North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

A long hard road

Sunlight picks out details of a headstone in an alcove in Claregalway Abbey.

I wonder how many of the long-suffering Galway commuters who spend a couple of hours each day trying to get through the village of Claregalway have visited the Franciscan Abbey just over the river on the Tuam side.[The people of the village are collecting signatures for a petition right about now to try to speed up the construction of a bypass. And weather-wise, they couldn't have picked a worse day for it. But I digress.]

The headstone pictured above records the death of Mary D’arcy in August 1780. It looked to be a momentous time for Ireland. It was the year that politician Henry Grattan made his call for Irish parliamentary independence. At that time, Ireland had its own parliament (located on Dame Street in central Dublin in what is now the Bank of Ireland) but it was a parliament without power. All laws proposed in the parliament had to be approved (or vetoed) in the House of Commons in London, which meant that the Dublin parliament was seen as little more than a talking shop. But a new group of politicians - men such as Henry Flood , James Caulifield (Lord Charlamont) and Henry Grattan - emerged that were determined to wrest some authority from London. Their first battle (and victory) was against the severe restrictions on Irish trade with Britain's other colonies. Their victory was not entirely due to the power of their rhetoric or political argument. The Irish Volunteers had been formed early in 1778 and by the end of the year numbered around forty thousand men. Ostensibly formed to protect Ireland from the French while the regular British army was in America attempting to crush the rebellion there, they soon became a none-too-subtle display of Irish independence. In 1779, the parliamentarians demand for free trade was matched by a march of Volunteers through Dublin - the artillery pieces that they dragged past Parliament Hose bore placards like "Free Trade or This". Free trade was granted.

The British government at the time had become more amenable to concessions for their Irish colony. It was motivated not so much by humanitarianism but by an anxious pragmatism. There was more than a whiff of revolution in the air. The rebellion in America had shaken the British - if a group of wealthy, white, Protestant colonists could take arms against the crown, then so could any other part of the Empire. At first, the concessions were grudging, and aimed at relieving the worst elements of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws. In 1771, Catholics were allowed to lease bogland (as long as they reclaimed it ) and in 1778, it became possible for Catholics to lease any land for 999 years. [Ironically, the man who repealed these parts of the Penal Laws, Lord Mountjoy, was 'to learn something of Catholic Emancipation when he was piked and hacked to death at New Ross' during the 1798 Rising ].

The irony was that, while the British accepted the inevitability of rights for Catholics, the Irish parliament in Dublin, Protestant to a man, was not so keen, fearing that an empowered Catholic political class might decide to settle any number of old scores. Grattan was not one of those men - he addressed the Irish Parliament thus,

the question is now whether we shall be a Protestant settlement or an Irish nation…for so long as we exclude Catholics from natural liberty and the common rights of man we are not a people.

He spoke those words in 1782 . Two years earlier, he had unsuccessfully proposed a bill that would give independence to the Irish parliament - he was unsuccessful on that occasion but two years later, Irish parliamentary independence was granted, and became known as Grattan's parliament. In the same year, Catholics were finally granted the same property rights as Protestants.

Alas, the triumph did not last long. It became clear that the newly-gained independence was a sham - by appointing large numbers of MPs (via rotten boroughs and other corrupt wheezes), there was a sufficient number of yes-men in parliament to render it practically useless. By the end of the century, the French revolution would infuse the Irish Volunteers with a more radical republicanism, particularly after a young Protestant barrister called Theobald Wolfe Tone assumed command. In 1798, a French naval task force landed in Mayo to assist a Volunteer uprising. It was brutally crushed and three years later, the Act of Union effectively obliterated any semblance on Irish independence. Wolfe Tone killed himself in prison in 1798 before he could be hanged - he is commemorated every year around this time by Fianna Fáil.

Another crossroads on the road of Irish history, and one that served to, yet again, separate the people of the island. One wonders how Irish history would have progressed, had Grattan's parliament has been able to fulfil it's mandate? Would Ireland have gone the way of the American rebels, whose army (led by Washington) along with the French navy, smashed Cornwallis' army in 1781 at Yorktown and effectively won independence. Or would an empowered Irish parliament assert itself as a loyal but independent colony like Canada. Who knows ? One thing is for sure - all of the tumult did not disturb the eternal slumber of Mary D'arcy.

Posted by Monasette at October 28, 2004 04:42 PM