The Catholic Emancipation Movement and the People : Popular Politics in Ireland During the 1820s.

Abstract

During the 1820s. the Catholic Emancipation movement was the most important single issue in Ireland. Its original aim was to remove legal discrimination against Catholics. The most remarkable thing about this movement was the fact that lower-class people, who were almost all poor peasants, for the first time in Irish history broadly and enthusiastically took part in a movement whose main character was "political". The aim and fruits of the movement were, however, not relevant to those people directly. This paper tries to explain why they took part. Contrary to some former arguments, they were not the puppets of their leaders, nor did they participate without their own ideas. They committed themselves to the movement holding their own ideas and visions about Catholic Emancipation, and these ideas were not identical to those held by the leaders who were mainly, the middle-class men. In fact, the people adopted and modified the words and their meanings used by the leaders in such a way that they became congenial to their traditional mentality. This was how they made up their own version of "Catholic Emancipation", which had a social revolutionary character. As a result, two relatively autonomous, but related Emancipation movements came to exist: one for the leaders, and one for the people. Here lies, the main reason why the people strongly committed themselves to an issue which seems on the surface to have had no relationship to them. As stated above, this paper tries to explain how a particular cultural and social group made up their cultural and social action, by focusing on the fact that the members of that group appropriated words as cultural goods. And also, by relating this psychological process with the actors' mental structure, the author tries to present a case study for the action of creating the meaning (appropriation), which is a main concern of the historiography now.