The only altogether reliable information we had was from Frederick Lucas, and he thought O'Connell was not so ill as he believed himself to be. He wrote to John O'Hagan at this time:—
"I have seen O'Connell. He is really ill, and supposes himself to be gradually breaking up. He attends to politics no more than is absolutely necessary, and spends every vacant moment in prayer and spiritual reading. At the best, however, he is so bad that I really think every unfriendly allusion (even indirect) to him in the Nation ought in good feeling to be suppressed."
Lucas's letter also reported some palaver of John O'Connell's about his good intentions for the future, which time proved to be entirely futile.
Lucas was willing to transfer the Tablet to Dublin if John O'Hagan would become his partner in the undertaking, as it needed two or more men to conduct such a journal, and one of them ought to be an Irishman. O'Hagan's uncle and elder brother would not hear of his relinquishing his profession, and the proposed partnership had to be abandoned. The impediments to Lucas's transfer of the Tablet to Ireland were not overcome at that time, but five years later, as we shall see. It was in this tragic era, a few weeks after Lucas's letter, when all hope of saving the people had disappeared, that news came across the sea for which no one was prepared. O'Connell had died in a foreign city on his way to Rome.
This announcement naturally created a profound sensation. The Confederates were of opinion that they ought to remember the early career of the dead Tribune, and forget as far as it was possible the disastrous story of his later years. In this spirit the Council, who, man by man, had been ejected from the Repeal Association on false pretences, ordered that the Confederates should attend the funeral and wear mourning for a month, but Mr. John O'Connell caused their proposed co-operation to be rejected, and kept the dead body of his father unburied for three months to increase the reaction. The device was not unsuccessful; the favour of the fickle multitude came back foaming and surging like a returning tide.
