Biographies tend to focus on one of two types of subjects – first, the figure who definitively shaped a political, social, religious, or cultural period and thus merits examination to explore how they influenced history; or, second, the figure who is representative of a wider phenomenon whose study allows the author to say something more broadly about the milieu. Aidan Enright’s Charles Owen O’Conor, the O’Conor Don: Landlordism, Liberal Catholicism and Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland conforms to neither approach, but instead offers a portrait of a prominent Catholic landlord and political figure whose idiosyncrasies and increasingly unpopular views demonstrate the changing nature of Irish society in the second half of the nineteenth century, and what an alternative Ireland might have looked like. In so doing, Enright reminds his reader that identities and ideologies are not easily reducible, which should challenge us to reconsider simplistic renderings of Irish nationalism, political liberalism, or civic Catholicism in the nineteenth century.
Eschewing the traditional chronological approach to O’Conor’s biography, Enright instead employs a thematic structure, which allows him to explore discrete topics relevant to the O’Conor Don’s life and political programme. There are a number of advantages to such an approach, including the ability to explore complex political issues, such as university education or home rule, in depth across a lifetime. It also allows the reader to evaluate the O’Conor Don’s political commitments and try to make sense of how his views changed over time. Enright organises the book into seven chapters whose topics include family history and its relationship to the O’Conor Don’s worldview, his entry into politics, his approach to estate management, his rather radical views on the land question (he was an early advocate of compulsory land purchase), his Catholic views on university education, and the ways liberalism infused his political outlook and shaped his unionism in the face of the home rule movement. If the advantage of such an approach is the depth it affords the author to explore various topics, the drawback of course is that it closes off the ability to think laterally; to mine, for example, how debate on Irish education influenced the O’Conor Don’s approach to the Catholic Church and land reform, though Enright does his best to mitigate this for the reader by noting how a topic in one chapter foreshadows aspects of the O’Conor Don’s thinking in another.
What ties this book together are three overlapping keywords Enright identifies as the pole stars of the O’Conor Don’s worldview: Catholicism, unionism, and liberalism. Enright highlights the ways that the family’s Catholicism infused their political and national identities. Charles Owen O’Conor’s grandfather, Owen (1761-1831), rebuilt the family’s estates in Roscommon and Sligo, was a prominent member of the Catholic Committee in the 1810s, and later was elected as Liberal MP to represent Co. Roscommon where he prevaricated on repeal, advocating some sort of connection to the British monarchy. Charles Owen’s father, Denis (1794-1847), was an emblematic example of Ciaran O’Neill’s Catholics of Consequence, travelling to England to receive his education amongst the upper crust of Catholic British society, before returning to Ireland to take a degree at Trinity College Dublin and represent Co. Roscommon at Westminster. Denis’s political creed—stressing ‘the loyalty of Irish Catholics’ (p. 38) and advocating for equality of civil rights—put him firmly in the O’Connell camp and served as the framework for Charles Owen. The O’Conor Don’s education at the Catholic Downside School, near Bath, solidified a ‘family tradition of loyalty to the British crown’ while also cultivating ‘lifelong friendships with English Catholics’ (p. 44). Enright’s focus on the O’Conor’s family history, and education, allows him to demonstrate how a modern self-assured Catholicism emerged, undergirded no doubt by the predispositions of class, which eclipsed the self-conscious Catholic experience of the penal era. This authoritative Catholic outlook certainly was also buoyed by the O’Conor Don’s experience serving as a chamberlain to Pope Pius IX, which he called ‘“the happiest days of my life”’ (p. 46), as well as his connection with leading figures in the Irish Catholic hierarchy and intelligentsia, including Cardinal Paul Cullen, Archbishop Edward McCabe, Monsignor Bartholomew Woodlock, and Dr John Henry Newman.
Given the family’s history of loyalism, and the O’Conor Don’s hostility to democracy, it is maybe not surprising that unionism provided a structure to his political outlook. In the chapter devoted to home rule and unionism, Enright underscores the fear the O’Conor Don cultivated of home rule, seeing it as a place where republicanism and democracy might run amok, which he believed would ultimately spell disaster for Catholic Ireland. Ironically, only ‘maintenance of the union’ (p. 183) between the countries granted ‘full civil and religious liberty’ to Irish Catholics, a position that might be challenged if a domestic parliament became a place dominated by secular republicans. However, the O’Conor Don’s unionism was tempered by a criticism of its application, which points to a continuity with O’Connellite politics in the 1830s. Thus, writing in the wake of the failure of the Second Home Rule Bill, in 1893, the O’Conor Don wrote an essay in The National Review entitled ‘The Unresolved Irish Problem’ where he asked: ‘Why should there not be, then, a Parliament sitting in Dublin, a true and real Parliament, not a sham, subordinate Legislature?’ His answer was that the Imperial Parliament should meet every year in Dublin to deal with mostly Irish issues, which he believed would give more practical power to Irish MPs to implement Irish policy decisions (English and Scottish MPs likely would not bother making the voyage over), while also fostering ‘an Irish national identity’ that could reconcile a larger portion of the population to the British connection. This idea was supplemented by the recommendation to establish a permanent royal residence in Dublin, which the O’Conor Don believed ‘would not fail to revive and strengthen that personal loyalty to the Throne’ (p. 187). In considering the O’Conor Don’s unionism it is curious that the book says very little of his views of British imperialism and its relationship to political developments in Ireland. This was a period of imperial turmoil and given Enright’s unparalleled access to the O’Conor Don’s private papers at Clonalis House it is a shame the reader does not hear more about how events in the British Raj, or Africa, challenged (or reinforced) the O’Conor Don’s thinking about Irish loyalty to the British crown.
Whereas unionism and Catholicism are coherent analytical categories to understand the O’Conor Don’s worldview, his commitment to liberalism seems much more tenuous. On the one hand, it seems self-evident that the O’Conor Don was a liberal—he was elected to parliament as a liberal candidate, nearly joined as a junior minister in a Lord John Russell government, and advocated for a number of political causes associated with the Liberal Party. Nevertheless, he also vehemently opposed Gladstone’s university bill, which subsequently brought down the Liberal Government, opposed home rule as proposed by Gladstone, and held radically forward opinions on land reform. Enright notes, too, the ways in which the O’Conor Don often eschewed loyalty to a political party for his own, often obstinate, political independence. Part of the problem, of course, is that being a ‘liberal’ meant different things to different people across the second half of the nineteenth century, and Enright is clear that he adopts Jonathan Parry’s “‘broadly inclusive” definition’ (p. 20). Nevertheless, given the O’Conor Don’s observations on the workings of American democracy, which he saw as ‘corrupt and populist [in] nature’ (p. 152), and his Whiggish beliefs in ‘a “natural” ruling class, presumably comprised of the landed and well-educated gentlemen’ (p. 133) one wonders how well he fit into a party that according to Eugenio Biagini had to reconcile by the 1860s with the growing influence of ideas of democratic reform amongst its constituency.
Enright has offered readers a compelling biography, both meticulously researched and lucidly expressed, of a curious man whose life embodies the peculiarities and dead ends of nineteenth century Ireland. Given the O’Conor Don’s interests in crucial political questions—on land reform, education, the Catholic Church, and home rule—there is plenty to glean from this deep analysis of his life; but, what is best about the book is the way it encourages readers to reimagine the complexity and contradictions of identity in nineteenth century Ireland and to recognise that the shape of Irish national independence was never a foregone conclusion.
