RONAYNE, Dominick (1790-1836), of Ardsallagh House, Youghal, co. Cork

Ronayne, ‘a distant cousin and close crony’ of Daniel O’Connell, was born in county Waterford into a junior branch of the D’Laughtane family and came to reside at Ardsallagh House, ‘a nice fanciful structure’ set in 320 acres near Youghal, co. Cork.2F.W. Knight, ‘Notes on the Family Ronayne or Ronan of Counties Cork and Waterford’, JCHAS, xiii (1917), 29-33; T. Lacy, Sights and Scenes in Our Fatherland (1863), 664. Called to the bar in 1817, he joined the Leinster Circuit where, though ‘not in extensive practice’, he nevertheless established a reputation as an able counsel and ‘an ingenious and successful defender’.3Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (1836), 159; Annual Register (1837), 191; A. Macintyre, The Liberator. Daniel O’Connell and the Irish Party 1830-1847 (1965), 306; Waterford Mirror, 18 Jan. 1836; D.O. Madden, Ireland and Its Rulers: Since 1829, i (1843), 235.

An early member of the Catholic Association, Ronayne joined the emancipation campaign and sought to reform tithe payments and the exclusive practices of the corporations. In 1825, he opposed Daniel O’Connell over the proposed ‘wings’ to be attached to the emancipation bill, objecting in particular to the abolition of the forty-shilling freeholders.4J. O’Connell, The Life and Speeches of Daniel O’Connell, MP, ii (1846), 459; Morning Chronicle, 9 Feb. 1824; Cobbett’s Weekly Register, 1, 15 Oct. 1825; T. D’Arcy Magee, Historical Sketches of O’Connell and His Friends (2nd edn., 1845), 74. Nonetheless, after participating in the election victory of Henry Villiers Stuart at Waterford in 1826, he agitated the constituency of Clare on behalf of O’Connell where, as a ‘master of the Irish tongue’ he threw his ‘educated mind into the powerful idiom of the country’ and so exerted ‘an uncommon power upon the passions of the people’.5Morning Chronicle, 7 July 1826; M.W. Savage (ed.), Sketches, Legal and Political, by the Late Right Hon. Richard Lalor Sheil, ii (1855), 113-4. Along with Richard Lalor Sheil and Thomas Wyse, he accompanied O’Connell, then fresh from his election victory, to a mass gathering in the chapel of Saints Peter and Paul at Clonmel, 25 Aug. 1828. He was also a member of the deputation that called upon O’Connell to stand for county Waterford in July 1830 and accompanied the Liberator on his triumphal entry into the city, 14 Oct. 1830.6Clonmel parish history [www.parishpeterandpaul.net]; Freeman’s Journal, 20 July, 18 Oct. 1830.

Ronayne again attended upon O’Connell in 1831, viewing the electoral work undertaken on his behalf as ‘evidence of the value of agitation’, and frequently chaired meetings of the National Political Union.7Ronayne to O’Connell, 17 Jan. 1830, O’Connell Correspondence, ed. M.R. O’Connell, iv, 120-1, and see 297-8, 299-301; Freeman’s Journal, 1 Dec. 1831, 5 Mar. 1832, 31 Dec. 1832. An eloquent and determined proponent of ‘patriotic’ causes, he campaigned against the Irish Church establishment ‘on grounds of right and public policy’ and was zealous in his public opposition to tithes, tolls and vestry tax.8Ronayne to O’Connell, 12 July 1830, Edward Dwyer to O’Connell, 27 May 1832, O’Connell Correspondence, iv. 188-9, 418-9; Waterford Mirror, 18 Jan. 1836; W.P. Burke, History of Clonmel (1907), 322; Freeman’s Journal, 24 Mar., 11 May 1832; Macintyre, Liberator, 181. Unlike some of his colleagues, however, he drew a distinction between the extinction and the ‘total alteration’ of tithes, and argued that ‘some species of land tax’ might be raised to support clerical incumbents who were deprived of their subsistence.9Freeman’s Journal, 17, 21 Jan. 1832; R. Sloan, William Smith O’Brien and the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 (2000), 40. Ronayne is sometimes confused with his kinsman, Dominick Philip Ronayne of Youghal, a repealer who also campaigned against tithes and tolls, see D.A. Murphy, The Two Tipperarys: The national and local politics of the unique 1838 division into two ridings (1994), 3, and Macintyre, Liberator, 74.

As a scholar and ‘poet of no ordinary merit’, Ronayne wrote ‘poetic satires on public abuses’ for The Comet under the name of ‘Figaro’, and subsequently produced verses describing the leading politicians of the day. He also assisted O’Connell with the publication of the short-lived Irish Monthly Magazine, and acted as his legal assistant at the trials consequent upon the massacre of a police contingent at Carrickshock, co. Kilkenny in November 1831.10Waterford Mirror, 18 Jan. 1836; J. O’Connell, Recollections and experiences during a parliamentary career from 1833 to 1848, i (1849), 26-7; B. Clifford, The Dubliner: The Lives, Times and Writings of James Clarence Mangan (1988), 19; D.J. O’Donoghue, The Life and Writings of James Clarence Mangan (1897), 31; W.T. Fagan, The Life and Times of Daniel O’Connell, ii (1847), 109. He was spoken of as a candidate for Tipperary at the 1831 general election, and again in 1832, when he was returned as a repealer for Clonmel, a seat he retained in 1835, each time in the face of a stiff challenge from the principal proprietor of the borough.11Freeman’s Journal, 27 Apr. 1831, 14 July 1832. Shortly after being elected in 1832 he spoke on behalf of Sir Richard Keane at the county Waterford election, and was later to receive credit for the return of Ebenezer Jacob at Dungarvan in February 1834.12Freeman’s Journal, 26 Dec. 1832; D. O’Connell to P.V. Fitzgerald, 12 Feb. 1834, O’Connell Correspondence, v, 97-8. Given O’Connell’s propensity for campaigning on Sundays, Ronayne later argued that the Sabbath observance bill should be treated ‘with that ridicule it deserved’: Hansard, 30 Apr. 1834, vol. 23, c. 348. Having attended O’Connell’s National Council in Dublin, 25 Jan. 1833, he took his seat in the Commons where, possessed of an ‘invariable suavity of manner’, he obtained a reputation as a minor wit.13Waterford Mirror, 18 Jan. 1836; Burke, History of Clonmel, 322. He was said to have been indebted for his ‘saucy and audacious eloquence’ to his ‘daily tilts’ at breakfast with Anne Horan, a female attendant at his university: Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, xi (1844), 20. While he does not appear to have introduced any bills, and he served on only one select committee, on the Stafford election petition in June 1833, he made more than thirty, often lengthy, contributions to debate.14PP 1833 (537) xi. 1. He first spoke against the Irish coercion bill, arguing that it was designed to buttress the tithe system – a system he regarded as ‘a badge of national degradation’ – and denounced the measure as ‘a concentration of all the virus of all the abominable principles of Toryism’.15Hansard, 18 Feb. 1833, vol. 15, cc. 920-1; 8 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, cc. 439-45. He regarded plans to renew the bill in 1834 as ‘an insult to Ireland’, arguing that the state of the country did not justify legislation whose true purpose was to prevent political agitation rather than suppress agrarian disturbances.16Hansard, 7 July 1834, vol. 24, c. 1254; 18 July 1834, vol. 25, c. 192; 21 July 1834, vol. 25, cc. 315-6; 26 July 1834, vol. 25, cc. 545-8.

Ronayne conducted the opposition to the old corporation of Clonmel before the Irish municipal corporations commission in October 1833, and subsequently pressed the government for the publication of its report.17Freeman’s Journal, 15 Oct. 1833; Burke, History of Clonmel, 322; D. O’Connell to Edward Littleton, 31 May 1834, O’Connell Correspondence, v. 140. In 1835, according to Feargus O’Connor, Ronayne gave notice of a motion on the Irish municipal corporations bill ‘which would have tested the Whigs’, before being forced to withdraw it by O’Connell.18Northern Star, 16 May 1846. He campaigned to have tithe collections suspended, complained of the unduly harsh treatment of the men imprisoned in Cork jail for opposing them, and dismissed the government’s Irish tithe bill as one designed to perpetuate ‘under another name’ a system that had brought ‘misery, bloodshed, and confusion’ to Ireland.19Hansard, 6 June 1833, vol. 18, c. 388; 12 June 1833, vol. 18, cc. 606-7; 14 June 1833, vol. 18, cc. 816-7, 848; 18 June 1833, vol. 18, cc. 979-80. During the debate on the second reading of the bill, 6 May 1833, after Lord Stanley had clashed with O’Connell over appropriation, Ronayne protested against nonchalant response of the secretary of state to his critics (throwing ‘his legs upon the table like a man in a North American Coffee-house’), accusing him of ‘insolence and disrespect for the House’.20Hansard, 6 May 1834, vol. 23, cc. 623-4, 626-31; O’Connell, Recollections, i. 242-3; A. Hawkins, The Forgotten Prime Minister. The 14th Earl of Derby, i (2007), 139.

Ronayne was amongst the minority of repeal MPs who wished to see the question brought before the Commons before the end of the 1833 session, and founded a repeal club in his constituency the following year.21Freeman’s Journal, 15 June 1833, 20 Sept. 1834. During the repeal debate of April 1834, he argued that there was ‘no similarity’ between England’s union with Ireland and that with Scotland, a country that had had, he contested, ‘nothing of consequence or importance to sacrifice’, her parliament having ‘not the slightest resemblance’ to that of the Irish, her government having been ‘a confused mixture of oligarchy and monarchy’.22Hansard, 28 Apr. 1834, vol. 23, cc. 170-83. Ronayne later intervened in the quarrel between O’Connell and Benjamin Disraeli, after Disraeli described O’Connell as an ‘incendiary’ and a ‘traitor’ to the electors of Taunton in June 1835, contrasting that speech with the ‘extravagant admiration’ that Disraeli had expressed for the Liberator during a recent conversation.23Morning Chronicle, 3 May 1835; J.A.W. Gunn (ed.), Benjamin Disraeli Letters, ii (1982), 406; R. Blake, Disraeli (1966), 124-5.

Ronayne was a critic of the Irish registration system, arguing that the assistant-barristers who presided over the registry sessions were frequently ‘influenced by political partialities’. After Ronayne indicated his wish to retire from parliament in August 1835, O’Connell solicited the government to have him appointed to a vacant chairmanship. Although he was derided by his enemies as ‘about a fortieth-rate lawyer’ there was speculation that Ronayne would be the first repealer to be given a judicial position as the assistant-barrister of county Waterford.24D. O’Connell to Lord Mulgrave, 19 Aug. 1835, O’Connell Correspondence, v. 328; Hansard, 20 Aug. 1835, vol. 30, c. 766; The Times, 15 Oct., 4, 21 Nov. 1835. His failure to secure this appointment was attributed to his having revealed the contents of a confidential communication between Lord Anglesey and Earl Grey on the condition of Ireland during the repeal debate in 1834.25Fagan, Life and Times of O’Connell, ii. 362-3; Hansard, 28 Apr. 1834, vol. 23, cc. 181-2; 29 Apr. 1834, vol. 23, c. 253.

Though Ronayne was said to have been ‘assiduous in attendance to his parliamentary duties’, contemporaries believed that he would have been more useful in the house ‘had he entered it at an earlier age, or had brought with him a moderate degree of self confidence’. Nevertheless, he was regarded as an ‘honest’ politician who was highly popular with his constituents, having gratuitously given them counsel in legal disputes over tithes and taxes. He was said to have addressed the people of south Tipperary periodically on the favourite political topics of the day, ‘urging them to put their own shoulders to the wheel for the redress of grievances’.26O’Connell, Recollections, i. 239-42. Though a firm adherent of O’Connell’s principle of non-violence, Ronayne had an excitable temperament and once accosted a member of his audience after misinterpreting a call for action on the (turn)pikes as a call to arms: W.J. Fitzpatrick, The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Right Rev. Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, ii (1861), 380-1.

Ronayne died at his residence, Ardsallagh House, co. Cork in January 1836, four days after contracting ‘a very malignant fever’. He was buried at Clashmore churchyard, where, it was reported, ‘thousands flocked from distant places’ to join his funeral procession.27O’Connell, Recollections, i. 239, 242; Waterford Mirror, 18 Jan. 1836; North Wales Chronicle, 19 Jan. 1836; Waterford Chronicle, 23 Jan. 1836. It was claimed that his coffin was ‘followed by upwards of 150 vehicles, and 1,000 equestrians; the funeral train altogether covering a space of five English miles and comprising not less than 100,000 persons!’: Gent. Mag. (1836), i. 436. His loss depleted the repeal interest in parliament and he was remembered as one the ‘best protectors’ of the popular interest, having never given ‘one vote that could cast a slur on his memory’.28Macintyre, Liberator, 64; Freeman’s Journal, 16 Jan. 1836.