Charles O'Conor of Ballinagare, Co Roscommon is not exactly a household name today. Yet he was one of 18th-century Ireland's greatest scholars and was regarded by contemporaries as one of the most literate men of his day. He also played an important role in founding the modern study of Ireland's language, culture and history - a role that may gain a wider appreciation as a result of a conference on his life and work to be held in Roscommon over the weekend of April 7th to 9th.
O'Conor was born in 1710 at Kilmactranny, Co Sligo and died on his estate at Ballinagare on July 1st, 1791. He belonged to the O'Conor Don branch of the O'Conors of Connacht - an old Roman Catholic Roscommon family whose members had produced a number of High Kings before the Norman invasion and were hereditary kings of the province until the 15th century.
O'Conor was not the O'Conor Don of his day (as is sometimes stated) but he was the head of the most senior cadet line of that sept. The O'Conor Don title passed in the early 19th century to his grandson, Owen, who inherited it on the failure of the main line to produce a male heir. This makes Charles O'Conor the direct ancestor of the present O'Conor Don (Desmond, who lives in Sussex) and also of Pyers O'Conor-Nash, who owns Clonalis House outside Castlerea where Charles O'Conor's papers, writings and library are preserved.
The estates and possessions belonging to O'Conor's direct family had been reduced in size by confiscations in the 17th century due to the part they played in various rebellions and their adherence to the Catholic faith. In 1720, however, Charles O'Conor's father regained about 900 acres of the family's old lands at Ballinagare because of a legal loophole and the family set up home on this relatively small estate.
Charles O'Conor's education was a mix of traditional Irish scholarship (taught to him by members of old Gaelic learned families) and the conventional learning appropriate to the son of an early 18th-century gentleman. He was deeply imbued from youth in the native aristocratic literary and cultural tradition, yet his writings were clearly influenced by the Enlightenment and he was as familiar with the works of Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire as he was with Gaelic lore.
He was author of the highly influential Dissertations on the Ancient History of Ireland, first published in 1753. This was the first Irish history written in English by someone who had a command of the surviving Irish and colonial sources and who saw the past from an indigenous perspective. Its publication established O'Conor as the leading living expert on Ireland's history and antiquities.
He is also credited with helping to generate an interest in Irish culture, history and antiquities among the Anglo-Irish establishment. He was a founder member in 1785 of the Royal Irish Academy, where his portrait still hangs. He also helped to foster a public awareness in English-speaking Ireland of the value of studying Irish, along with its associated poetry and folk-tales. Thus he laid the foundations for the academic study of the different aspects of Irish culture which has taken place in our universities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries down to the present day.
As a Roman Catholic, O'Conor was affected for much of his life by the Penal Laws - which were were intended to break the political power of Irish Catholics and were aimed in particular at the landowning class. Catholic gentry such as the O'Conors were denied access to careers in the army or law and could take no part in government at either national or local level.
Many Catholic gentlemen had to go abroad to the Continent to further careers denied them at home. Charles O'Conor had relatives serving with the Irish Brigade in France, including his uncle Colonel Tiernan O'Rourke (his mother's brother), who was killed fighting for Louis XIV at Luzara in 1702, and his younger brother Daniel, who distinguished himself at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745.
Given this background and his considerable intellectual powers, it is not surprising that O'Conor tried to advance the civil rights of Catholics marginalised by the Penal Laws. One of the most interesting features of his career was how his antiquarian and historical studies fuelled his political interests and his desire to see the laws eased or repealed.
He started to write pamphlets advocating rights for Catholics from at least 1749 onwards. In 1756 he was one of the three founder members of the Catholic Association,
which tried to encourage the surviving Catholic gentry and clergy, as well as the emerging merchant class, to agitate peacefully against the Penal Laws.
In many ways, the Catholic Association was the beginning of the peaceful Catholic political activism that was to be so much a feature of nationalist politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Speakers at next weekend's conference - in the Abbey Hotel, Roscommon will include a number of leading academics, such as Luke Gibbons, Joep Leersen, Olga Tsapina, Clare O'Halloran, Nollaig Ó Muraíle, Mícheál MacCraith, Lesa Ní Mhungaile, Diarmuid Ó Cathain and Fr John Wrynn. Details of the conference can be found on www.cruachan.ai.com or at 071-9639268. E-mail cruachanai@esatclear.ie for information.
Kieran O'Conor lectures in archaeology at NUI Galway and is a direct descendant of Charles O'Conor of Ballinagare.