23

Thomas Davis

1814–1845

 

For a man with so short a career, Thomas Osborne Davis has exerted an influence over generations of Irishmen of all kinds which is surprising.  Arthur Griffith, the leader of the Irish Free State government in 1922, said Davis was 'the prophet I followed throughout my life, the man whose words and teaching I tried to translate into practice in politics'.  It is to Thomas Davis, a Protestant, that Catholic Ireland owed much of its political maturity.

      He was born in Mallow, a town in Cork, on 14th October 1814, the posthumous son of a British army doctor who had died in September.  His mother was a Cork woman.  With her child she moved to Dublin, taking a house at 67 Lower Baggot Street, which was Davis' home for the rest of his life.

      He was an indifferent scholar, and a worse athlete at school.  In 1831 he entered Trinity College, in Dublin, and enjoyed himself there, graduating in 1835.  He then set off on a tour of Britain and Europe.  On his return he was called to the Irish Bar in 1838.  On renewing his studies for the law at Trinity he became auditor of the college historical society.  He joined the Repeal Association in 1839, which DANIEL O'CONNELL [20] had created to campaign to repeal the Act of Union, passed in 1800, which bound Ireland to Great Britain.

      He found much of the inspiration for his own ideas in the Irish past, then only being opened up by native scholars, and in a famous speech at Trinity College, then seen as a bastion of British rule, he pleaded for Irish historical studies.  His great slogan was 'Educate that you may be free'.  (The annual lectures by Irish scholars and writers which are broadcast by the Irish public service are named for him.)

      He was one of the group of young men, impatient as young men often are with their elders, who banded together to found the Nation newspaper in Dublin in 1842.  The paper was the brainchild of Davis and his friend John Blake Dillon, another barrister.  While walking in the Phoenix Park they discussed the matter with another friend, CHARLES GAVIN DUFFY [82], who agreed to put up the money.

      The first issue appeared on 15th October 1842.  An augury of things to come, it contained a poem by James Clarence Mangan.  It was in its pages that Davis published much of his poetry and ballads.  Such songs as 'A Nation Once Again' and 'The West's Asleep' are still sung today.  Among the other contributors was Jane Elgee, later the mother of OSCAR WILDE [97].

      The paper proved to be a great success and soon the Nation had a countrywide readership.  Rather than the gleanings of a foreign newspaper, shipping news, and parliamentary reports, which is what most papers of the day contained, the Nation set about a programme of practical education and liberal enlightenment.  The songs and ballads were published as The Spirit of the Nation in July 1843 and became an instant bestseller.  This was the first of a series of inexpensive publications on history and politics called The Library of Ireland.

      Thomas Davis was one of the founders of Young Ireland, a political movement which would instigate a rebellion in the summer of 1848.  But Davis contracted scarlet fever and failed to throw it off.  He died at the age of thirty-one in his mother's house in Dublin in September 1845, but his ideas became the shaping inspiration of generations of Irish people.

      The national ideal as espoused by Davis and his friends might have claimed to be an ancient notion, but was in fact a new and lately fashionable mystique.  All across Europe the provinces of the empires and large states were discovering their 'nationalities', so Young Ireland had parallels in many other countries.  Though it was an idea hailed with enthusiasm in the nineteenth century, it was the cause of two world wars in the twentieth.

      The problem was not in the idea of nationality itself - the sense of a shared heritage and culture.  It lay in the idea that a nation had exclusive claim to one piece of land and was therefore entitled to drive out anyone who did not share that culture, or to make them second-class citizens.

      Of course, Davis and his friends were high-minded idealists, but their ideas were responsible not only for much bloodshed, but eventually for the partition of Ireland, for their nationalism could leave no room for other aspirations.  It has taken Ireland and other countries of Europe many decades to undo the damage and to find new grounds for allegiance in the European Union.

      Though Davis was the Protestant son of an Englishman, many of his ideas have proved influential, especially that of reviving the Irish language and the knowledge of ancient Irish history and culture.  So, too, were his ideas about education in Ireland, and the need for the widespread use of the Queen's Colleges.  He was also right about the industrial development of Ireland, expounding the need to use turf and water as sources of power.  An early death cut off the full development of his ideas, though what he did manage to say and publish was wonderfully effective.