Interpreting Young Ireland

Peel and O'Connell had been enemies since the 1810s. Yet, despite their very real differences, they held in common a belief in constitutionalism and in traditional monarchy which never wavered. A much clearer opposition may be seen between the hotly nationalistic Young Ireland movement, which sprung up in the 1840s, and both O'Connell and the Conservative prime minister. It is debatable how much Young Ireland owed to O'Connell and the repeal campaign. Foster claims that it was a ‘splinter’ of the repeal movement, a self-consciously youthful splinter as its name suggests. Some would see the distinction between O'Connell and the Young Irelanders as that between pragmatism and principle – the latter ‘kept the question of principle strictly in the foreground’, writes Dudley Edwards. The matter, however, is rather more nuanced. Born in the same context and supporting the same agenda, Young Ireland did adopt an ideological and culturally radical tone; soon it became tinged with combativeness. Publicity became an end in itself. Its principal organ was a newspaper, the Nation. Its leadership, Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy were all of them lawyers with a keen nose for publicity. They were incurably verbal with a remarkable capacity for the kind of rhetoric that sold papers. Their extraordinary popularity is testified to by the fact that up to 250,000 people may have been reading the Nation in 1843.