Smith O'Brien
In Brief
The last sight from the funeral carriage in Hades before it passes over the Liffey and under "the hugecloaked liberator's form" is "Smith O'Brien. Someone has laid a bunch of flowers there. Woman. Must be his deathday. For many happy returns. The carriage wheeling by Farrell's statue united noiselessly their unresisting knees." William Smith O'Brien was a nationalist leader of the 1830s and 40s. Gifford says that he did indeed die on June 16, but most sources record his "deathday" as 18 June 1864. The statue was sculpted by Sir Thomas Farrell, who also made Sir John Gray's statue.
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Smith O'Brien was a Protestant, born to a family in County Clare that traced its ancestry to Brian Boru. Educated in England at Harrow and Cambridge, he entered politics as an MP for Ennis and later Limerick, and took up the cause of Irish nationalism, helping lead the Young Ireland movement and passionately advocating for revival of the Irish language. After O'Connell's death in 1847, at a time when famine was still ravaging Ireland, he and other members of the Young Ireland party founded the Irish Confederation to pursue a more militant path to self-sufficiency. The 1848 French revolution in Paris inspired them to attempt an uprising in the countryside, which was inept and swiftly put down.
Though never an apostle of violence, Smith O'Brien was arrested and charged with high treason, and he and three others were sentenced to death by hanging, drawing, and quartering. After 80,000 people in Ireland and England signed petitions for clemency, his sentence was commuted to transportation to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). In 1854 he received a conditional pardon and resettled in Brussels. In 1856 he received a full pardon and returned to Ireland, but he did not return to politics.
In Circe, when "Pandemonium" breaks out and Irish heroes fight duels with one another, one of the matches is "Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell." Although the spirit of the passage is absurd, there is some historical basis for this opposition. Smith O'Brien always supported Catholic Emancipation, but he at first opposed O'Connell's movement to Repeal the Act of Union. When O'Connell was arrested in 1843 for conducting his "monster meetings," however, Smith O'Brien joined the Repeal Association and became its second most influential voice. And after O'Connell's death he allied himself with those who pursued more militant, non-parliamentary avenues to independence—a more radical step than O'Connell was ever willing to take. The two men certainly did not always see eye to eye, and indeed the whole climate of Irish political organizing in the 1830s and 40s was marked by such violently shifting alliances and recriminations that Circe's picture of "duels with cavalry sabres" is perhaps not a completely unapt analogy.
The marble statue of O'Brien was erected in 1869-70 at the intersection where D'Olier and Westmoreland Streets join, just south of O'Connell Bridge. This is where Bloom catches sight of the monument. The postcard at right shows O'Brien at this location, on the south side of the river, across from "the hugecloaked liberator's form" on the north. But in 1929 Farrell's statue was moved north to a new location on O'Connell Street, beyond the O'Connell monument.
