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Charles Gavan Duffy

1816–1903

 

As an Irish revolutionary and Australian statesman, Charles Gavan Duffy had a remarkable career indeed, for in both roles he was a man of importance and influence.

      The son of a shopkeeper in Monaghan, he was born on 12th April 1816.  His total formal education was a few months at a local school; otherwise he taught himself.  He read widely and voraciously, as perhaps only the genuine autodidact can.  Almost inevitably he grew up to become a journalist, contributing from an early age to the Northern Herald.  In 1836 he moved to Dublin, where he joined the staff of the Morning Register.  In 1839 he moved to Belfast to work as the editor of a new Catholic paper, The Vindicator, and remained in Belfast till 1842.  He found the time to study law and was called to the Irish bar, but he did not practise.

      Returning to Dublin in the summer of 1842, he came in contact with two young barristers, THOMAS DAVIS [23] and John Blake Dillon, with whom in October he founded the Nation, perhaps the most influential newspaper ever published in Ireland.  It supported DANIEL O'CONNELL [20] and the Repeal Association, and its efforts helped to fill the association's meetings.  O'Connell was duly grateful.  When the government prosecuted O'Connell in 1844, Duffy was tried with him and afterwards joined him in Kilmainham Gaol.

      All across Europe this was an era of reviving nationalism, as a younger generation rejected the cautious precedents of those who had survived the Napoleonic Wars.  In 1834 an international association of republican societies had been formed, which included Young Germany, Young Italy, Young Poland, and Young France.  In Britain, however, Young England was a reactionary group of young Tory aristocrats who sought a return to medieval ideals.  And so, in Ireland, a Young Ireland party was formed in imitation of the Continental movements.

      Among his most valued contributors, Duffy included the leading figures of Young Ireland.  The stated ambition of the paper was 'to create and foster public opinion in Ireland and to make it racy of the soil'.  As most of the writers were staunchly middle class, they did not mean anything crudely vulgar by this, rather, that all they wrote would have a national reference.  The paper was widely read and deeply influential.  From its pages were gathered the songs and ballads that made up The Spirit of the Nation, which became a bestseller and was read everywhere, or rather sung everywhere, for it contained the patriotic ballads that passed almost at once into popular currency, and are today part of the folk tradition of Ireland.

      Impatient young men that they were, the Young Irelanders soon broke with the ageing O'Connell.  The repeal movement had been a failure, and the famine had devastated the country.  The outbreak of rebellion across Europe in 1848, first in Paris, in February, and then in the German states and elsewhere, inspired Young Ireland also to rise in arms.  But in July 1848 Gavan Duffy was arrested and his paper suppressed.  This did not prevent a brief flurry of insurrection by William Smith O'Brien and others in Tipperary, but it was quickly put down and the leaders were imprisoned.

      Though some of the Young Irelanders were deported, Gavan Duffy survived four trials unconvicted and was released in 1849.  He revived the Nation and became involved in the land reform movement along purely constitutional lines with Frederick Lucas and others.  They founded the Tenant League in 1850, and at the general election of 1852 forty MPs (including Gavan Duffy from New Ross) were elected to Parliament, pledged to its aims and independent opposition.  This was the beginning of a true Irish party.  But its aims were betrayed when two leading members accepted offices from the government.  Lucas died, the reform measures failed in the House of Lords, and Gavan Duffy was in despair.

      Duffy left Ireland in ill health.  In 1855, he immigrated to Australia where he began a law practice.  He felt he had had enough of public life, but he could not resist politics.  He was elected to the colonial assembly in Victoria and became minister of public works, minister of public lands, and chief minister in 1871.  A knighthood followed in 1873.

      He championed the labourers and farmers, many of them Irish, against the capitalists and squatters (farmers with large spreads of land).  By the time he retired he had gained a reputation as one of the most distinguished Australian public figures.

      Duffy left Australia in 1880 and went to live in the south of France.  There he wrote a biography of his friend Thomas Davis, two histories of the Young Ireland movement, and his autobiography.  This last was called appropriately My Life in Two Hemispheres.  After he died, in Nice, on 9th February 1903, his remains were brought back to Ireland and were interred in Glasnevin, with the other heroes of Ireland.  His son, George, was a lawyer who acted for SIR ROGER CASEMENT [94], while his daughter, Louise, was a republican and educator.  To have radically influenced the public life of two countries, in two different parts of the world, is an achievement that ranks Gavan Duffy high in the pantheon of the great Irish.