Confessing Ireland: Gerald Griffin and the Secret of Emancipation

Abstract

There is only one state of perfect confidence on earth-it is that which exists between a Catholic penitent and his confessor. Here alone there is no reserve-here alone the heart is truly laid bare-and the soul exposed in its true colours. The confidence of the most intimate friendship must still have some reserve and. .. a degree of secrecy. gerald griffin, common place book a 1 In 1825, while Gerald Griffin was in London writing his Tales of the Munster Festivals (1827), a Parliamentary select committee was compiling evidence for an exhaustive report on the state of Ireland. Among the witnesses questioned were a host of Catholic priests, whose testimonies were directed repeatedly to the practice of confession among Irish Catholics, and in particular to the secrecy at the heart of that ritual. With its claims to divine authority and its inviolable secrecy, confession seemed to offer in distilled form everything that was problematic about Britain's new "step-daughter" in Union. 2 Here was a shadowy corner of Irish life beyond the reach of progressive reformers, sealed off from the eyes and ears of Dublin Castle,

‘Information from which money can be made is what is required’: William Blackwoods and the Irish Ordnance Memoir Commission of 1843-4

“…Their voluntary production by the ministers of the kirk rather than a workforce funded by the government in London avoided the controversies which surrounded Young's ill-fated commission, and the subsequent accusations in Irish society and its increasingly independent press that Peel had never been open to letting the memoir project proceed. 111 In addition, the historical material in the Scottish accounts was primarily produced for drawing-room interest, whereas the memoirs writers had a far more weighty ambition of producing a serious Irish history, free of English bias. Although historical memoir activity eventually ground to a halt, the work of the Ordnance in this area had an unintended legacy effect by helping to inspire the contemporaneous emergence of the influential Young Ireland grouping, a grouping whose open emphasis in this case was on Ireland's history as stirring polemic rather than objective truth.…”