SEARC'S WEB GUIDE - Charles Gavin Duffy (1816-1903)

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Searc's Web Guide to 19th Century Ireland - Charles Gavin Duffy (1816-1903)

Charles Gavin Duffy was born and educated in County Monaghan. In 1836 he became a journalist with the Catholic Association newspaper The Morning Register in Dublin. Two years later Duffy was a founder member of the Press Association and in April, 1839 he became editor of the Belfast newspaper The Vindicator. In Belfast Duffy studied philosophy at the Royal Academical Institution and law at King's Inns before returning to Dublin where, in 1842 he, together with Thomas Davis and J.B. Dillon, founded The Nation - 'to create and foster public opinion in Ireland and make it racy of the soil'. A year later Duffy published Irish Ballad Poetry which went into four editions in its first month of publication.
Duffy was imprisoned in 1846 for publishing articles in The Nation by Thomas D'Arcy McGee which advocated using the Irish railway system to aid a rising. Duffy was tried for sedition but Robert Holmes delivered a brilliant defence speech and Duffy was acquitted. In August, 1848 Duffy was again tried for sedition and when a letter from Duffy to William Smith O'Brien was produced at the trial the charge was changed to one of High Treason. A retrial was held in April, 1849 when Duffy was again acquitted.
In 1850 Duffy founded the Irish Tenant League and in 1852 he was elected to Parliament for New Ross, County Wexford.
In 1855 Duffy emigrated to Australia where he became Prime Minister of Victoria in 1871. In 1880 Duffy retired to France where he wrote Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History 1840-59 (1880) from which the extract below is taken; Four Years of Irish History 1845-1849 (1883); A Life of Thomas Davis (1895); and an autobiography My Life in Two Hemispheres (1898).©

To teach a people emerging from this long servitude to appreciate public rights at a just value, and to assert them, not with the fury and fickleness of slaves, but with moderation and firmness, was not an easy task. To many self-complacent persons, and to all the fanatics of major force, it will seem plain indeed that it is a task which never ought to have been undertaken; the duty of a good citizen being to exhort the people to be content with their lot. But there are surely some who will better understand the premises.
A man has but one mother country; if he sees her in rags and tears while her next neighbour is in comfort and splendour, it is scarcely good to be content or preach contentment. If he knows that she is living under the lash of unequal laws, that the sword of justice has long been turned against her bosom as a weapon of assault, that she was made poor and kept poor by perverse legislation, it would be base to be content for 'nations are not called on like private persons when smitten on one cheek to turn the other'. [Aubrey de Vere] The first and hardest step was to revive self-reliance and self-respect, which the system passed in review had nearly extinguished in the mass of the people. The next, to familiarise them with rights and duties long in abeyance. A man with clear convictions and exact knowledge is a greater power than ten men wanting these endowments, and force and tension of character may be increased in a community in the same proportion.
If Ireland was to rely on opinion alone in her contest with England, the need was great that opinion should not only be organised as [Daniel] O'Connell proposed to organise it, but that it should be informed and disciplined. The most disheartening of the popular errors were assailed one after another, and week after week, with a fullness of knowledge new in Irish journalism, and a fire of conviction which was contagious... Week after week the names and services of the spiritual warriors who carried the cross into Pagan lands were made familiar to the people... Nor did the middle ages, or modern times want their notable men. The chiefs who had made alliances, on behalf of Ireland, with France and Spain, the soldiers who had fought in later times against foreign rule, and the patriots who had conspired against it, were rescued from under mounds of misrepresentation, and the people taught, in ballad and essay, that these were not men to be ashamed of, but the flower of their race.
To forget her martyrs and confessors would be folly as well a baseness; laborious and unprofitable days awaited all who turned from the pleasant paths of corruption to the service of Ireland; they must not be further disheartened by feeling that the labourers who went before them had not had their reward. The services of Irishmen in the armies of France and Austria, in the diplomacy of Spain and Italy, in the wars of liberation in North and South America were described. Irishmen had won conspicuous places in every country where a career was open to them; even in England where an Irishman was treated as a foreigner, and an inferior, how many of the successes in the arts, arms, statesmanship, and literature, recorded as British successes were won by Irishmen?
The English books most familiar to France and Germany were the books of Irishmen, the 'Vicar of Wakefield' [by Oliver Goldsmith, 1766] and the 'Sentimental Journey' [by Laurence Sterne, 1768]. The insular names best known between the Straits of Gibraltar and the Gulf of Bothnia were Wellington and O'Connell. Their own history was a chart of perils to be avoided and of paths that might safely be pursued, of which they knew nothing; for to the untaught the Past is a region as blank as the Future; but from the Past the veil might be lifted by knowledge... But the true lesson they [The Nation's writers] taught was that Irishmen were enslaved because they were divided. Their Protestant forefathers were often pampered and protected by England, as her garrison, and their Catholic forefathers reduced to slaves because they were dangerous to the English ascendancy. If they forgot hereditary feuds they might create a noble future for their common country. Ireland must aim to be Irish, not Anglo-Irish; because vigour, and health, and great achievements belong to men and nations which follow their nature, not to those broken by a foreign mould. But Irish must no longer mean Celtic; from whatever stock they sprung, Celtic, Norman or Saxon, if men loved and served the country they were Irish. Hereditary party spirit was an ignis fatuus in a country where the lineal descendants of the O'Neills, O'Briens, and O'Connors were Unionists, and where Philpot Curran, Wolfe Tone, and Theobald Matthew sprang from Cromwellian soldiers. The pursuit of knowledge was incited not with the zeal of a schoolmaster but with the fevour of a lover. © Searc's Web Guide 1997-2008

19th Century History
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