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William Smith O’Brien was a
firm believer in national rehabilitation for Ireland through economic
development, and through the Nation he advocated model farms,
agricultural schools, colonisation of waste lands and a national system
of railways for Ireland. The Repeal Party, however, was becoming increasingly
fragmented between the older, more conservative members who preached Catholic
politics, and the younger men who desired a pluralist, non-sectarian state.
Both factions disagreed over the use of violence as a means of redressing
grievances, and clashes were particularly vehement over the government’s
proposal to establish provincial University Colleges which would be open
to all religious denominations. The Young Irelanders, as the more radical
faction was known, withdrew from the Repeal Party and formed the short-lived
Irish Confederation in January 1847.[2]
O’Brien was a reluctant figurehead,
and appeared more anxious to live the life of a country gentleman at his
estate in Cahermoyle, County Limerick, which he had inherited through
his mother. It was a difficult time for new political movements. Famine
and fever racked the land, but political fervour was ignited by the news
of the successful French Revolution of February 1848.
O’Brien advocated the setting up
of an armed National Guard, and with others of the Irish Confederation,
he visited France to congratulate the revolutionary movement there. He
believed that the mere existence of a National Guard and a network of
Confederate Clubs would force the British government to concede Repeal,
and in early July 1848, he set out on a tour of the south and east to
organise clubs.
The government moved swiftly: Habeas
Corpus was suspended, and a warrant was issued for O’Brien’s
arrest. His natural indecisiveness was overthrown, and he decided with
the encouragement of Thomas Francis Meagher and John Dillon to defy the
government and appeal to the people. Such a course of action was influenced
by the reports in the Nation of large, well-organised revolutionary
clubs in Kilkenny and Tipperary.
O’Brien made his way through Kilkenny,
Callan, Carrick-on-Suir, Cashel, and Killenaule before finally locating
his headquarters in the little mining village of The Commons in southeast
Tipperary. Here, on 28 July 1848, the cream of Ireland’s revolutionary
literati gathered in the upstairs room of a village pub – O’Brien,
Thomas Francis Meagher, Terence Bellew McManus, James Stephens, Michael
Doheny, John O’Mahony, John Dillon and Patrick O’Donohue.
They discussed revolution, and agreed to disperse and await the harvest.
O’Brien remained at the Commons with McManus, Stephens and O’Donohue,
and on the morning of Saturday, 29 July, a group of armed policemen marched
from Callan to arrest him.
William Smith O’Brien, seated,
and Thomas Francis Meagher
flanked by a prison guard and jailor at Kilmainham jail, Dublin, 1848,
before being deported to Tasmania
The subsequent confrontation between
police and O’Brien’s group of badly armed farmers and miners
at the Widow McCormack’s house was, in effect, the 1848 rebellion.[3]
O’Brien fled, but was arrested a week later at Thurles railway station
as he awaited a train to Limerick. Tried with McManus, Meagher and O’Donohue,
he was sentenced to death for treasonable activities. The sentence was
commuted, and on 9 July 1849, they left Kingstown harbour (Dun Laoghaire)
for the penal colony at Van Diemen’s Land. His tribulations there
have been the subject of a number of volumes,[4]
but the proposed publication of his ‘Tasmanian Journal’, which
is a relatively full account of his exile, will give valuable insights
into the political philosophy of a remarkable Clareman. [The journal was
published in 1995 as To Solitude Consigned: The Tasmanian Journal
of William Smith O'Brien, RP Davis (ed.), Crossing Press, Sydney.
ISBN 064622784X.]
O’Brien’s interests had much
to do with the moral basis of authority and the more equitable forms of
government. After his release, his two volumes, Principles of Government
or Mediations in Exile was published in Dublin in 1856. He led a
rather unsettled life, and did not again become actively involved in Irish
politics. O’Brien died at Bangor, North Wales in 1864.
O’Brien retained a deep affection
for his native county, and was particularly conscious of its rich Gaelic
heritage. He was held in high esteem by the Gaelic poets of his time,
who regarded him as the rightful successor of Brian Boru. Both Seamus
MacCuirtin and Brian O Luanaigh composed poems in his honour, and
O’Brien had O Luanaigh collect ‘vernacular sayings’
and ‘colloquial phrases’ of the Clare peasantry. It appears
that O’Brien was proficient in the reading and writing of Irish.
The Tasmanian Journal
To Erin’s Isle across the Main
Fancy has borne me once again
And now the well known scenes I trace
Where dwells the future of our race
Whilst Thomond’s hills before us rise
And dear Dromoland greets my eyes[5]
The above lines which begin a long and
rather tedious poem composed by O’Brien for his niece Juliana, and
copied into his journal are illustrative of the pangs of exile suffered
by this sensitive and scholarly man, cast adrift on an inhospitable shore.
The Journal as a whole is a remarkable record of O’Brien’s
trials and tribulations. More than this however, it provides a unique
picture of the youthful Tasmania, in the portrayal of which O’Brien
proved himself to be acute both as a statistical enquirer and general
reviewer. It commences on Wednesday 28 October 1849 and concludes on 20
March 1853.
Smith O’Brien’s cottage
at the penal settlement Port Arthur, Tasmania
Initially confined to Maria Island, O’Brien
was transferred to Port Arthur in April 1850. On his acceptance of parole
he lived in New Norfolk from November 1851. From New Norfolk he moved
to St. Paul’s where he remained for almost a year, and his final
period of exile was spent back in New Norfolk. Geographically, his observations
are confined to the southeast of the island as far north as the Esk River,
and it is well to remember that his freedom of movement was restricted
within these areas also. The Tasmanian landscape was a source of some
pleasure to O’Brien, and he was pleasantly surprised on his arrival
to witness the splendid beauty of the Derwent in the neighbourhood of
Hobart, ‘scarcely surpassed – even by the vicinity of Dublin’.
He noted the similarities between the southern shores of Van Diemen’s
Land and the Giant’s Causeway in north east Ireland, and the sight
of Mount Arthur brought back memories of the Galtee and Wicklow mountains.
The grief of separation was often sparked off by the perceived similarity
between Tasmanian and Irish scenes, or more particularly in many cases,
between Tasmanian and Clare scenes. In Ireland he had roamed the countryside
in the company of his wife and children; in Tasmania he was a solitary,
lonely observer.
O’Brien’s Ireland was a humanised
landscape full of the spent shells of history. Tasmania, for the Europeans
was a new, young country, although its aboriginal cultures predated Europe’s
oldest civilizations. Ireland was a crowded countryside with a population
of eight million. Clare alone held some 286,000 souls. Tasmania, in contrast
was almost empty (70,000) with a corresponding absence of the cultivation
so characteristic of Ireland. O’Brien belonged to a landlord class,
who had controlled and shaped landscapes such as his ancestral Dromoland
and before that Bunratty for many generations. Tasmania with its impenetrable
woodlands was a little unrefined for his aristocratic taste.
O’Brien’s views on Tasmania’s
Government and society are of compelling interest because of their timing
and his vast experience as a parliamentarian and popular politician. His
opinions are obviously tempered by the fact that he was not a voluntary
exile and that he believed himself harshly victimised by Governor Denison.
At times he haughtily distances himself from the provincial politics of
the colony, declaring that he is ‘mere spectator of what passes
in this country’, but inevitably and luckily his natural instincts
and interests prevail.
He was well placed to observe the workings
of the penal system established to solve at the periphery the problems
of the core. O’Brien firmly believed that the wrongdoers could be
rehabilitated beneficially through transportation, but he was firmly against
the system whereby convicts were superimposed on a free settled population.
Such a system, he was convinced, would produce an indigenous criminality
which would be all-pervasive and impossible to ameliorate. Tasmania’s
government replicated on a smaller scale the imperial model. It was inextricably
linked to the ladder system of patronage which enmeshed the island in
a giant web stretching from government headquarters at Hobart to the remotest
settlement and the lowliest constable. The island was a prison fortress
whose population consisted primarily of jailors.
O’Brien’s gentry status and
natural reserve distanced him from the free settler and merchant population
of the island. Rarely does he befriend anyone apart from the Catholic
clergyman, Rev. William Bond, with whom he claimed to be on terms of ‘intimate
acquaintanceship’. A frequent visitor to the house of Michael Fenton,
a voluntary Irish exile, who was later to become prominent in Tasmanian
politics, he once observed after a dinner there in the company of local
notables: ‘there were perhaps few persons there with whom I should
desire to form an intimate acquaintance’. He considered that Meagher’s
marriage to Catherine Bennett ‘cannot be considered advantageous
to him’, and generally found that the settlers differed from him
in ‘tastes and opinions’. He recommended Australia as a suitable
destination for the working classes, and rejoiced that there was ‘at
least one part of the world in which the labouring classes have a chance
of sharing the bounty which providence showers upon man’. O’Brien,
however, had serious reservations concerning the emigration of young girls
to Van Diemen’s Land, and was so affected by stories of moral depravity
that he considered ‘it better to each(?) potatoes at home than to
live in luxury in Van Diemen’s Land’.
On a deeply personal level, the journal
records the impact of exile on an individual who was centre stage in Irish,
and by extension, British politics for over twenty five years. Reading
and writing were his great consolations and his capacity to read French,
Latin and Greek, and to review a very catholic range of literature is
ample testimony of the effectiveness of his early education. His mental
state varied in the context of location and conditions. He experienced
difficult times in both Maria Island and Port Arthur, but he appears as
disconsolate and depressed in New Norfolk, observing that ‘Often
have I regretted that I was not shot at Ballingarry or executed at Clonmel:
Death must be terrible indeed if it be not preferable to such a life as
this which I have led since I left the shores of Ireland.’
From the Irish perspective, the most
significant element of the journal are his retrospective accounts of his
own role in the turbulent year of revolution: the analysis of contemporary
English politicians is also of great interest, as O’Brien was a
parliamentarian of long standing and intimately acquainted with the scene
at Westminster. Throughout his exile, Ireland and the Irish people were
constantly on his mind. The outbreak of sectarian violence at Dolly’s
Brae on 12 July 1851 greatly distressed him, and his admonition to both
factions betrays his exasperation at the divisiveness which bedevilled
Irish politics: ‘if man’, he wrote, ‘had nothing else
to quarrel about, they would quarrel as to the best mode of breaking an
eggshell’. Along with Augustine Thierry, he marvelled at the ‘indomitable
pertinacity’ of his own people to preserve through centuries the
‘remembrance of their lost liberty’. O’Brien indicted
England for her treatment of Ireland and scorned England’s role
as ‘friends of liberty’. The tone of the Journal becomes more
vitriolic and denunciatory:
‘Force, fraud, intrigue, corruption
are the agencies by which England has ever sought to uphold her rule in
Ireland, coercion acts, standing armies of soldiers, standing armies of
police, packed juries, hired spies, hired informers, hired journalists,
hired layers(?), moral assassins of every class – such are the agents
employed in the government of Ireland.’
O’Brien is a reluctant commentator
on his own role in 1848, and writes only to correct what he considers
as incorrect attributions to him by other participants. In this context
he takes issue with the Lamartine claim that the delegation went to France
in 1848 to request military assistance. O’Brien, who was on the
delegation, reiterates that they went merely to congratulate the French
revolutionaries. However, he does describe with enthusiasm the role of
National Workshops under the direction of Louis Blanc, and perhaps here
was the model for the Confederate Clubs established throughout Ireland
in the Spring and Summer of 1848. The visit to France and the French Revolution
of 1848 ignited the flames of dissatisfaction in Ireland and were, O’Brien
wryly notes, ‘attended with consequences most disastrous to myself
and to my country’.
England’s failure to counteract
the Great Hunger drove reasonable men to despair and revolution. O’Brien
rightly points to the damning indictment of English policies in the published
returns of the 1851 census, which showed that Ireland had lost two million
either through death or emigration in that awful decade. The economic
pragmatism of the Whig Party was preferred to any pecuniary sacrifice
for Ireland’s starving masses. Revolution in these circumstances
was ‘a noble venture’ and O’Brien vindicates his companions
by declaring that ‘never were a body of men animated more by purer
or more disinterested patriotism’. Unconsciously presaging his future
role in Irish politics, O’Brien declares his reluctance to offer
himself again as a sacrificial victim to people who were, ‘utterly
incapable of making a united and successful effort to win that national
independence, the value of which they have so ostentatiously proclaimed
during so many years.’
William Smith O’Brien’s Tasmanian
journal is a most important document. It will long remain a primary source
for the history of two islands, geographically separated, but woven together
in the privately recorded observations, thoughts and opinions of an exiled
Clareman.
Notes
External Link:
Young Irelanders: Exiles
in Paradise
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