The typed recollections of Charles Owen O'Conor, the O'Conor Don (1838–1906), composed towards the end of his life, largely contain matter-of-fact recordings of events and the persons in attendance. However, one entry, which recalled his refusal to attend a unionist meeting in Dublin in 1893, revealed something of the complex political inclinations of this fascinating figure of Victorian and Edwardian Ireland: the O'Conor Don, a liberal Catholic who was devoted to promoting the interests of his church, while determined in his opposition to home rule, refused to attend because, while opposed to the nationalist campaign, ‘I could not speak as an admirer or lover of the Union. If I believed that a Home Rule scheme would be secured that would be good for Ireland, I would be its warmest supporter, having no intrinsic love of the Union’ (p. 170). It is this final sentence, that Aidan Enright does so well to identify, isolate and emphasise, that captures the political complexities of the O'Conor Don, who inhabited ‘a kind of nationalist-unionist no-man's-land, occupied by an independent-minded liberal who refused to join one or other camp in the often-heated debates on home rule in the 1880s and 1890s’ (p. 170). This independent-mindedness is at the heart of Enright's new and important biography of the O'Conor Don.
Charles Owen O'Conor was one of seven surviving children of Denis and Mary O'Conor of Clonalis, County Roscommon. Charles and his brother Denis were educated at Downside School in Bath, typical of the widespread practice amongst Irish Catholic elites of educating their children in English Catholic colleges; their five sisters all entered religious communities. As a young man, Charles toured Europe, accompanied by tutors personally recommended by Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman and Dr John Henry Newman, and he served as a chamberlain in the court of Pope Pius IX. Upon coming of age in 1859, Charles Owen O'Connor inherited the honorary title ‘the O'Conor Don’, estates in Counties Roscommon and Sligo, and a £50,000 fortune. He followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather in occupying positions of prominence and influence in local and national society and politics. Serving as M.P. for County Roscommon from 1860 to 1880, the O'Conor Don maintained a prominent public profile, but became a largely marginalised figure in the quarter century before his death in 1906. Typical of men of his social background, while also embracing the ‘natural leadership credentials’ (p. 26) bestowed on him as a descendant of the last high king of Ireland, Roderic O'Conor (d. 1198), the O'Conor Don held powerful positions within his local community: justice of the peace; magistrate and deputy lord lieutenant for counties Roscommon and Sligo; chairman of Castlerea Board of Guardians and Castlerea District Council. He was appointed to the privy council and the governing board of Maynooth College, as well as numerous state committees and commissions, such as the Callan schools select committee (1873) and the financial relations commission (1895–6). He was also active in intellectual bodies, serving as vice-president of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, a council member of the Royal Irish Academy and the Royal Dublin Society, and president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. The breadth of the O'Conor Don's interests are evident from the thematically-arranged chapters in Enright's text: estate management; land reform; the Irish university question; liberalism, nationalism and unionism. These chapters are preceded by discussions examining his family history and the world of Catholic elites.
While he was best remembered for his consistent opposition to home rule, the O'Conor Don was adamant throughout his public life that the core issue needed to reform Ireland, and the one which drove him more than any other political or social cause, was landholding. In the late 1870s he took an advanced position on the matter by advocating for compulsory state-aided land purchase as a measure to transfer land from landlords to tenant farmers. A number of factors drove his passionate views on land reform and the need for compulsory purchase, a view that was ahead of its time, anticipating the 1909 (Birrell) Land Act by more than three decades. (A nice vignette is the fact that George Wyndham, author of the transformative 1903 Land Act, began work on this legislative measure while staying at O'Conor Don's Clonalis home in the autumn of 1901, suggesting the influence of the O'Conor Don's views on land reform in the upper echelons of British and Irish political life). As well as possessing a paternalistic interpretation of his role as landlord, the O'Conor Don believed that home rule, inasmuch as he opposed it in its 1880s and 1890s iterations, was inevitable, and the emphasis of Irish politicians and U.K. governments ought to be to prepare Ireland for this eventuality (whenever it may come): this was to be best achieved through largescale reform of the landed system.
Enright's book is at its strongest when dissecting how the O'Conor Don personified the complexities of identity faced by Catholic unionists in nineteenth-century Ireland, thus building upon the important work of James H. Murphy, James McConnel and Ciarán O'Neill. For the O'Conor Don, there was no contradiction in his service to his church and its post-Famine ultramontane realignment, while also expressing political loyalty to the crown and empire, and opposing home rule in favour of (lukewarm) support for the union. He saw his Irish identity — encompassing his strong Gaelic lineage and his support for the preservation of the Irish language — as a pluralist one, which could incorporate a British and imperial identity. These complexities became increasingly marginalised in the late nineteenth century: it was in this era when Irish nationalists adopted and weaponised terms such as ‘West Briton’ and ‘Castle Catholics’, terms which the O'Conor Don rejected, despite meeting the criteria assigned by opponents. The general election of 1880, wherein the O'Conor Don lost his seat, witnessed a sustained campaign against him by Irish nationalists, emboldened by direct criticism of the incumbent by Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt. His defeat to a Parnellite candidate mirrored the loss of seats by other landlords in that year's election, as the impact of Parnellism was felt.
The author's view of his subject is clearly one of high regard, and one may say, sympathy: a convincing case is made for Enright's view that the O'Conor Don was a ‘fair and reasonable man with a paternalistic sense of duty towards his tenants and the local community’ (p. 205). Yet, the author is not uncritical. His subject, we are told, held a hubristic view of his own invincibility, perhaps contributing to his political isolation in later life; his views on home rule were somewhat ill-defined, thus leading to confusion among contemporaries as to where he stood on the matter.
As such, one finds it difficult to escape the image of the O'Conor Don as an isolated figure, charting ‘a somewhat torturous and often isolated course in Irish politics’ (p. 135), in the Ireland of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Against a backdrop of increasingly polarised alignments of political affiliations and confessional allegiances — Catholic nationalism and Protestant unionism — ‘the hybrid nature of O'Conor Don's liberal Catholic and unionist outlook gradually became impossible’ (p. 210).
