Call for O’Connell Memorial Day

9 Sep 2013

Professor John A. Murphy, Emeritus Professor, UCC has called on the State to relinquish its indifference and declare a Daniel O’Connell National Memorial Day.

Professor Murphy made the call at the Daniel O’Connell Heritage Summer School, which ran 6-8 September 2013 in Cahersiveen, Co Kerry.

The overall purpose of the School is to examine aspects of the historical career of Daniel O’Connell as well as to consider the challenges of modern Ireland. Professor Murphy, who chaired a panel on Friday 6 September entitled ‘Repeal, Questions of Independence and Sovereignty’, and which included panelists Professor Patrick Geoghegan (TCD) and Dr Gavin Barrett (UCD), sets out his rationale for a memorial day below:

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“Official Ireland has never adequately recognised its debt to Daniel O’Connell. While governments and political parties have regularly acclaimed Wolfe Tone as the father of Irish republicanism, a dubious accreditation, no native government has publicly honoured O’Connell as the father of Irish democracy, a much more substantial achievement. As a political innovator, he hit on the idea of getting ordinary people to identify with a cause through small regular contributions, nearly two centuries before Barack Obama used this tactic in his 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign.

Like Martin Luther King, O’Connell cherished the dream of achieving civil rights for an oppressed population, and he organised a great non-violent moment to make that dream a reality, in the face of an entrenched ascendancy. In his opposition to slavery worldwide, and particularly in the United States, he inspired the celebrated black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Every so often, we hear the erroneous rhetoric that brave Irishmen died for our right to vote. In fact, the march in Ireland towards universal franchise, begun under O’Connell, required no bloodshed, and was almost completed before Independence. But it is the glorifiers of physical-force nationalism who are always celebrated by the State, and not the architects of constitutional democracy. The fact that the move to save Derrynane House from derelictions in the 1940s had to be undertaken by interested citizens, speaks for itself.

The completion of the O’Connell Monument in Dublin in the 1880s was a voluntary effort, and the belated naming of the capital’s principal street in 1924 was a municipal development. The priorities of the State, on the other hand, are eloquently reflected in the iconography of Leinster House. The building is replete with large portraits and impressive busts of those involved since the late eighteenth century in the physical-force struggle, while O’Connell is represented by a ludicrously diminutive statuette placed in the rear entrance.

It is high time for the State to make amends to the greatest political leader in Irish history, by declaring a Daniel O’Connell Memorial Day.”

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