Still Big Dans greatest effort.
What fucking faults??? He was one of the greatest cunts in Irish history… An enemy of the people. He effectively partitioned the country, killed the Irish language and empowered the church to rule the country. He felt he had more in common with middle England than Ireland and he loved Victoria.
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He was an awful gowl alright
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Thank you my brother, those be the words I was after.
Sorry, i thought ye meant Daniel O’Donnell.
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After rousing the country with “monster meetings” in 1843, O’Connell’s “Year of Repeal”, he was to speak at Clontarf on October 8th. In contrast with later leaders of passive resistance (Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement) O’Connell baulked at “resistance” by cancelling the meeting when Peel’s British government banned it. The success of the Repeal movement cannot be measured by the fact that the British had no one to massacre on the day. Rather, O’Connell’s abstention from attempting to change the course of history can be measured in the millions of lives lost a few short years later in a famine whose effects the British government exacerbated.
This brings us to the more serious criticism of O’Connell, who entered into a place-seeking alliance with the Whig administration of Lord John Russell in 1846. Russell promptly dispensed with the famine work projects, food depots and imports of his Tory predecessor, saying that “private enterprise” would step into the vacuum. Thus followed “Black '47” in which more than 10,000 died weekly in the name of political economy. O’Connell occupied himself with “endeavouring to keep the people from outbreaks, and endeavouring to get food to them”. His first endeavour was more successful than the second.
In truth, O’Connell was a conservative landlord whose anti-violence rhetoric seems less sincere in the light of his praise of the murderous yeoman terror that put down the 1798 rebellion. He helped to win Catholic emancipation in 1827, but then agreed to a restriction of the franchise, so that “40 shilling freeholders”, who previously had the pleasure of voting only for Protestants, then found themselves voteless.
O’Connnell opposed the “godless” young Irelanders led by the Protestant Thomas Davis. Davis had promoted O’Connell in his Nation newspaper up to the Clontarf fiasco. In the gulf that was to open up between them we see the distinction between a “loyal” Catholic nationalism, in which, according to O’Connell, “patriotism and religion run in the same channel”, and the eventually successful non-sectarian republicanism that was to culminate in the Sinn Féin election victory of 1918.
O’Connell’s sometimes sectarian rhetoric and practice has echoes in the conservative nationalist ideology that ruled this State in the first 40 years of its existence. Its effects, or rather the lack of them, are also the abiding memory of Northern nationalists.
They continued to endure “the arid lash of censure” in the British six counties, until they decided to take matters into their own hands in the late 1960s and stand up for themselves, initially by defying a ban on the right to assemble peacefully.
- Yours, etc,
NIALL MEEHAN, Offaly Road, Dublin 7.
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Zing!
Captivating. Controversial. Champion.
#MaradonaHBO premieres October 1 at 9 PM on @HBO. https://t.co/hhBFqzP93q
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How many children outside of marriage did the great Catholic O’Connell have? It was rumoured to be over 60. He himself confirmed one child outside of marriage to a poor servant. He abandoned the mother and child to live in poverty with no financial support, notwithstanding that he the father was, allowing for inflation, a multi-millionaire living in what was then a third world country.
How many men did the great pacifist O’Connell murder by his own hand?
A bit like yourself so.
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I pay child support.
- and I am not a millionaire
- and I was careful not to knock up another 59
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Do you have to wire the money to Brazil or how does that work?
Monaghan people prefer cash in a bag
Poses problems for getting the money to Brazil
I’m not sure if a few 20s in a Super Valu bag will fit in an envelope
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We should run with this as a forum to insist O’Connell Streets all over Ireland are renamed as Noonan Boulevard.
#metoo
#thecelticphoenix
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‘The Disappearance of Susan Cox Powell’ is well worth a watch
Where mate?
And don’t say on the TV
Sky Crime - it is excellent
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The (fairly) new Ken Burns series on Country Music is (unsurprisingly) excellent.
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Where can you watch it? Im rewatching the series on the west at the minute. Powerful stuff