a ‘prophet of a coming time’ – our fraught and challenging times in the twenty-first century which are characterised by a retreat from the rule of law internationally, the erosion of democratic norms in so many countries, the exponential rise of global inequalities and at a global level the almost total ignoring of the concept of the common good in respect of the climate crisis.
O’Connell, of course, was an early exemplar of civic republican principles. He operated in a context where ordinary people lacked any civic tradition of self-government: he had first to create a ‘public space’ in which an embryonic form of democratic citizenship could emerge and evolve. After a hundred years of independence in the Republic of Ireland we have greater resources and opportunities to exercise the civic virtues as equal citizens participating in public life to serve the common good: to build a genuinely Civic Republican State which will inspire others at the international level to adopt the key principles first practised in Ireland by the founding father of our democracy, Daniel O’Connell.
This is the most important story Irish people have to tell: how and why the Catholic Irish, who were totally outside the province of politics, law and government in the eighteenth century, come to be the pioneers, in a world of imperialism and colonialism, of democratic politics, of the modern political party, free elections, democratic opposition and political liberty in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are now one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world.
Dr Fergus O’Ferrall is author of Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy 1820-30 (Dublin, 1985) and Daniel O’Connell, Gill’s Irish Lives, (Dublin, 1998) and Liberty and Catholic Politics 1790-1990 (Belfast, 1990); his forthcoming book is County Longford Explored: Irish history in the hidden heartland, at press with Geography Publications.
6/8/2025
