Daniel O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation

I.  BRITAIN'S IRISH PROBLEM.  William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806), British prime minister, 1783-1806.  "the connection" = the Union ==>  United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.  King George III (1760-1820).  Sir Arthur Wellesley (1769-1852), later created Duke of Wellington.  First Reform Bill (1832).  Chartist movement.  Catholic Association of Ireland (est. 1823).  Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), "The Liberator."

II.  DANIEL O'CONNELL & CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION.  Derrynane, Co. Kerry.  Family:  Daniel, Clare's Regiment, Irish Brigade; Maurice, called "Hunting Cap," justice of the peace in Kerry, "the Crooked Knife" (Gaelic, skean = knife); Mairé Dubh ("Dark Mary"): "God prosper your wages, my love--or otherwise, according as you earned them."  Richard Lalor Sheil (1791-1851); Catholic Association of Ireland; "the Catholic rent."  "The King of Beggars"; "agitation"; "monster meetings"; the Clare by-election (June 1828).  Bill of Catholic Emancipation (April 1829).

WHAT ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE LEARNED IN IRELAND

INTRODUCTION.  THE UNION AND THE PROBLEM OF CATHOLICISM.  Robert Southey (1774-1843), private secretary to the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1801-2.

I.  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE'S IRELAND.^[1]  Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59); Gustave de Beaumont (1802-66).  Democracy in America (1835).  (British) Reform Act of 1832.  Bp. Edward Nolan of Kildare and Leighlin.  Carlow, Waterford, Kilkenny (cathedral town of Ossory).

II.  WHAT TOCQUEVILLE LEARNED ABOUT IRELAND.

1)  EXTRAORDINARY POVERTY.

2)  HATRED OF THE ARISTOCRACY.

3)  LOVE FOR THEIR CHURCH.

TIPS ON PAPER No. 1, “What Tocqueville Learned about Ireland.”  Alexis de Tocqueville was a great traveler and one of the most astute observers of the post-Napoleonic age.  He is best known for his assessment of the French Revolution as a unnecessarily violent disruption of French history, caused by the monarchy’s incompetence and its tyranny in weakening pre-revolutionary liberties, especially of the nobility.  He also travel led in the young United States and wrote a famous book, Democracy in America.   This assignment asks you to read carefully Tocqueville's journal of his visit to Ireland, which occurred in the middle of the era between Catholic Emancipation and the beginning of the Great Famine.  Tocqueville questioned everyone he met about the current state of affairs, the religious divisions, and the Union’s effect on public opinion in Ireland.  You should pay attention not only to what his informants said, but also to who was saying it.  The main question was (and for this assignment is):  Did the Union (1800), followed by Catholic emancipation (1829), lay a sound political basis for the settlement of the “Irish Question,” that is, the integration of Ireland and the Irish into the British State, society, and culture?  Or, did emancipation seem to Tocqueville’s informants to have set the stage for further, destabilizing changes in the relations between Ireland and Britain?  Bear in mind that, the more so after the Union, major impulses for political change or for political stability would develop in Britain and, more especially, at Westminster, the seat of the government of the United Kingdom.  That is the whole political point of the Union.  But Tocqueville is concerned for the other side of the dynamic, the conditions in Ireland and the likelihood of future change arising out of the post-Emancipation situation in Ireland.  Your task is to tell what he seems to have found out.  Although not required for this paper, some reading in  Lawrence Taylor, Occasions of Faith (copies in book stores and on reserve), is highly instructive about the strengths and weaknesses of the pre-Famine Catholic Church in Ireland.