Daniel O'connell and Ellen Courtenay

Extract

To discuss the private life of Daniel O’Connell as though it required vindication is, especially around the centenary year of the Catholic Emancipation Act, an impertinence which would have called forth a scathing rebuke from the Liberator himself, if he had not passed beyond the range of those bitter controversies that saddened all his later public life. But a vindication has, in fact, become requisite in view of the extraordinary and quite gratuitous attack upon O’Connell’s moral reputation which was made a few years ago in a book which has attracted a great deal of public attention both because of its sensational style and because its author is not only an Irish Catholic but a former Lord Justice of the Irish Courts.

In all the vast output of recrimination with which O’Connell was assailed during his long struggle to win Catholic emancipation, and later as the leader of the Repeal movement, there is certainly no more astonishing and vindictive attack than that which was made quite recently by the Rt. Hon. Sir James O’Connor in his History of Ireland 1798-1924. And as this ex-Lord Justice has seen fit to attack O’Connell’s reputation from a new angle, throwing into the scales against a dead man his own prestige and authority as one of the principal former members of the Irish judiciary, the attack cannot, in fairness to O’Connell’s memory, be left unnoticed. The present writer has by accident discovered quite recently new evidence bearing directly upon the flimsy testimony which Sir James O’Connor produced.