O'Connell gets carried away.

O’Connell “A United Irishman”.

The uncompromising attitude of hostility maintained by O’Connell towards the advocates of physical force, specially evidenced in his censure of the men of ‘98 at the Repeal Association on May 21, 1841, and which led to the resignation of some influential repealers in America, imparts additional interest to the fact, hitherto hardly known, that he himself had been a United Irishman. We are indebted to the late Mr Peter Murray, of the Registry of Deeds Office, Dublin, a man of scrupulous veracity, for the following curious reminiscence of O’Connell in 1798:-

My father, a respectable cheesemonger and grocer, residing at 3 South Great George Street, was exceedingly intimate with O’Connell, when a law student and during his earlier career at the bar. Mr O’Connell, at the period of which I speak, lodged in Trinity Place adjacent, an almost unexplored nook, and to many of our citizens a *terra incognita. *I well remember O’Connell, one night at my father’s house during the spring of 1798, so carried away by the political excitement of the day, and by the ardour of his innate patriotism, calling for a prayer-book to swear in some zealous young men as United Irishmen at a meeting of the body in a neighbouring street. Counsellor --- was there, and offered to accompany O’Connell on his perilous mission. My father; although an Irishman of advanced liberal views and strong patriotism, was not a United Irishman, and endeavoured, but without effect, to deter his young and gifted friend from the rash course in which he seemed embarked. Dublin was in an extremely disturbed state, and the outburst of a bloody insurrection seemed hourly imminent. My father resolved to exert to the uttermost the influence which it was well known he possessed over his young friend. He made him accompany him to the canal bridge at Leeson Street, and after an earnest conversation, succeeded in persuading the future Liberator to step into a turf boat which was then leaving Dublin. That night my father’s house was searched by Major Sirr, accompanied by the Attorneys’ Corps of yeomanry, who pillaged it to their hearts’ content. There can be no doubt that private information of O’Connell’s tendencies and haunts had been communicated to the Government.”

Mr O’Connell’s intimacy with Mr Murray is confirmed by Mr John O’Connell’s memoirs of his father, p.11; and Sir Jonah Barrington, in the third volume of his ” Personal Sketches,” p. 396, gives a very animated description of the sacking of Murray’s house by the Attorneys’ Corps, or “Devils Own.” The” Personal Recollections of O’Connell,” written by Mr Daunt, and mainly devoted to a record of coversations with his great leader, describe O’Connell as in Dublin during the spring and summer of 1798, and, lest some officious persons might endeavour to implicate him in their disaffection, “quitting the city in a potato boat bound for Courtmasherry,” (vol. i., p. 117.) But the circumstances detailed by Mr Murray are not given.

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