Brendan Hoban: Irish history shows that O’Connell was right
Western People 19.8.2025
I’ve often wondered why I’ve been so uncomfortable with the physical force element in Irish history. I used to trace it to my unease as a child with Pádraig Pearse’s coupling of ‘the fight for Irish freedom’ with blood sacrifices that had forced resonances with Jesus dying on the cross on Calvary – paying the ultimate sacrifice for the ultimate good.
Years later as I studied history I came to realise that whatever substance there was in my instinctive revulsion from the bloody sacrifices that peppered the road to 1916 and beyond, and the ballads and the culture that glorified them, had found an alternative strategy in the political philosophy of the Liberator, Daniel O’Connell.
O’Connell became my hero as the violent and bloody history of the fight for Irish freedom – that justified any level of violence and death – became more and more suspect as many young men of twenty were given guns and bombs and sent out to kill often indiscriminately, not just the perceived enemies of Irish freedom but innocent bystanders regarded as collateral damage in the ‘glorious campaign’.
As a young man when the Northern Troubles were at their deadliest, my contemporaries wrongly convinced that they were fighting for (and if necessary, dying for) Ireland found themselves holding AK-47s and carrying bombs as people were gunned down or blown to bits as any sacrifice by the ‘freedom fighters’ or those they eliminated was justified in a series of increasingly violent and bloody campaigns.
And as a young man I watched on RTÉ television’s evening news as police picked through the devastation of the subsequent outrages gathering body-parts into body-bags while spokespersons for the Provos and other copycat groups competed in defending their role in ‘the fight for Irish freedom’ and the glorious accolades that they imagined would follow.
But as the campaign continued, it was becoming progressively more obvious by the day that, with leaders like John Hume and Séamus Mallon patiently teasing out the indefensible reality behind the ballads and the blarney, the Provo campaign had morally run into the sand. The final solution – after decades of murder and mayhem, and incalculable mountains of pain and suffering – meant Hume and others had to ease the ‘freedom fighters’ towards a peace dividend.
The trick was to get them to throw in the blood-soaked towel yet allow them to pretend that any dividend that accrued from three decades of madness would be attributed to the ‘freedom fighters’. But the Irish people knew that deep down it was all a pretence to allow the Provos their moment in the sun and to get them to see sense.
Over three decades of bombing and killing, and graves and funerals, and all the craziness and sufferings that ensued, it was a small price for peace to indulge the public strutting of Provo leaders taking laps of honour on the international stage as they imagined themselves the victors.
For me the figure of Daniel O’Connell hovered over those three decades as, in comparison, his political philosophy and moral purpose set in relief the very opposite of the Provo course. The Provos sought the glory and continue to claim that their campaign of violence and blood was justified mostly because they never gave in – a reality now undermined as their ‘celebrations of victory’ have diminished into sing-songs in alcohol-laden tributes in pubs and in quasi-military posturing at the funerals of the ‘freedom fighters’.
On the other hand, those who laud the O’Connell philosophy, praise him for knowing as a public servant with a clear moral compass that there comes a point at which it is the responsible, ethical decision to give in. O’Connell recognised that point had arrived when as the famous Clontarf Monster Meeting of 1843 drew near; he took an adult decision to call off the meeting because he knew that if it went ahead the probability was that it would result in a huge loss of life.
Thus, the Provo mentality could claim that O’Connell’s strategy was a failure and that O’Connell himself was a coward. It was an unsurprising riposte as the tradition of violence was so embedded in the Irish psyche that O’Connell, as a result of the Clontarf decision, could easily be presented as a failure.
But, as we know things are not always what they seem. The Provo ‘victory’, though presented as such in the declining ‘blood and violence’ tradition of Irish politics, now widely discredited, was in effect a ‘defeat’ because, as many commentators now point out, a united Ireland had more chance of becoming a reality if unity was based on the uniting of the people of the north and south and not on bombing them into a united Ireland. So, from that perspective, the Provo campaign was a disaster.
In simple terms, the ‘blood and violence’ tradition is now past its sell-by date’ and the dawning truth is that if O’Connell’s pacifism had been adopted as a realistic option there would be no point in inflicting the recent Troubles on our people, north and south, and no need for the 1916 bloody campaign as much more would have happened more gradually in terms of movement towards unity among people north and south – without the murder and the mayhem of those years.
The difficult truth is that the Provo campaign achieved very little and that the O’Connell formula of responsible pacificism would have delivered as much or maybe more without the huge loss of life and the terrible theatre of suffering so many had to so needlessly endure.
When will we ever learn? Jesus call to non-violence seems to be inaudible today with the deafening sounds of wars. “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?”
Mary Lou McDonald is living in a deluded time-warp (with the grinning Adams at her elbow):
“Ten names that inspire generations.
“Ten stories that reverberate throughout the world.
“Ten brave Irish men who laid down their lives on hunger strike for the freedom of their country.
“Starved and persecuted they lay in the H-Blocks and with every sinew of their being, they refused to be criminalised, refused to be broken, refused to be defeated.”
They were encouraged to commit suicide for no discernible purpose by fanatics like her and the inhuman machine that has shaped her. Her United Ireland is a barren pipe-dream that was antiquated even when Mr De Valera chanted it in our childhoods. The relations among the inhabitants or our island would be infinitely happier and more prosperous if the sanity of O’Connell, Hume, and Mallon has prevailed over the fascistic terrorism of the PIRA.
“Their hopes encapsulated by the immortal words, ‘Our revenge will be the laughter of our children’” — at best they will have tears of pity, but as far as I recall their suicides did not arouse much enthusiasm in the sensible people of Ireland at the time. Mary Lou desires that Irish school children will glorify the hunger strikes along with the martyrs of 1916 and so on. But that will never happen. De Valera looks in his heart and saw what the Irish people wanted, but Mary Lou looks in hers and sees what they do not want — the wraiths of a spooky republicanism that would be fetid even if it were not stained so deeply with blood and cruelty.
“The days of saying ‘yes to Unity but not now’ are over.” Really, they may be just beginning. If nationalists have a demographic preponderance in NI that does not translate into a solid vote, certainly not if it would be seen as a vote for Mary Lou’s glorification of terrorism. Nor is it at all guaranteed that the Republic (the really existing one) would necessary agree on yes to Unity now — especially if the archaic bitterness of the North would be given a new lease of life in Dublin.
So far, so boring. But what is really obscene is the way Mary Lou makes the tragedy of Palestine part of her PIRA propaganda:
“As our long walk to nationhood continues, we never forget other peoples who yearn for freedom. We stand in unwavering support of Palestine and the people of Gaza as Israel’s barbaric genocide continues. As occupation, apartheid, starvation, bombardment, brutality, Israeli barbarism plays out for all the world to see. As Britain, the United States, the European Union facilitate, enable and finance genocide.
“We know what it means to be colonised, occupied, and oppressed but to rise-up and never surrender the principle of human dignity.”
The PIRA have only one set of soulmates in Palestine, namely Hamas — they have equal respect for human dignity, namely, none.
“So, the people of Palestine can count on the people of Ireland. We will never stop raising our voices in their name.” And we will never stop using you for our parochial propaganda.
Perhaps there are Irish people taken in by this tawdry rhetoric — perhaps there are young people who do not remember the terror, the lost lives, the quick resort to the gun and the bomb. Only on such a premise can Ms McDonald’s fanaticism triumph. But I think her day is gone.
All very well said!
It remains only to question the line sold by Constantine after 312 CE – that he had seen the legend ‘In Hoc Signo Vinces’ (‘In This Sign Conquer’) under the Sign of the Cross, prior to his decisive battle with Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome – a story bought by ‘Christendom’ and implicitly underwritten by St Augustine of Hippo in his justification of state compulsion to enforce Christian orthodoxy in the early 400s.
René Girard’s contention that all violence originates in mimetic desire – the desire we ‘catch’ from a rival, is amply borne out not just by the Roman civil wars that led to the Caesarean Roman Empire but by the entire history of Western imperialism and by the Provo adoption of the British imperial policy of deliberate atrocity – now by far the strongest Unionist argument against Irish constitutional unity.
The world’s future is at stake in re-understanding ‘sin’ as prideful rivalry for power and status, born always out of our bad habit of ‘invidious comparison’ – our tendency to doubt our own value when we see ourselves as lacking what a neighbour has.
That this is our ‘original problem’ is borne out even by Genesis, and that Augustine was mistaken to interpret that passage as referring to sexuality is well verified by the disgracing of the Catholic magisterial over-investment in priestly celibacy – the investment that led to the covering up of clerical sex and, inevitably, of clerical sexual abuse also.
Vladimir Putin’s Christian imperialism should be enough warning for the Trumpite Republican party, but Trump prefers Putinism to the US constitution, and JD Vance seeks to inherit that disgraceful cause. Imperialism is always rampant covetousness, and US Catholic bishops need to see and say this urgently – in detaching themselves from growing US Christian nationalism – led by Pope Leo XIV who obviously can see this.
The current global economy has been built on the exploitation of ‘wanting what your neighbour has’ – aka covetousness or mimetic desire. Until this insight becomes embedded in synodality, at every level, that initiative too will struggle for traction.