Speech by Taoiseach Micheál Martin at the Daniel O’Connell Summer School 30 August 2025

Speech

Speech by Taoiseach Micheál Martin at the Daniel O'Connell Summer School 30 August 2025

• From: Department of the Taoiseach

• Published on: 30 August 2025
• Last updated on: 30 August 2025

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"If we want to bring the Irish people together we must start trying to understand and respect far more of our history"

It is an honour to have been invited here to Derrynane to participate in a special 250th anniversary gathering of the pre-eminent O'Connell forum in the world. This summer school has, under the leadership of Professor Maurice Bric, played a vital role in encouraging O'Connell studies and engaging new generations of scholars and the wider public alike.

I want to congratulate you for another successful year and to thank you for the opportunity to address you.

I do not claim to equal the expertise of many of your other speakers. They reflect the great strength of Irish historical research at this time.

But what I like to do is to speak with you about our history, how it relates to the challenges of today and the role which greater engagement with Daniel O'Connell can play.

O'Connell changed Ireland, its sense of itself and its identity. For all of his many flaws, he is an indispensable figure in our history and we should do far more to engage with him.

And I believe that this is essential if we are to meet key challenges of this generation.

In a world which is seeing rising division and conflict we should never take for granted the right to freely debate our history and its importance. The freedom to argue about who we are and who we seek to be.

But what do we do with that freedom?

Do we use our history to build a picture of an unchanging and entirely distinct identity, or do we embrace the much harder task of seeing a complex and evolving history.?

A history not just of characters and conflicts.

A history which can represent wider contexts and diverse ideals.

This is not a new concern. In fact two figures whose works were known in great detail by Daniel O'Connell and his contemporaries, talked of how the failure to think outside fixed community boundaries was a deep problem for Ireland.

Richard Curry, the most widely-read Irish Catholic historian of the eighteenth century, attacked the approach of much historical commemoration to, as he said, "oppress the living through the abuse of the dead."

Edmund Burke, later viewed as a conservative hero in England, but a Protestant son of a mixed-religion Irish family, wrote from a very different perspective but reached the same conclusion. He argued that history was being abused to provide "offensive and defensive weapons for parties in church and state, and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury."

We have progressed a lot since then. I don't think anyone could conceivably accuse any serious historians of holding sectarian agendas such as those which once dominated.

We have created new realities and overcome enormous barriers in terms of respect if not yet reconciliation.

Eighteen years ago, in the aftermath of the re-establishment of the Northern Executive, then-President Mary MacAleese was invited to give a reflection on where we might be moving towards.

She said then:

"Where previously our history has been characterised by a plundering of the past to separate and differentiate us, our future now holds the optimistic possibility that…we will revisit the past more comfortably and find…elements of kinship long neglected, of connections deliberately overlooked."

As Minister for Education and then Foreign Affairs, I was honoured to work with her as she began a remarkable programme of reaching across boundaries to try and rebuild and strengthen these connections. A Catholic from the Ardoyne inviting the Orange Order to Áras an Úachtaráin signalled true historical progress and it remains far more than a symbolic act of reconciliation.

Yet I cannot help thinking about the momentum we have lost since those optimistic days.

About how we have so often stepped-back and failed to move forward in acknowledging Irishness and Irish history in all of its complexity.

About how elements of our popular discourse are becoming less inclusive.

In fact, it is possible to argue that many towering figures and important movements in our history are being pushed into the background - becoming, at best, supporting figures in a narrative which is focused more than ever on the early twentieth century.

I often wonder are we beginning to lose from our popular understanding of Irish history the leadership of Parnell, the wild inventiveness of Swift, the constitutional radicalism of Grattan, or the reforming idealism of Edgeworth?

Are we more likely to looked at the separate and uniqueness of our past, rather than understand that we have always been engaged and open to a wider world of ideas?

What I have no doubt whatsoever about is that at this moment of growing division, if we want to bring the Irish people together, then we must do the hard work of trying to understand and respect far more of our history.

And within this we must do much more to remember and reflect on the national and global significance of Daniel O'Connell and the movements which he led.

O'Connell should not be an afterthought. We should understand that he is one of the most important leaders in our history.

He is by some distance the Irish leader who was best known and most influential in the world.

His impact was not just felt when he was alive, it could be said that he was more responsible than any other individual for establishing the national aspirations and outlook of the majority.

Without O'Connell Irish history would have been more provincial and less national.

The stories of his life and career would be captivating in any era. But far more important is that he changed Ireland. In fact it is entirely possible that he is an essential figure in creating something close to a shared nationalism amongst the large majority of Irish people.

We can argue about how much he achieved, but there is no doubt that he was a liberator.

A liberator of national sentiment.

A liberator of community spirit.

His life and career represent a foundation without which it is hard to imagine the rise and success of movements which followed - whether or not they acknowledged him.

I think this is necessary to say because O'Connell has always been subject to sustained criticism. Some of this focuses on the aggressive and narcissistic features of his public life. There is no doubt that he was often brutal and nearly always vain.

For many, like W.E. Lecky the great Protestant historian of the late nineteenth century, O'Connell's manners, or rather lack of them, was something which they could never get over.

However, by far the most consistent attack on O'Connell has come from those who condemn him for not having used his power for their ends.

For example, Friedrich Engels condemned him for not using his popularity towards more revolutionary objectives. The Young Irelanders said much the same thing.

What is remarkable is the scale of the condescending dismissal of O'Connell published recently by a Sinn Fein spokesperson writing in An Phoblacht. According to this account O'Connell was not the Liberator but the Suppressor of the Irish because he failed to lead a republican socialist revolution.

These and many other sweeping condemnations of O'Connell involve grossly ahistorical comments on two levels. Firstly they demand that he should have operated to the standards and ideologies of later generations. And secondly they assume that O'Connell's impact was easily transferable to other movements and leaders. In effect that O'Connell was not necessary to O'Connellism.

This is transparently ridiculous.

In truth it is part of a wider tendency amongst those with limited popular support to lecture others about how they should use their mandates - thereby removing the requirement for them to develop mandates of their own.

No less a radical than Seán O Faoláin considered and rejected the attacks on O'Connell by the republican and socialist writers of the 1930s. He pointed out that no one could realistically deny his radicalism in the context of his times.

He should, he said, be seen as "a brutal realist, occupied with the present conditions of his country," whose "vision of an Irish democracy was limited by those conditions".

Eamon de Valera is the only other Irish leader who was known throughout the world during his life and who led movements which won majority support. He came here to Derrynane in 1967 and spoke at length about how he and the other major figures of our revolution had failed to properly appreciate or acknowledge O'Connell.

But if we are to do more to engage with this colossal figure in our history, which are the themes and lessons that remain important - and how do they help us today?

Ann Dolan, who is one of our foremost historians writing about issues of memory, recently said that, as a historian, she was luckier than politicians who can seem "compelled to see if the past can fix us, and I'm blunt enough to think we only have ourselves to blame for what happens now."

Putting it in a different way, but to much the same effect, Richard Bourke identified what he called "the myth of continuity" as a major issue in how Irish history has been discussed and written about over the past three centuries.

I absolutely agree with these sentiments, particularly because they make the point that history cannot be allowed to be about the sorting of people into camps which keep alive rather than challenge divisions.

And if we understand this, if we refuse to demand a blueprint from our history, then we can use it to find diverse sources of inspiration and reflection.

It is in this context that I think we have much to learn from the complex and dramatic legacy of Daniel O'Connell. His is a story of quite dramatic achievement and innovation. But equally it is a story which calls on us to see Ireland in a wider context of international connections and ideas.

We should know the details of his life, and even more than this we should understand the significance of the ideas which shaped him and the profound changes he inspired.

For me, O'Connell is impossible without the wider European context of his times.

The story of his two years in France before fleeing the rising violence of the Revolution is well known, and perhaps too often used as the explanation of all of his political ideals.

More important that this was that O'Connell, though hailing from one of the most remote parts of Europe, grew up in a social class and time which was profoundly European.

His was the last generation of Irish people whose primary international orientation was towards Europe rather than to America. Once overseas Irish communities developed dramatically due to mass emigration, and also with the greater ease of crossing the Atlantic, we became much more focused on the English-speaking world. However before that the situation was completely different.

Scholars have shown that popular poetry and writing of those times was full of references to France, Spain, Austria and other countries which the Irish had developed a long-term connection with. This was the cas ein both English and Irish.

In O'Connell's case, as was seen with many Catholic landholding families, his family had an ongoing connection with European militaries and centres of education.

His uncle was a French general and his son served as an Austrian Hussar

Throughout his life he followed European events and never doubted that Ireland was part of a wider European culture.

And while authors in English dominated his later reading, his core sense of justice and shared rights was emphatically based on wider European ideas.

This was a time when educated Irish people actively sought out the new romantic literature of Europe, read liberal philosophers and constantly observed evolving national sentiments in Europe.

For example, James Clarence Mangan, regarded as one of the most widely read Irish poets of the years of O'Connell's public life, published volumes on new German literature - with a special emphasis on Goethe.

Irish people were very clearly engaged with new European trends of exploring antiquities, scientific exploration, romanticism in the arts and new concepts of education. And particularly because of O'Connell, Ireland was in turn also a topic of sustained interest in Europe.

It is remarkable how Europe gradually retreated over the following century from its place at the core of our national sense of what our wider context was.

After over 50 years of membership of what is today the European Union, we still have many people who instinctively view Europe as 'them' not 'us'. We too little understand how it was actually Europe which gave many distinct elements of Irish identity their opportunity to survive - particularly during the sustained periods of dispossession and religious repression. Without Europe there would have been no 'us'.

Our connection with Europe, the solidarity which is shown to us and which we show for others, is by some distance the most important guarantee of our national sovereignty. It is a remarkable thing that this country will next year chair many of the most important councils making decisions which affect us and 750 million people throughout Europe.

For Daniel O'Connell, a shared sense of idealism, culture and aspirations with the peoples of Europe was something he held to instinctively

- something attested to by the many European visitors who came to this place to see for themselves the Great Dan.

And we should also remember him as the essential figure in what Patrick Geoghegan has rightly called the "transformative" moment of the 1828 campaign for Catholic Emancipation and its victory the following year. At the head of a popular movement the like of which had never been seen before -

O'Connell not only helped to remove sectarian laws against Catholics, he created a sense of a shared-cause and an appetite for popular mobilisation the scale of which is one of the unique features of Irish history of the nineteenth century. Indeed I would go as far to say that it established the principle that, to be legitimate, any national movement had to seek to gain the clear trust of the people

Legal emancipation was not what was transformative. It was the popular sense that the majority did not have to bow down. It was the emancipation of the spirit which made the difference

The penal laws against Catholics and the practice of Catholicism were introduced gradually in the decades after the victory of King William. They were extraordinarily wide in their impact and reflected the idea that a religious and sectarian divide should define the state - a divide which sought to directly suppress the majority

Where previous centuries had been defined by widespread dispossession, these new laws made the Eighteenth Century a time where there was a concerted effort to weaken and destroy Catholic influence in professional and personal realms.

They had only a limited impact on the position of the great majority of the rural and urban poor - but the sense of exclusion, of humiliation, went across all classes of Catholics and also many dissenters.

The open practice and basic operations of the Catholic Church were banned. Catholics were excluded from education, politics and professions. And continued efforts were made to try to force the conversion of Catholic landed interests, such as the O'Connells.

There was no equivalent here of the sort of serfdom known through many parts of Europe, but to be an Irish Catholic was to be denied status or respect in your own country.

This is a wider and more complex issue, but it is hard not to see the very limited spread of popular loyalism amongst Catholics as having resulted from this exclusion. Certainly there were many demonstrations of enthusiasm, including from O'Connell, when royalty visited or when a major celebration was staged. But there is none of the growth of popular support for the state or its monarch which was seen in Britain and much of Europe at that time.

And this was entirely logical. Why should people develop lasting attachment to a state, a monarch and a flag which defined themselves against the religion and culture of the majority?

O'Connell did not invent the idea of working for the repeal of the penal laws, and the bulk of the repressive measures were indeed removed in fits and starts during his youth.

However the process by which these earlier measures were secured was very different and it had stopped working in the decades before O'Connell took on the leadership of the cause.

Earlier Catholic relief bills were overwhelmingly driven not by a sense of liberalism but by London governments looking for ways to quieten and then enlist Catholics. This included the desire to ally with Catholic states and the Pope against France both before and after the Revolution.

It is also a contrast with various edicts of toleration in Austria, France and Prussia during the 1780s, each of which was explicitly informed by Enlightenment principles.

There were many organisations seeking relief, but their focus was on meek addresses to the King which argued that discrimination should be lifted because they had proved their loyalty rather than because of more basic principles.

The elected assembly of Catholics in 1793, of which Wolfe Tone was Secretary, is the only example of more ambitious agitation - but it also focused on demonstrations of loyalty. In response, the government granted important reliefs, including the forty shilling freeholder franchise and the establishment of Maynooth - but it also banned any similar Catholic assemblies from being convened.

The years following 1798 and the Union were defined by depoliticization and repression. No progress whatsoever was made in securing further rights for Catholics and various Catholic committees returned to the quiet and easily ignored strategy of regular loyal petitions seeking relief.

And this is where the radical impact of O'Connell was most dramatically felt

The very core of his strategy was for Catholics to take charge of their own advocacy. To not humbly ask for rights, but to demand them as being owed to all people.

The strategy of loud agitation and mass participation through small financial contributions and regular meetings which he was directly responsible for, and which could have been achieved by no one else - was the first mass democratic political movement in world history.

This is no small thing, and its impact on our society has been truly profound.

A people whose spirit had been broken by centuries of growing exclusion found their voice and never lost it.

As O'Faoláin wrote a century later, O'Connell "thought a democracy, and it arose".

Fifty years before this, Gladstone, reflecting on a figure who he had known and disliked early in his career, looked back the transformative impact of O'Connell and described this son of Kerry as "The greatest popular leader the world has ever known."

Modern conceptions of participative democracy are far more evolved than they were two hundreds years ago, but O'Connell's conception of a state which was directed by the public through the democratic rule of law was clear.

As he said in 1841, without democracy "governors are tyrants and the people are slaves."

At this moment of what has been called a 'democratic recession' in the wider world, it is clearer than ever how right he was. And it is a reminder to us about how democracy is more than just holding votes.

Obviously the question arises about how one can reconcile honouring his commitment to non-violence with also honouring those who later secured our independence through violence?

I actually think that they can be reconciled without unreasonable leaps of logic. This is particularly because of the way that democratic aspirations became entrenched within the majority political culture and were central to our revolution.

If you look at the Proclamation of 1916 and the progress of the War of Independence, the dominant aspiration is to be free to seek a state defined by liberal democratic principles.

The harsh, exclusive and ultimately undemocratic nationalism of many other independence struggles was not absent, but it became rapidly marginalised.

The establishment of an independent parliament and the adoption of resolutions calling for expanding rights are very much part of the tradition which arose a century beforehand.

The Proclamation reads like a declaration of rights from a European revolution in 1848 rather than the exclusionary nationalism of the early twentieth century.

And equally, this contrasts with the small groups of nationalists who descended into fundamentalist principles in the face of the rejection of the Irish people expressed repeatedly over decades

I think it is entirely possible that without O'Connell we would not have seen the rise of the democratic republicanism which today underpins one of the longest lasting democracies in the world.

Above all else O'Connell's life was defined by a commitment to the values of solidarity between peoples and support for what we today call human rights.

The achievement of Catholic Emancipation unquestionably saw him elevated to a position as a national and international hero to all Catholics. What is different about him is that he rejected the idea that he should be an advocate only for his own people. He did not want to espouse sectional interests. He rejected the idea that the objective should be to swap places with the oppressor and carry on.

Especially in his later years, O'Connell was a man of deep personal faith. His Catholicism was not about positioning himself at the head of a group, it came from a sincere and unwavering belief that all religious expression should be tolerated.

He called the connection between church and state "an adulterous connection" and it is one of the many reasons why one of his first actions after finally being admitted to the House of Commons was to demand similar emancipation for Jews.

He explained his core philosophy in a letter to the leader of the main body of British Jews. He wrote that it was "an eternal and universal truth that we are responsible to God alone for our religious belief and that human laws are impious when they attempt to control the exercise of those acts."

It is a disturbing fact that religious freedoms are today under attack in many part of the world

He mobilised the structures of the Church, but he never wavered in opposing the idea of religious supremacy. In fact he remains one of the most important figures in our history arguing for the separation of church and state.

O'Connell used his position as an international star to show solidarity with the suffering and aspirations of others.

He admired and had an ongoing correspondence with Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America. He encouraged movements pushing for democratic and religious freedoms throughout Europe. And, in contrast, he refused a request to write to the Tsar because of the denial of personal and religious freedom to the Russian people.

And it was this believe in universal ideals that lay behind his deep, lifelong and brave expression of his abhorrence of slavery in every context.

As his most famous statement said, "wherever the miserable is to be succoured, and the slave is to be set free, there my spirit is at home." He was true to this - and in return he was honoured as a friend of the oppressed.

Slavery was the topic he was most aggressive in opposing - chiefly slavery in America, but not exclusively

He went to remarkable lengths to denounce this slavery in every available forum. He insulted and called for a boycott of a slave-owning US Ambassador in London. He addressed anti-slavery meetings at every available opportunity.

And most importantly, he refused to compromise with pro-slavery elements even when it might benefit his campaigns on Irish issues.

In the House of Commons he refused to negotiate over Catholic Emancipation with MPs who supported slavery in the West Indies. Later he steadfastly rejected the shameful demand of some Young Irelanders that he stop talking about slavery in order to raise more money in America.

His response to them was to become even more assertive - authoring an open letter to the Irish in the United States calling on them to oppose slavery and linking this to supporting the liberty of all people including the Irish.

I find it remarkable that some of those who denounce O'Connell today remain blind to the active support for slavery shown by O'Connell's loudest opponents. Their vision of freedom was one they could not extend to others.

And O'Connell went even further in his support for the ideals of democracy and human rights, adopting a fundamental position that Ireland should show sympathy with all oppressed nations and people.

For him, national liberty must lead to individual liberty.

His was an enlightenment-inspired nationalism rather than a revivalist nationalism. While he did not leave behind a lasting organisation, he certainly left behind a lasting impact.

And this is especially important today because of both the situation in the wider world and the great challenges we face here on this island.

The idea of values-based international cooperation based on the rule of law is under threat. Many organisations which were once driving forces in promoting peace and development in the world are being undermined by countries which ignore or manipulate them.

For example, in spite of the rising number of conflicts in the world, it is over a decade since a new UN peacekeeping operation was authorised.

There are even sustained attempts by some to withdraw or undermine the core human rights laws which have guided much of the democratic world for three-quarters of a century.

Ireland has to remain clear on where it stands. We must remain true to ideals of universal values which apply to friend and foe alike. We must refuse to accept false opposites and be able to speak up equally for the rights of the people of Ukraine and the people of Gaza.

We must be active promoters of humanitarian values and the urgent need for international action to prevent a rising catastrophe in Somalia.

And at home we must be more serious at meeting and overcoming the great challenge of this generation - which is to build a deep and sincere reconciliation between all traditions on this island.

The shining beacon of hope which the Good Friday Agreement represented was not an end in itself - it gave us the freedom to move from fear and conflict to trust and understanding.

We amended our constitution to reflect this, refereeing to the different traditions and aspirations of Irish people and our commitment to respecting diversity.

Yet today we have a situation where the largest party in Opposition casually accuses opponents of being unpatriotic because they have a different approach. We are seeing many more examples of people ignoring their own divisive and sectarian behaviour - while seeking to impose their narrative on history.

It is not progress when we are again seeing people attacked for having a more complex or different view on how we should remember and reflect on our history.

O'Connell was not and did not claim to be a saint.

He was a sometimes inconsistent and often bombastic figure.

But all of that is outweighed by his extraordinary impact on our country.

His liberation of the spirit of the majority.

His creation of a mass participation in democratic politics.

His sense of solidarity with others.

His demand that the freedoms he sought for his people must be shared.

By any measure, this is a tremendous and positive legacy - and it is a legacy we should do more to remember.

ENDS