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Chapter NiNe 325
and eight of his most noted assistants were prosecuted for conspiracy. O’Connell was found guilty and sentenced to one years’s imprisonment, and a ine of £2,000. The verdict was reveresd on appeal to the House of Lords, Lord Denman declaring that such a trial was ‘a delusion, a mockery, and a snare’; O’Connell was released after three months coninement. This decision, which caused great rejoicing in Ireland, was one of the last important events connected with O’Connell’s political career. He was by then an old man; broken in spirit, grieviously disappointed at the failure of the Repeal movement, and overwhelmed by the aliction that black-clouded Ireland in 1845 when famine stalked the entire land following the failure of the potato crop. Soon his health began to give way to various ailments, aggra- vated, as many at the time said, by the sight and plight of his people perishing of hunger and disease and others leaving the country in droves. The “Liberator” died at Genoa while on a pilgrimage to Rome, 15 May, 1847. By his dying wish his heart was carried to Rome-where it was received with signal honours- and his body brought back to a ‘heart-broken’ Ireland, and buried at Glasnevin Cemetery, in Dublin.
Previous to O’Connell’s death, in 1846, several of the ablest and most idealistic mem- bers of the Repeal Association seceded and banded together to form a rival organisation- The Young Ireland Party. The two main reasons given for the split were:
(1) O’Connell saw nothing wrong in, but on the contrary approved of, his follow- ers accepting positions from the Whigs. The members of The Young Ireland Party strongly disapproved of this policy.
(2) The Young Ireland Party, too, thought that the attitude adopted by the Repeal Association with regard to educational and other questions was unwise, inasmuch as it would alienate and sideline Protestants from the Repeal agitation.
It is also maintained that as O’ Connell had devoted nearly all his energy to organising only the Catholics of Ireland, the Young Irelanders wished to foster a wider and deep- er nationalism than O’Connell had advocated, including the cultivation of the Irish lan- guage, Irish literature, Irish music, and Irish industries. They argued that the great fault of O’Connell, other than his loyalty to the English Crown, was his lack of loyalty to Irish herit- age and culture, in particular, his neglect of the Irish language. Though he himself was a luent Irish speaker, he never, it is said, ‘gave a thought to its encouragement or propagation, because he never realized that in a people’s native language lay the soul of their nationality.’