The General Election of 1847 took place in July. In the interval between the secession from the Conciliation Hall and the election, the Young Irelanders made the acceptance or solicitation of place by professing Nationalists from English Government a definite issue—for the first time—in modern Irish politics. The ‘Nation’ laid it down as a first principle in our national politics that so long as an Irish Parliament did not exist no Irish representative, no public man, could accept or seek for himself or for others, place, pension, or dignity arising out of the Act of Union. Acceptance of the magistracy the ‘Nation’ exempted on the ground that the magistracy was not a Union office. The Irish Confederation, founded by Mitchel, Meagher, O’Brien, and Duffy, after the disruption in Conciliation Hall, made anti-place begging its basic principle. Thus the Irish Repealers had now two organisations to choose between—one with its headquarters on Burgh Quay, Dublin, which, while professing to be virtuous and incorruptible, declined to ‘insult itself’ by adopting the self-denying ordinance, the other with its headquarters just across the Liffey, in what is now the Abbey Theatre, pledging its followers to break no bread with the Government until the doors of the Irish Parliament were again re-opened.
In the first few months the Confederation had a hard struggle for life. All the resources of Conciliation Hall were gathered and hurled against it. Mitchel and Duffy inclined to the opinion that the ‘Nation’ would go down, and, necessarily, the Confederation with it, but they agreed they would go down fighting—that they would make no compromise; and they consoled themselves in the faith that though they might be smashed in the process, the effect of the battle would be to set placehunting and placebegging in its true light before later generations and banish it from future Irish politics. In the Dublin Press the ‘Nation’ stood alone. The ‘Freeman’ supported Conciliation Hall, while its proprietor, John Gray, sympathised with the ‘Nation’s’ policy, but he would not imperil his paper. But in Cork John Francis Maguire, who had founded the ‘Cork Examiner,’ firmly supported the Young Irelanders on the main question.
The ‘Nation’ withstood the fierce onslaught of Conciliation Hall. In a couple of months that institution realised that it could not destroy and could not intimidate the anti-Placehunting Party, and it hoisted flags of truce. Proposals for a re-union in the Repeal ranks were put forward and discussed. But they came to nothing. The ‘Nation’ party would make no compromise on the question of accepting or soliciting places. The Burgh Quay Repealers wanted at least a compromise on the latter. The ‘Freeman’ drew an elaborate distinction between the acceptance of place by an Irish member of the English Parliament for himself and the use of his ‘legitimate influence’ as a representative to secure small places for his meritorious constituents. Surely, it argued, there is a vast difference between a member of Parliament selling himself for a place and his merely recommending good, capable men for minor administrative posts.
‘Yes,’ replied Thomas Francis Meagher, for the Confederation, ‘there is a vast difference between the action of an Irish representative in ‘taking’ a place for himself and in ‘getting’ places for his supporters. Nothing for nothing is a Ministerial as well as a Scotch motto. He who gets places for his constituents must give a return to those he gets them from. In the first case, the representative takes his place or his price—we see the action, and are done with him. In the other case, the representative remains amongst us day after day multiplying his obligations to the Ministry—day after day binding the people to the Government by a series of golden links—day after day stimulating a gross appetite amongst the people for the dregs and droppings of a foreign court when he should expand their ambition and bid them seek in the prosperity of their country the pure and unfailing source of private happiness. Once for all we must have an end to this money-making in the public forum. The pursuit of Liberty must cease to be a traffic. Let it resume amongst us its ancient glory—let it be with us as a passionate heroism. Fear no dissension—dissension is good whose truth is to be saved.’
Mitchel, to those who honestly felt alarmed at dissension in the Repeal Movement, wrote:—
‘For the common good there is a standard on neutral ground around which all honest Repealers must rally, and by which all trustworthy candidates can and must be judged. This standard bears the words: ‘No place-begging for Yourselves or Others.’ It is a plain, simple theory—worth to Ireland all the ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ theories put together.’
Duffy in the ‘Nation’ traced the history of the Parliamentary Repeal Party of the Thirties. Forty Irish Representatives had been returned to the English Parliament pledged to Repeal, but not pledged to maintain their personal independence. What happened, he asked. One of them sold himself to the Government for a lordship in the Treasury, another for a position in the Court of Exchequer, another for a stipendiary magistracy in Clare, a fourth for a police magistracy in Dublin, a fifth became a Master in Chancery, a sixth Clerk of the Hanaper, a seventh Master of the Mint, an eighth got a place at £2,000 a year, a ninth and a tenth sold themselves for baronetcies. Five openly deserted Repeal, others were dead and he would not speak of them, two remained honest and retired from politics in disgust at what they witnessed. ‘To a legal agitation, intended to operate through public opinion, and other peaceful organs, pleace-begging is ruin and death,’ he concluded. And now announcements began to appear in the Press of the appointment of members of Conciliation Hall to lucrative positions, and one morning its honest supporters were startled by the news in the ‘Globe’ newspaper that:
‘Mr. Fitzpatrick, a young barrister who took a leading part in the discussions of the Repeal Association and opposed the Young Ireland Party, has just been appointed by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to be Solicitor-General at the Cape of Good Hope.’
Mr. Fitzpatrick had been the Demosthenes of Conciliation Hall against Mitchel, Meagher, Duffy, and O’Brien. He was a barrister of no high standing, and his appointment to a Solicitor-Generalship was too flagrant for even the unthinking. The ‘Nation’ merely printed the announcement and headed it, ‘The Reward of Treason.’
The episode brought over many of those who had clung to Conciliation Hall to the side of the Confederation, but unluckily an incident next occurred which enabled the place-hunters to make a rally.
O’Connell died at Genoa on his way to Rome. The news created an outburst of grief all over Nationalist Ireland. His faults and errors were forgotten and his greatness and virtues were affectionately recalled. And the venal gang who had surrounded the old man in Conciliation Hall, who had encouraged him to the compact with the Whigs, to his breach with Young Ireland, and who were now threatened by the rising tide of popular feeling against place-hunting, used his dead body as their weapon. ‘The Young Irelanders have killed O’Connell,’ they shrieked, and the reply they offered to all arguments against place-hunting was, ‘Yah! who killed O’Connell?’
On the uninstructed peasantry and the mobs of the towns the cry had a powerful effect. When the Confederation threw itself in the path of the place-hunter, the place-hunter hallooed to the mob. ‘Behold the murderers of O’Connell.’ In Limerick—his native city—Father Kenyon, when he stood up to oppose place-hunting, was assaulted by a mob led by one Gribben, a newsagent, and Coleman, a pig-jobber, which not merely attempted to intimidate, but to murder him. And when they failed in that object, the maddened miscreants attacked the venerable mother and pious sister of the noble priest.
We lack Irish historical painters, not great scenes to inspire them. None is greater than the scene when Father Kenyon stood up before the murderous mob of Limerick, commanded by Town Councillor Devitt, and directed by Gribben and Coleman, and while it shrieked for his blood, thundered out:
‘The system of despotism set up by John O’Connell does not differ except in degree from the terrorism of the French Revolution… If there were no other man in my native city to raise his voice against place-hunting. I shall do so. It shall not be said in history that this ancient city of high renown will be degraded without one man to lift his voice against it.’
‘If there be a single one amongst you with me,’ he cried to the surging mob, ‘let him lift his hand.’ Many were with him in sympathy, but their courage failed in that frenzied mob. One hand alone shot up—that of a youth who dared the place-hunters from the centre of their legions. ‘God bless you, my lad, you will be a good man,’ said Father Kenyon.
An appreciative Government rewarded Town Councillor Devitt with a post worth £300 a year, but he considered his services were too poorly requited.
Such was the situation the Anti-Place-hunters had to face. Against them they had the Government, Conciliation Hall, the mob, and the majority of the priests. Here and there priests took sides against place-hunting as openly, though not so boldly, as Father Kenyon—in Dundalk when the agents of Conciliation Hall arrived with a Scot named MacTavish as a Repeal candidate—he said MacTavish, having communicated to Redington, the Under-Secretary, previously that as soon as he was elected as Repeal member he would renounce Repeal and support the Government—the Parish Priest, Dr. Coyne, publicly denounced them as ‘mercenary place-hunters, who profane religion and tarnish the Irish character.’ But these priests were the exceptions. The General Election of July, 1847 found the Anti-Place-hunters fighting a combination ranging from the Executive in Dublin Castle down to the organised mob. The Confederation issued an address to the electors, urging them to vote for no one who would not pledge himself against place-hunting and place-begging.
‘You cannot expect,’ it said to the electors, ‘fidelity to Ireland on the part of your representatives unless you be yourselves also true and disinterested. The member who assists you to a traffic for personal advantages will assuredly sell himself to the Minister as an agent for more extended corruption. If you turn into suitors those who should be champions, you must consent for ever to continue slaves to the power upon whom you teach them to fawn.’
John O’Connell replied to the Confederation that he would never sign its pledge, and that he would stand for the City of Dublin. The Confederation replied by promptly calling on all its supporters in Dublin to vote against him. The ‘Freeman’ condemned the action—and the ‘Nation’ replied to ‘our dubious contemporary’—
‘Either place-begging will help Repeal or will not—either a place-beggar is a formidable foe to the Government he begs from or he is not.’
It invited the ‘Freeman’ to explain how an Irish representative could solicit places from an English Government and yet remain independent of that Government. Up to the present (1913) the ‘Freeman’ has not solved the conundrum. John O’Connell was forced to withdraw his candidature for Dublin. Had he gone forward he would have been left at the bottom of the poll, for the Anti-Place-hunters had decided to vote for the Tory against him. He fell back on Limerick which elected him by an enormous majority.
This skirmish which they had won cheered their courage, and the Cork City Election more than counterbalanced Limerick. When the election approached, John Francis Maguire, Denny Lane, and Michael J. Barry procured a Citizens’ Meeting at the City Courthouse, at which they submitted resolutions declaring that they were determined to gain Repeal by peaceful and constitutional methods, and therefore they demanded as representatives for Cork men who would neither turn to the right nor to the left from the pursuit of Nationality to please any Government, and who would neither solicit nor accept any favour, honour, or emolument from an English Ministry.
‘We must care nothing,’ said John Francis Maguire, ‘for the Party predilections of any man who demands our suffrages, but we must resolve on binding him by a solemn vow to the Nationalists of his country. Look at your Party in the House of Commons at this moment, and say am I not right in reiterating what has been said here and said everywhere, that has been flung in our teeth at all times, and that in the bitterness of our hearts we must admit has not been exaggerated—the subserviency, unworthiness, the dishonesty of the bulk of our representatives. Have not the Irish constituencies been long enough betrayed, have they not been sufficiently imposed on—are we to submit our shoulder in all humility that any men may climb up into place and power, and grasp at the bauble which is the object of their ambition or the purse which their baser nature covets?
‘Pledge your members to vote for what is useful no matter whether their vote break one administration or tend to form another. Think only of the interests of Ireland, and not how these resolutions may or may not embarrass those gentlemen who have sons who would rather mark letters in a post office than sell calicoes behind a counter, nor of the inconvenience of some ambitious shoemaker who sighs for the dignity of a tide-waitership and the delights of a residence in Cove. Let all these matters be settled as they may, they are not for our consideration, nor should we sell our liberties for the satisfaction of a few people who live upon such expectations. We must rather think of the condition of the idle tradesman and of the starving labourer, and struggle manfully for the restoration of that which would give employment to the one and food to the other—the right to govern ourselves.’
‘Cork,’ wrote Frederick Lucas in the ‘Tablet,’
‘will not hear of the seduction of the Whigs’ Paradise. Whiggery that rides triumphant in small constituencies bowed down by famine, and where anything of a congenial kind Can be done in purchasing putrefaction—whiggery, strong where public sentiment is extinguished by public misfortune, whiggery which is robust wherever baseness, cowardice and selfishness are most rife—whiggery, somehow in Cork is nowhere.
‘Whig favours, whig places, whig patronage—everything whig for himself, his connections, his partisans, his friends, must be renounced. He must neither accept, solicit, nor recommend—he must cut himself off from whiggery as from a plague ship—there must be no coquetting with the yellow flag.’
Mr. William Fagan, a rival Cork newspaper proprietor, was at Maguire’s suggestion, chosen candidate on the basis of the resolutions. In the county, Dr. Maurice Power fought against accepting them, and John O’Connell spoke of the ‘humiliation’ of such a man as Dr. Power being asked to subscribe to such resolutions—what a reflection it was upon the good man’s character. Smith O’Brien, who had declined to go forward again for Limerick County, because Caleb Powell, ‘a Repeal Place-hunter,’ wrote O’Brien, ‘a more dangerous enemy to the cause of Ireland than either Whig or Tory’—had been re-adopted as his colleague, appeared on the hustings in Cork County, where he was received with wild enthusiasm, and declared he ‘accepted the Cork Resolutions as the basis of National policy.’ He invited Dr. Power in the face of the multitude to subscribe to them, and the honest doctor, after wriggling for a while, permitted the priests to accept them ‘in spirit’ on his behalf. Power was returned, and four years later he sold himself to the Government for the Governorship of St. Lucia Island.
Sir James Anderson, the celebrated inventor, and son of the founder of Fermoy, had been inclined to contest the representation on the clear issue of ‘No Place-hunting,’ but unfortunately did not do so, accepting Power’s assurances. In a letter to the electors, however, Sir James stated that he had been a convinced Repealer since 1814, and he believed that Repeal could only be won by ending place-hunting and place-begging.
In the city, Fagan, who accepted the resolutions, not only ‘in spirit’ but in the letter, was returned at the head of the poll. The great constituency of Cork, said Mr. Fagan after his return, has sanctioned the principle that no representatives shall accept or solicit place from English Governments.
Cork City was the first constituency in Ireland to definitely pledge its representatives to the principle Young Ireland laid down. Had there been no Dungarvan Election the effect of Cork’s action would have changed materially the political situation in Ireland. On the whole, the Anti-Place-hunters had scored. Limerick County had insisted itself on returning O’Brien, and had rejected the place-hunter, Caleb Powell. John O’Connell, after his refusal to pledge himself, had been forced to retreat from Dublin, and Cork City had smitten the place-hunters with a club. But Dungarvan was the crucial constituency. Dungarvan had a clear Repeal majority on the electorate; and yet a man who sold Repeal for place—who had publicly scoffed at it as a ‘splendid phantom,’ and who was a Minister of the Crown sat for Dungarvan. If the ministry could hold Dungarvan, it could hold Ireland. If Dungarvan condoned Shiel’s apostacy and sale of himself, there was no place-hunter in the Irish representation who might not sell his constituents, and yet feel himself reasonably secure of re-election. John Francis Maguire, who still gave a loyalty to Conciliation Hall, while he firmly opposed its place-hunting tendencies, wrote to John O’Connell—
‘Two agencies are ever ready to be brought against Ireland by England and English statesmen—intimidation and corruption. The former is far less terrible than the latter, for it arouses all the spirit of the nation to resistance—the latter arouses but the worst and basest passions. It is against the letter that the whole energy of the country must be brought to bear if the country wish to be free.’
On John O’Connell’s ears Maguire’s warnings and expostulations fell in vain. O’Connell was secretly working to let the renegade be returned unopposed for Dungarvan. At the last moment Maguire learned the truth, and flung himself into the breach to save the country. The Dungarvan Election marks the final turning point in the Repeal Movement.