MEAGHER, Thomas F. Letters of a Protestant, on Repeal. By Thomas Davis. Edited by Thomas F. Meagher.

Dublin: Printed for the Irish Confederation, by W. Holden 1847. Slim octavo. pp. 36. Modern brown wrappers. A very good copy.
OCLC 18758707. JISC locates 2 copies only. Not in TCD, Cambridge or Bodleian. No. 2. The Irish Confederation at head of title. Signed at end, ‘An Irish Protestant.’
“The English were sought out and invited here by an Irish King: the gates of the first city that fell (Wexford) were opened by an Irish Bishop, and the Bulla of him whom the Irish called the earthly head of their church was tied to the flag-staff of Strongbow. We quarrelled then, and then betrayed, though of one religion. Vice, not theology, ruined us then, as now. Selfishness, not Protestantism, was, and is the origin of Irish treason. From the time the religious quarrel commenced in the sixteenth century, up to the latter part of the eighteenth, England practised the same policy against us, using sect against sect, as well as clan against clan. Thus we find in Elizabeth’s wars O’Hanlon bearing Marshal Bagenal’s flag against Hugh O’Nial, and many of the Protestants of Dublin joined the Roman Catholics of Ormond in the “hosting” against the Irish army at Kinsale. In Charles the First’s time the Royalist Protestant Duke of Ormond wore out the strength of the Royalist “Confederate Catholics” of Kilkenny; while the bulk of Sir Charles Coote’s army that broke Owen Roe’s veterans under MacMahon, at Letterkenny, in 1650, were Roman Catholics ...” Thomas Davis.
Davis argues the case for a non-sectarian Irish nationality, grounded in civil and religious liberty, equal citizenship, and the practical benefits of restoring a Dublin legislature (revival of industry, local responsibility, and cultural confidence). His tact, writing as a Protestant to Protestants, was central to Young Ireland’s attempt to broaden the movement beyond the Catholic base of O’Connell’s Repeal Association.
This 1847 edition, prepared by Thomas Francis Meagher (later the ‘Sword Speech’ orator, 1846, Confederation leader, Union general in the American Civil War), represents Davis’s tact at a decisive moment: Black ‘47, the death-year of O’Connell and the birth-year of the Irish Confederation (January 1847), when Young Ireland sought a constitutional, national programme distinct from Repeal Association tactics. In that famine context the pamphlet reads as both memorial to Davis, dead at thirty-one, and a recruitment text to reassure Protestant merchants, professionals, and farmers that Repeal was constitutional and inclusive.

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