Clontarf, the cancelled meeting

It is twenty past four on the afternoon of the seventh of October 1843, in the upstairs committee room of the Repeal Association at 36 Burgh Quay, Dublin, on the south bank of the Liffey, in heavy autumn rain. He is sixty-eight years old. He is Daniel O'Connell, called by every man and woman in this country the Liberator, the man who had won Catholic Emancipation in 1829, who had organised the Repeal Association in 1830, who had been holding monster meetings across Ireland through the spring and summer of 1843 (Tara, the third of August, by the conservative count of the Dublin newspapers, three quarters of a million people), and who has, for tomorrow, called a final meeting at the strand at Clontarf, the symbolic ground where Brian Boru defeated the Norse in 1014. The expected attendance is, by the Repeal Association's own organisation, between five hundred thousand and one million.

On the table is the proclamation of the Lord Lieutenant Earl De Grey, posted at the Pillar at four o'clock by the Castle messenger Patrick Connolly. The proclamation, in a single sheet of foolscap, in the official typography, declares that the public meeting called for tomorrow at Clontarf is, by the law of the country, an unlawful assembly, and prohibits it. The proclamation is countersigned by the Chief Secretary Edward Eliot.

Around the table are the committee of the Association: Thomas Davis (the Young Ireland editor of the Nation), John Blake Dillon, Charles Gavan Duffy (also of the Nation), William Smith O'Brien, the eldest son Maurice O'Connell. Davis and the Young Ireland faction are, by the record of the meeting, in favour of holding the meeting in defiance of the proclamation; they argue that the moment is a constitutional moment and that the meeting is a peaceful one and that to back down is to forfeit the political weight of a year of monster meetings.

He thinks: Davis is twenty-nine. Davis has not seen what a British army does in this country when it has the rifle. The British have brought up two regiments of infantry from Curragh and a battery of artillery from Beggar's Bush in the past week. The artillery is sited on the strand.

He thinks: if I hold the meeting tomorrow against the proclamation, the army has the right under the Insurrection Acts to fire on the crowd. The crowd will not fight back, because the meetings have been organised through the year on the principle of moral force and not physical. The army will fire on five hundred thousand peaceful Irish people on a seaside strand outside Dublin. The country will not forgive the army and will not forgive the British state and will not forgive me for having brought five hundred thousand into the field.

He thinks: the country may not forgive me, anyway, for cancelling.

He thinks: the political movement is built on the constitutional principle. The principle is non-violence. The principle is more important than tomorrow's meeting. The principle is more important than my own legacy. The principle is, in the long run of this country, the only principle that gets us to a settlement that is not a graveyard.

He thinks: Davis will be furious. Davis will be right that the moment is forfeit. Davis will be wrong that the alternative is preferable.

He turns to Maurice and says: cancel the meeting. The notices to the parishes, the messengers to the railways, the announcements at the chapels in the morning. We have until midnight.

Davis is, by the tradition, in tears at the table. He says: we have lost the country. O'Connell says: we have not lost the country. We have not killed five hundred thousand of the country. There is a difference.

The cancellation went out from Burgh Quay through the night. By eleven on Saturday evening, every Catholic parish priest in Dublin and the surrounding twenty miles had been notified. The announcement at every Sunday morning Mass on the eighth of October was that the meeting was cancelled and that the people were to remain at home. The crowd that gathered on the strand on the morning of the eighth of October, by the Freeman's Journal the next day, was perhaps two thousand. The British artillery on the strand stood down at noon. The day passed without disorder.

By every careful subsequent reading of Irish political history, the cancellation of the Clontarf monster meeting was the moment at which Repeal as a constitutional movement effectively ended. O'Connell was tried for sedition in February 1844, convicted in May, sentenced to a year in Richmond Bridewell. He served four months and was released in September after the Lords reversed the conviction. He emerged from prison a visibly broken man. The Famine struck the country the following year. He resigned the leadership of the Catholic Association in early 1847 and left Ireland in March 1847 on a pilgrimage to Rome. He never reached Rome. He died at Genoa in northern Italy on the fifteenth of May 1847, seventy-one years old. His last instruction, by his confessor Father John Miley, was that his heart be sent to Rome and his body to Glasnevin in Dublin. The instructions were carried out. The heart is in the Irish College in Rome; the body is under the round tower in the centre of Glasnevin Cemetery, which is the O'Connell monument in Ireland and the symbolic centre of the modern Catholic graveyard tradition. The strand at Clontarf was extensively reclaimed for industrial port use in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the precise spot where the cancelled meeting was to have been held is now under a container terminal of Dublin Port. By the observation of every Irish political historian since John A. Murphy in the 1970s, the cancelled meeting on the eighth of October 1843 was the right call of an old constitutional politician who would not bring the rifle into the question, and the wrong call for the political movement, and the moment of national hinge between the constitutional century and the revolutionary one.