Clontarf, the cancelled meeting

There is a kind of political victory that looks, in the hour it is won, exactly like a defeat. A man who has spent forty years building a peaceful movement is offered, on a single afternoon, the chance to break it open into something larger, hotter, and irrecoverable. He may take the offer and be carried on the shoulders of his own generation; or he may refuse, and be judged by the next. The refusal is the rarer thing. It is also, in countries where the rifle stands ready, the older man's burden.

THE LIBERATOR AT SIXTY-EIGHT

Daniel O'Connell, called by every parish in Ireland the Liberator, was sixty-eight years old in the autumn of 1843, and had been the public face of Catholic Ireland for the better part of his adult life. He had carried Catholic Emancipation through the British Parliament in 1829 by the threat of constitutional weight alone, without a shot fired. He had founded the Repeal Association in 1830 to undo the Act of Union of 1800 and restore an Irish parliament in College Green. Through the spring and summer of 1843 he had drawn the country to him in monster meetings: Trim, Mullaghmast, and on the third of August at the Hill of Tara, by the Dublin papers' count, three quarters of a million people on a single hillside. He had announced, for Sunday the eighth of October, a final meeting on the strand at Clontarf, the ground where Brian Boru had broken the Norse in 1014. The Association's own organisers expected between five hundred thousand and one million.

THE WEEK BEFORE CLONTARF

Through the last week of September and the first week of October, the weather over Dublin turned. The wind came in off the Irish Sea cold and wet; the autumn rain set in. In the same week, two regiments of British infantry were marched up from the Curragh into the city. A battery of field artillery was moved out of Beggar's Bush barracks and sited on the strand at Clontarf itself, with the guns laid towards the ground on which the meeting was to be held. The orders had gone out from Whitehall over the signature of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel. The Lord Lieutenant, Earl De Grey, was instructed to prepare a proclamation. The Castle messenger Patrick Connolly carried the foolscap to the Pillar on Sackville Street at four o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday the seventh of October, and posted it: the public meeting called for the morrow at Clontarf was, by the law of the country, an unlawful assembly, and was prohibited. The proclamation was countersigned by the Chief Secretary, Edward Eliot.

THE UPSTAIRS ROOM AT BURGH QUAY

At twenty past four, in the upstairs committee room of the Repeal Association at 36 Burgh Quay, on the south bank of the Liffey, the sheet was laid on the table. The rain was loud on the windows. O'Connell had been in the room since noon. Around him were the committee: Thomas Davis of the Nation, twenty-nine years old, John Blake Dillon, Charles Gavan Duffy, William Smith O'Brien, and his eldest son Maurice. The Young Ireland men spoke first and spoke hardest. The meeting was peaceful. The proclamation was a bluff. To cancel now, after a year of monster meetings, was to forfeit the political weight of every hillside the country had climbed since spring. Davis pressed it with the steadiness of a man who had not seen the inside of a courtroom in the year of the Insurrection Acts, and had not seen, as the old man across the table had seen, what a regular British infantry square does at thirty paces when the order to fire is given.

A SECOND OF TIME IN BURGH QUAY

He listened, and he weighed it. Davis is twenty-nine, he thought, and Davis has not been in this country long enough to remember a yeomanry on a market square. The battery at Clontarf is not theatre; the battery is sited and laid. If the meeting is held against the proclamation, the army has the legal cover of an unlawful assembly, and the army will fire. The crowd, organised through the year on the principle of moral force, will not fire back. Five hundred thousand peaceful Irish men and women on a seaside strand, and a battery of British field guns on the high ground above them. The arithmetic of the afternoon resolved itself in his head with the cold clarity of a younger barrister's brief. The movement was built on the constitutional principle; the principle was the only thing in the long Irish century that led anywhere except to the graveyard; the principle was, in the end, larger than tomorrow's meeting, larger than the Hill of Tara in August, larger than his own name on the lintel of the country. Davis would be furious. Davis would be right that the moment was forfeit. Davis would be wrong that the alternative was preferable. The principle, he understood, would cost him the political movement he had spent his life assembling. He took the cost. He turned to Maurice and gave the order to cancel: notices to the parishes, messengers to the railways, announcements at the chapels in the morning. They had until midnight. Davis, by the tradition of the room, wept at the table. We have lost the country, he said. We have not lost the country, O'Connell answered. We have not killed five hundred thousand of the country. There is a difference.

THROUGH THE NIGHT

The cancellation went out from Burgh Quay into the wet evening. Boys on foot, riders on horseback, the Repeal wardens on the Dublin and Kingstown line. By eleven o'clock, every Catholic parish priest in Dublin and the twenty miles around had the notice in his hand. At first Mass on the morning of the eighth, from the high altars of the Pro-Cathedral to the chapels of Howth and Swords and Blanchardstown, the announcement was read: the meeting was cancelled, the people were to remain at home. The crowd that gathered on the strand at Clontarf in the cold sun of that Sunday morning, by the Freeman's Journal the next day, was perhaps two thousand. The British battery stood loaded on the high ground above them until noon, and then the order to stand down was given. The day passed without disorder. No Irish man or woman was buried that week with a British bullet in them.

THE COURTROOM AND THE BRIDEWELL

The Crown moved in the new year. O'Connell was indicted for sedition in February 1844, tried at the Court of Queen's Bench, convicted in May, and sentenced to a year in Richmond Bridewell on the south side of the city. He served four months in a comfortable room with his books and his correspondence, and was released in September when the House of Lords reversed the conviction on a technicality of jury empanelment. He came out of the gate of the Bridewell to a torchlit procession across Dublin, and to a country in which the Repeal Association no longer commanded the hillsides. Young Ireland broke from him in 1846 over the question of physical force. The potato failed in the autumn of 1845 and failed again in 1846, and the long Famine came down on the country he had not led into the muskets at Clontarf. He resigned the leadership in early 1847 and set out, ill and quiet, on a pilgrimage towards Rome.

THE ROUND TOWER AT GLASNEVIN

He did not reach Rome. He died at Genoa on the fifteenth of May 1847, in his seventy-first year. His last instruction, recorded by his confessor Father John Miley, was that his heart be carried on to Rome and his body returned to Dublin. Both were done. The heart was placed in the Irish College in Rome; the body lies under the round tower in the centre of Glasnevin Cemetery, the tower he himself had imagined for the Catholic dead of a country that, in his lifetime, had at last been permitted to bury its dead in its own ground. The strand at Clontarf where the meeting was to have been held has long since been reclaimed; the precise yards of sand where the battery was laid in October 1843 are under a container terminal of Dublin Port. The cancelled meeting, by the long judgement of Irish political history, was the right call of an old constitutional man who would not bring the rifle into the question, and the wrong call for the movement he had built, and the hinge between the constitutional century and the revolutionary one that followed. There is a kind of victory that looks like a defeat in the hour it is won, and looks, a hundred and eighty years on, like the act of a man who refused to make a graveyard of his own crowd. Under the round tower at Glasnevin, that is the inscription the country has not needed to write.