Nationalist hero or child molester? Judging the past by modern morality

I DON’T know much, but I do know this.

Most Irish people don’t think of Dublin as having a statue of a child molester in what is arguably its main street. It does, though.

I checked on it with the Corpo after I had asked around a bit and found friends and acquaintances going “Who?” and then shaking their heads. Never seen a statue of him. Anywhere. Couldn’t be one. They’d have noticed.

I began to think the statue had been moved, but no, according to the gentleman at the Corpo press office. In fact, it’s been in situ for so long, we’ve forgotten it’s there. Nor has anyone plans to topple it any time soon. It’s not a moving statue, like the Floozie in the Jacuzzi. It’s a static statue.

It portrays a handsome, thoughtful aristocrat born in Dromoland Castle and educated in Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. A man who, despite his education having taken place in toto in England, nonetheless thought of himself as Irish.

“From my boyhood I have entertained a passionate affection for Ireland,” he wrote.

Admittedly, he had earlier entertained so passionate an affection for a young woman in London that he had got her pregnant. Because she was not considered suitable for marriage to the son of a substantial Anglo- Irish landowner, the girl was bought off with an annuity of £50 a year by his older brother and their father.

By the time he became one of the leaders of Young Ireland, in the middle of the 19th century, William Smith O’Brien was married to Lucy and had fathered several children.

Lucy wasn’t always enthusiastic about his involvement in patriotic groups, and now and again he ticked her off in writing for her failures in this regard, but for the most part, she was an oasis of calm for their brood and for him whenever he returned from meetings of fellow Young Irelanders.

This was the group of bullish lads, who, in the middle of the 19th century, challenged Daniel O’Connell’s pacifism and made plans for armed insurrection.

Because their idealism was matched by their ineptitude, the leaders ended up being captured by the British forces or surrendering to the local police and brought to trial for sedition. Convicted as charged, Smith O’Brien was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, although this was later commuted, in common with many other Young Irelanders, to transportation.

Smith O’Brien, leaving his wife and family behind him, sailed to Van Diemen’s land, where he was effectively incarcerated in an island-sized open prison, overseen by Superintendent Kevin Lapham, a Kildareman 10 years his junior.

Lapham was extraordinarily kind to O’Brien, taking him on trips and making him welcome on visits to Lapham’s own home. However empathic, the younger man could not fail to obey the orders of the Crown, and so O’Brien’s letters to his wife were read before being put on the ship. O’Brien coped with this restriction by not sending his wife any letters at all.

Lapham’s kindness met with a poor return from Smith O’Brien. Thomas Keneally gives the details in his history of the 19th century exodus from Ireland, entitled The Great Shame.

The incident started with a local policeman messing around with a telescope in the company of two other men, one of whom was also in the police force.

Constable Hamerton, looking through the telescope, noticed, about 400 yards away, Smith O’Brien “and the younger Miss Lapham, Susan, 12 or 13 years of age, embracing” in the back garden of the Lapham residence. The nature of the embrace led to Hamerton swearing out an official statement.

“I saw Smith O’Brien reclining on a garden seat and Miss Susan was close to him. I positively declare I saw O’Brien’s flies open in front and that I saw Miss Susan’s hand in his trousers. Smith O’Brien had on his cloak and tried to conceal himself by drawing it around him….”

The rest of Hamerton’s statement suggested that his use of the telescope might have been more than an accident. It was probably motivated by a desire to catch Smith O’Brien because of earlier compromising sightings. “I have seen them kissing,” Hamerton stated. “I have repeatedly seen them together after dark.”

Mitigating circumstances? Smith O’Brien, in his prime, was thousands of miles from home and family, although he doesn’t seem to have made much of an effort to bring Lucy and his children out to Van Diemen’s land, as did many other Young Irelanders transported around the same time. Smith O’Brien seems to have been repentant about the Susan Lapham episode, albeit, according to his journal, in terms so vaguely general as to amount to considerably less than a full confession.

“It is beyond measure painful to one who is sincerely desirous to do right,” he wrote, “to feel that he has been led by the frailties of his nature into acts which have brought with them consequences not only disastrous to himself but most detrimental to others.”

Nobody ever accused him of such abuse at any other point in his life, but there can be little doubt that, on this occasion, he used a child “12 or 13 years of age” for sexual pleasure. Yet his hero status within Ireland was never dented by the incident, perhaps because of distance, perhaps because it never reached media (and if it had, would hardly have become a topic of much interest in post-Famine Ireland).

Arguably, though, the most significant reason was that the offence was seen as breaching the terms of his ticket-of-leave and of his relationship with his superintendent, rather than as a crime against a child. It viewed as an offence against a decent man, rather than an assault upon a minor.

THOMAS Keneally also makes the point that “a defender of O’Brien could of course argue that (at that time) 12 years was Ireland’s marriageable age”. That is true, although the average age of women marrying in Ireland at the time was the mid-20s. Not many 12-year-olds actually walked up the aisle, even if the law allowed them to do so.

Which brings us to the matter recently touched upon with reference to the sexual mores of Ancient Greece, and raises the question: what gives people in the 21st century the right to impose the psychological insight we believe ourselves to have, together with our current view of child development, on those who lived in earlier times? Is there, perhaps, an arrogance in our assumption that human progress has reached its highest point in our time, and that those living in earlier centuries were vile or ignorant or both? Is it possible that the life-long damage which might happen to a 21st century 12-year-old in that situation would not have applied in a century where very early marriage was acceptable, and the understanding of sexuality was quite different to that of the present day?

I don’t know. All I know is that the first statue of a nationalist ever erected by Dublin Corporation is of a frock-coated William Smith O’Brien. A man we would, today, condemn as a child molester.