Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History (10 page)

cathair
. (Ir.) A stone-built open fortress or
caiseal
.

cathedral
. The church of the bishop of a
diocese
. The cathedral and its revenues were administered by a
chapter
which in the provinces of Dublin and Cashel usually comprised a
dean, precentor, chancellor, treasurer, archdeacon
and
prebendaries
but which elsewhere had regressed to a simpler form. The actual work of the cathedral was carried out by the
vicars choral,
usually four in number, wherever they existed. The cathedral and its officials were supervised by the dean who also presided as head of the chapter. Most cathedral offices had their corps, a parish or number of parishes whose revenues went to the cathedral officials. Some benefices were highly lucrative and therefore greatly prized. In return, the cathedral officials preached or acted as parish priests in the relevant parish or parishes. In some cases the spiritual duties were performed by a curate or vicar; in others the benefice had no
cure of souls
and the office was a sinecure. The chapter administered the rents and leases which pertained to the cathedral. Revenue accrued from the corporate lands and the rectorial
tithe
(the great tithe) of certain parishes and was held in the common or economy fund for the maintenance of the fabric of the cathedral. After the Reformation Irish cathedrals came under the control of the Church of Ireland and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Catholic bishops were compelled to adopt a cautious attitude towards church-building. Catholic chapters were essentially diocesan advisory councils

Catholic Association
. Two bodies bore this name. The first was founded in 1756 and represented Catholic commercial and landed interests. It enjoyed a brief existence before being superseded by the
Catholic Committee
from 1760. The second, a popular political pressure group, was founded on 12 May 1823 by Daniel O'Connell and Richard Lalor Shiel to win political representation for Catholics and gain access for them to government positions. Specifically it aimed to adopt ‘all such legal and constitutional measures as may be most useful to obtain Catholic emancipation'. The annual membership fee was one guinea and, inevitably, membership was largely confined to the middle class. The groundwork for a broader and more popular base was laid in January 1824 when O'Connell introduced an associate membership which could be had for as little as one penny per month (
Catholic rent
). The collection of fees required the association to organise on a local basis. Local branches, with the enthusiastic support of Catholic clergymen who publicised the rent scheme, organised meetings and petitions and corresponded with the central committee. Their proceedings were regularly reported upon in the newspapers. The Catholic Association campaigned in elections and on issues such as
tithe
, the tolerance shown towards Orange outrages, patronage, education and the administration of justice. It disbanded briefly in 1825 when
Goulborn's Act
outlawed bodies campaigning for church or state reformation but re-appeared within days with a new set of aims purged of political content. The association proceeded to campaign for a census of the Catholic population, a liberal education system, public peace and charity. The great breakthrough came in the Clare by-election of 1828 when O'Connell successfully defeated William Vesey Fitzgerald by 2,057 votes to 982. By law O'Connell was entitled to seek election but was disbarred from taking his seat by the nature of the oath he was required to swear to do so. O'Connell's stunning victory made the emancipation of Catholics inevitable and relief legislation was duly enacted in April 1829.
See
Catholic emancipation. (O'Ferrall,
Catholic emancipation
; O'Hagan, ‘Catholic Association', pp. 58– 61.)

Catholic Committee
. The name borne by an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century moderate body which attempted to ameliorate the position of Catholics in Ireland. It sprang from the earlier
Catholic Association
and was founded in 1760 by John Curry, Charles O'Conor and Thomas Wyse. The committee sought relief for Catholics by addresses to the crown and played a prominent role in the campaign to break the monopoly of the Protestant trade guilds. Initially the Catholic landed gentry were the driving force behind the movement but these were later edged aside by the more aggressive Catholic business and professional classes. John Keogh, a Catholic tradesman, rose to prominence in the association and with Wolfe Tone as its secretary the committee began to flex some muscle. By 1791–2 it was pressing for Catholic enfranchisement. A delegation was dispatched to London to meet Pitt who promised no obstruction to Catholic enfranchisement if the Irish parliament wished to proceed along those lines. The response of the Irish parliament, however, was a pitiful Catholic relief bill in 1792 which went no distance towards answering the franchise demand. Hobart's Catholic Relief Act of 1793 (
See
relief acts), a response to a delegation dispatched from a representative national convention organised by the Catholic Committee in Dublin, proved more substantial in that Catholics were permitted to vote as forty-shilling freeholders in the counties and free boroughs, to bear arms, to become members of corporations, to serve as grand jurors, to take degrees in Dublin University, to hold minor offices and to take commissions in the army below the rank of general. The concession of participation in urban corporations proved a dead letter since it depended on the willingness of the corporations to enlarge their franchise and almost all refused to do so. Catholics also remained excluded from parliament and from senior offices such as lord lieutenant and lord chancellor. Nevertheless, the Catholic Committee dissolved itself in gratitude. It was revived in 1809 and hoped to avoid the
Convention Ac
t by claiming that its purpose was to draw up a petition and not to challenge parliament. Under pressure from the government it again dissolved and re-emerged as the Catholic Board (1811), made up of named individuals to avoid all claims to representative status. It dissolved finally in June 1814 when the Convention Act was again invoked.
See
Catholic Convention, guilds, Municipal Corporations Reform Act, quarterage. (Edwards, ‘The minute book', pp. 3–170.)

Catholic Confederacy
. In October 1642, a year after the outbreak of war,
Old English
and native Irish Catholics combined to form an alliance known as the Catholic Confederacy or Confederate Catholics of Ireland. They insisted they were loyal to the crown but determined to secure religious freedom and a role in the government of Ireland. According to the confederate oath of association they aimed to restore the rights of the church, maintain the royal prerogative and defend the liberties of the nation. The confederates established an independent assembly in Kilkenny to govern those parts of the country that had come under Catholic control. A supreme council was appointed, taxes were raised, a mint was established and a printing press set up. The confederate army, though large, was poorly equipped, badly trained and lacked a unified command. Provincial commanders were unable or unwilling to co-operate in the field and failed to take military advantage of the pitiful state of royalist forces throughout the decade. A history of long-standing distrust made the alliance of Old English and native Irish inherently unstable. The Old English dominated the supreme council and sought a speedy conclusion to the war. They were willing to compromise since they realised a parliamentary victory in England spelt ruin for Catholic landowners. The native Irish, having lost their lands in earlier confiscations, had little to lose and wished to press on. An agreement to cease hostilities in 1643 split the alliance and relations deteriorated further in 1646 over the terms of a treaty proposed by Ormond. The supreme council and Old English nobility agreed to provide the king with an army of 10,000 men in return for the abolition of the court of wards, the substitution of an oath of allegiance for the oath of supremacy, the admission of Catholics to all civil and military offices and the lifting of restrictions on Catholic education. Rinuccini, the papal nuncio, and the native Irish demurred. They rejected the proposal for its failure to restore Catholicism. The success of the clerical faction convinced Ormond that any terms that he would find acceptable would be rejected by Rinuccini and he began to make preparations to transfer Dublin to the parliamentary forces. The military and political situation became chaotic in 1648 with Ormond's departure from Ireland. The army was mauled by parliamentary forces, the confederacy split along ethnic lines and the factions went to war with each other. When the dust settled in January 1649, Rinuccini was sidelined and, with episcopal approval, the confederates had signed up to a treaty with the newly-returned Ormond that differed little from that of 1646. Having lasted for seven years, the confederacy was now formally dissolved and Ormond became the leader of anti-parliamentary forces in Ireland. Although he failed to take Dublin in June 1649, the bulk of the island remained in royalist hands. The arrival of Cromwell in August, however, signalled the beginning of the end for confederate hopes.
See
cessation,
Commentarius Rinuccinianus
. (Cregan, ‘The Confederate Catholics', pp. 490–512; Gilbert,
History of the Irish Confederation
; Ohlmeyer (ed.),
Ireland
; Ó Siochrú,
Confederate Ireland
.)

Catholic Convention
(1792). In December 1792 the
Catholic Committee
convened a representative national assembly in Dublin to draw up a petition for the removal of disabilities imposed on Catholics by the
penal laws
. Membership of the assembly was determined by an election process conducted on a nationwide basis. One or two delegates from among ‘the most respectable persons' were chosen by Catholics in each parish to go forward to county meetings where delegates to the national assembly were selected. Over 200 members assembled in Back Lane (hence the phrase ‘Back Lane Parliament') on 3 December and agreed to a generalised petition for Catholic emancipation and a specific request for concessions on the
franchise
and membership of the
grand jury
. Suspicious of the Irish administration, the convention by-passed the
lord lieutenant
and presented the petition to George III directly. Many Protestants, both within and without parliament, reacted angrily to the assembly and its petition yet a substantial Catholic relief bill followed. In early 1793 most of the disabilities were removed although Catholics remained excluded from parliament.
See
Catholic Committee, relief acts. (O'Flaherty, ‘The Catholic Convention', pp. 14–34.)

Catholic Defence Association
. Founded in the 1850s as a response to the
Ecclesiastical Titles Act
(14 & 15 Vict. c. 60, 1851) which proposed to infringe the liberty of the Catholic church, the Catholic Defence Association comprised a group of Irish liberal MPs who proceeded to campaign for the repeal of the act. They allied themselves with the
Tenant League
by including the Tenant League campaign for lower rents and
tenant-right
within their programme. Pledged to pursue an independent policy in the house of commons and boosted by clerical support, the association returned 48 members to parliament in 1852 but was riven by the acceptance of posts in the new Whig-Peelite administration by two of its leading members, William Keogh and John Sadleir. The alliance was reduced to 26 members in 1853 and to a dozen two years later. It finally collapsed over an 1859 Conservative parliamentary reform bill. (Larkin,
The making of the Roman Catholic Church
, pp. 99–100
passim
.)

Catholic Emancipation
. The phrase used from the 1790s to express the demand of Irish Catholics for the right to sit in parliament, to be members of the
privy counci
l, to hold senior governmental positions and to become king's counsels and county sheriffs. Decades of agitation – culminating in Daniel O'Connell's election as MP for Clare in 1828 – finally wrenched an emancipating
relief act
(10 Geo. IV, c. 7) from the British parliament in 1829. This legislation effectively repealed many of the outstanding
penal laws
. Catholics could now sit in parliament without renouncing their religious faith, they could become members of corporations and were eligible for most of the higher civil and military offices from which they had been excluded. The positions of regent, lord lieutenant and lord chancellor, however, remained closed to them. (O'Ferrall,
Catholic emancipation.
)

Catholic petition
(1805). Although no clear promise had been made, Catholics were led to expect that the passage of the
Act of Union
would be accompanied by a further relaxation of anti-Catholic measures. In 1804 a proposal to petition parliament for Catholic relief was raised at a number of Catholic meetings in Dublin. Knowing George III's antipathy towards concessions to Catholics, the government advised Catholic leaders against pressing the issue at that time. Nevertheless, the proposal was carried and a delegation was dispatched to London in 1805 to request Pitt to present the petition in parliament. He refused for he had promised the king that he would resist all attempts to bring forward an emancipation bill and he spoke against the petition when it was presented in parliament by the Whigs Fox and Grenville. It was rejected by large majorities in both houses. Two further petitions were laid before parliament in 1808 and 1810 against the background of the
veto controversy
, both of which were heavily defeated. Their addresses rebuffed, Catholics ratcheted up the campaign for emancipation in the 1820s. A new body, the
Catholic Association
, galvanised the struggle with the successful raising of
Catholic rent
, with rallies and marches and, above all, through the mobilisation of the Catholic forty-shilling freeholders at election time. Addresses and petitions were the means by which Catholic bodies sought to present their grievances to the king and assure him of their loyalty throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Petitioning (dubbed the ‘annual farce' by O'Connell) yielded little in terms of redress but the business of petition-signing gave focus to and helped politicise the Catholic masses.