TIMES PAST: Here and there with Parnell
Historian Jonathan Smyth looks back on Parnell's meeting in Kilnaleck in 1879 in his latest Times Past column...
I well remember those far-off days during my time as a student at university in Liverpool in the mid-1990s when I headed off on a month’s work experience to the Gladstone Library, which then was known as St Deiniol’s Library, in the town of Hawarden in Northern Wales. One of our course supervisors, a kindly man named Vincent de Paul Roper, looking a little bemused, asked me why I had decided on a historical Welsh library and not one of those modern high-tech institutions that students might ordinarily choose. So, I told him of my fascination for the history of people and places.
In my school days, I had learned the story about the English prime minister William Ewart Gladstone inviting the leader of the Irish Home Rule League Charles Stewart Parnell to stay at his home in Hawarden, and the encounter having captured my imagination, I was not about to pass up the opportunity of working nearby, and getting a look at Gladstone’s stately home, Hawarden Castle: even if it was just to be a glimpse from the roadside.
It was the beginning of a cold February in 1995, that I took the train from Liverpool to Wrexham, from there changing over for the line to Shotton, and on my arrival at Shotton station, a friend I knew from university collected me by car and drove me back to their family home where I stayed during my placement. The house was within walking distance of the library which was handy, and the country scenery and birdsong were a lovely contrast to life in the city of Liverpool.
Parnell in Wales
In 1882, Parnell became leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and seven years later, he was invited to stay overnight at Hawarden Castle, on 18th December 1889, for the purpose of discussing the possibilities of Home Rule and to consider how such a bill might be shaped. The statesmen spoke together for over two hours that night, and during dinner Parnell sat beside Gladstone’s daughter Mary who thought him a rather aloof individual with ‘piercing eyes that seem to look through you’. The Hawarden discussions were fruitful and on the following morning, the two men went on a long walk around Hawarden Park.
Following his departure from Hawarden, Parnell travelled to Liverpool to attend a meeting of the Liverpool Reform Club. For the time being, Parnell was the darling of Irish communities, revered and esteemed wherever he set foot at home, or abroad. Ten years earlier on Easter Monday, 14th April 1879, Parnell addressed a crowd of over 10,000 in number who gathered to hear him on a hill outside the town of Kilnaleck.
Parnell in Kilnaleck
The first indication I had that Parnell once held a monster meeting in Co. Cavan, came through a booklet written in 2003 by the local historian, Mr TP Ennis. I recall how in the early 2000s, on many occasions in the cold night air after a lecture had concluded at the Cavan County Museum and as the front door was being locked, that myself and T.P. would still be discussing the evening’s talk while the last of the cars pulled away from the car park. TP Ennis was a historian with an exceptional knowledge of Cavan and he had enormous enthusiasm and a boundless energy for research like no other.
Prior to his trek to Kilnaleck, Parnell attended an open air tenants’ rights meeting in Ballinasloe in November 1878, where he spoke about the failed potato crop that year and its economic impact, which he neatly linked in his speech to the welfare of the Irish. In the book, ‘The Laurel and the Ivy’, the eminent historian Robert Kee ably demonstrated how Parnell ‘had directly linked his audience’s family welfare with the cause of nationality’ when he spoke of ‘their land to keep and their country to save and erect as a nation’. The bad weather continued into the Spring of the following year and did little to improve agricultural matters.
When Parnell came to Kilnaleck, he made his appearance alongside Joseph G. Biggar MP, and Charles Fay MP. The event was reported in the Freemans Journal, The Nation and the Dundalk Democrat. Significantly, the meeting at Kilnaleck ‘revealed even more strongly his (Parnell’s) awareness of the need to woo Irish people towards a militant sense of nationality’. In Parnell’s world, nationality was his primary driving force and he wanted the people for whom it was only of secondary interest to make it a matter of importance in the same way as he did. Meanwhile, Parnell was also setting his focus on galvanizing more votes for the next election.
Parnell speaks
Many musical bands with their accompanying banners arrived at the field. The Emmett band was there from Dundalk, and the Mountnugent band also came along, led by Fr. Lynch PP, and Fr. Briody, CC; other bands were there from Bailieborough, Cootehill, Oldcastle and Ballina. Parnell’s first utterances in Kilnaleck were about the effects of the Great Famine, and he told the audience: ‘It had not been given to every county like Cavan to retain her population’, and that the ‘county of Meath, which I had the honour to represent’ had dropped from 180,000 of a population in 1841, to 90,000 in 1879, and that even though Cavan had felt ‘the heal of the exterminator’, the county had ‘remained the grand remnant of a noble people’ who would join the ‘struggle for Ireland’. Parnell told them not to be faint-hearted, or frightened, but to trust themselves and ‘believe in their country and their country’s cause’.
Parnell gave many great speeches during his career, but this is my favourite quote which comes from a speech given in Cork on 21 January 1885 about Home Rule and the land question: ‘No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country- thus far shalt thou go and no further’.
Finally, regarding that castle in Hawarden, I did manage to see it , but alas, I only had a view from the roadside.
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