Parallels between the impact Daniel O’Connell and Nelson Mandela had on their respective countries were drawn at a symposium in Trinity College Dublin last week to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Liberator, the greatest political leader in Irish history.
With a number of commemorative events planned in the run up to the bicentenary of Catholic Emancipation in 2029, the State is finally giving due recognition to a leader who set the country on its course to become a successful European democracy with his campaigns for Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the union with Britain.
[ Daniel O’Connell would have enjoyed his life being celebrated 250 years on, says historian ]
It is certainly arguable that O’Connell’s message of non-violence and universal human rights has a greater relevance to today’s world than the vision of blood sacrifice and armed insurrection that motivated the leaders of the 1916 Rising, which was so enthusiastically commemorated in the past decade.
The parallel drawn by a number of speakers at the symposium between O’Connell and Mandela was appropriate.
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Both were extraordinary leaders who gave their oppressed followers a sense of their own individual worth and national identity.
As well as possessing enormous courage and political ability both had the moral authority to do truly great things.
I had the privilege of shaking hands with Nelson Mandela and exchanging a few words with him at a reception in Dublin Castle in July 1990 when he visited this country just months after his release from prison in Robben Island where he had spent the previous 27 years.
There was an aura about Mandela that differentiated him from other political leaders.
Despite having spent so much of his life in prison, he conveyed a dignity and a tolerance, allied to an iron will, that left anybody who met him in no doubt that he was truly one of the great men of history.
Years later I visited the house in which Mandela lived in Soweto before he went to prison.
Our knowledgeable guide emphasised how Mandela was no ordinary person but came from a princely Xhosa family. One of his ancestors had been the tribal chief in the 18th century.
There was certainly a regal air about Mandela. Whether in prison or as president of South Africa, he conveyed the absolute confidence that he was inferior to nobody, but he did it with a quiet dignity that made nobody feel inferior to him.
There is another parallel here with O’Connell who came from a Kerry clan that had ruled much of the Iveragh peninsula for hundreds of years.
Like Mandela, O’Connell never felt inferior to any of those who felt themselves to be his social superiors either in a courtroom or the House of Commons.
While the British Tory press portrayed him as a country bumpkin before he took his seat in the House of Commons in 1830, he quickly established himself as a towering presence in the chamber.
O’Connell’s great achievement was to force the British state to acknowledge that Catholics should be given equal rights despite the diehard opposition of the monarch George IV.
It took another Irishman, the Duke of Wellington, who was prime minister at the time, to force the King to accept the need for Catholic Emancipation.
O’Connell was far more than a champion of the rights of Irish Catholics.
He fought for the rights of the downtrodden everywhere and in particular he campaigned with passion for an end to slavery in the United States and was an inspiration for the former slave Frederick Douglass, who was a key figure in the anti-slavery campaign.
O’Connell refused to accept political donations from Irish-Americans who supported slavery, much to the fury of his more extreme nationalist critics in the Young Ireland movement who felt that the cause of Ireland was the only thing that mattered.
For O’Connell, the rights of Irish Catholics and universal liberty were inextricably linked.
As well as campaigning against slavery he introduced a Bill in the Commons for the emancipation of the Jews and he supported the liberal movement in Spain as well as the right of the Polish people to their own state.
In his own lifetime he was a figure of international repute and he became an inspiration for constitutional nationalism long after his death.
Unfortunately, following Irish independence O’Connell’s reputation suffered neglect as his message of non-violence did not chime with the ideology of the new state.
In his keynote address to the O’Connell symposium Micheál Martin said: “When we see our history solely as a link to and from the events, movements and personalities of 1916-23 we lose enormous amounts of the social, political and cultural diversity of our history.”
The Taoiseach made the point that concepts such as human rights and the rule of law were now being challenged to an extent which few could have imagined only a short time ago.
“And it is exactly because of where Daniel O’Connell stood on these issues – for his role and impact in promoting democracy and human rights both at home and abroad – that he deserves to be seen as a still relevant and still inspirational figure,” he said.
