Young Irelanders: Exiles in Paradise

Political background to the exiles in paradise

Daniel O'ConnellTo understand why the Young Irelanders were arrested and transported from Ireland it is necessary to comprehend ongoing British political oppression in Ireland since Tudor times. As one historian notes, 'Irish convicts must be examined against a background of political domination, economic exploitation, impoverishment, famine and social divisiveness'.1

After Henry II invaded rural Ireland in the twelfth century everything changed for the Irish people who were largely rural peasants subscribing to Catholicism. Ruled by Henry II, they became subjugated to foreign rule. Then, in the 1530s, when Henry VIII split with the Papacy, the Irish people became subjugated to a Protestant England, whose leaders constantly feared the ramifications of an Irish Catholic majority with the potential to join forces with England's Continental foes. This all-consuming fear produced a politico/religious situation that persisted well into the eighteenth-century, when harsh penal laws (or Popery laws) consolidated the political status quo by making the practice of Catholicism even more difficult for Irish Catholics.

Not only were the Irish discouraged from practising their faith but they also were denied the right to govern their own country and own land. From the sixteenth century they had been displaced in a series of plantations that favoured Irish Protestant landlords as well as by English colonists who 'identified Protestantism with their own racial ascendancy'.2 Irish Catholic peasants effectively thereafter became second-class citizens in their own land, economically enslaved to the cause of British Imperialism. That Ireland became a food basket for British markets while the Irish peasants themselves lived on a staple diet of potatoes was a major grievance for the Irish people. During the Great Famine, the ramifications of this policy proved to be a catalyst for much Young Ireland militancy.

By 1801, when the Union of Ireland and Great Britain was enacted, and the Irish Parliament was persuaded to vote itself out of existence by the Imperial British Crown, bitterness between the two religious denominations of Protestantism and Catholicism on the one hand and the political identities of Britishness and Irishness on the other had grown to considerable dimensions. Rigid class divisions between the nobility and the peasants and the lack of meritocratic advancement for the latter exacerbated this complexity. Fertile ground thus emerged for a rising young generation of nationalist intellectuals to resist the political status quo. In other European nations movements for self-determination were developing and revolution was rapidly filling the air.

This emotional climate made it difficult for politicians to address such difficult and complex issues peacefully. The great Irish liberator and pacifist Daniel O'Connell attempted to do so by dealing with two particularly significant Irish grievances. The first was Catholic emancipation and the second was the repeal of the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain. O'Connell achieved success with the first grievance by successfully lobbying for the Catholic Emancipation Bill, passed in 1829. The Bill's success meant that Catholics could sit in the British Parliament alongside their Protestant counterparts. Success with the second grievance was less than forthcoming.