necessary, for their skill and assiduity had not saved the prisoners already tried. I determined to carry the contest before the large court of popular opinion and to make it disagreeable and dangerous for the Executive to destroy me by the base methods they had employed against my colleagues. What I had to fear was a packed jury, that is, a jury composed of the political enemies of the prisoner. Up to the Solicitor-Generalship of Sir Michael O'Loghlen, a few years earlier, in political cases Catholics were universally excluded from juries, and with the Catholics those Protestants who were called liberal because they desired to abolish the penal practices which had outlived penal laws. O'Loghlen suspended the system, but in the O'Connell trial in 1844 Irish Tories revived it, and tried the Catholic chief of a Catholic nation by a jury and a court in which there was not a single Catholic. The Whig statesmen then in Opposition denounced this transaction unsparingly. Macaulay, who had the habit of laying his finger on the weak point, reminded the House of Commons that the law humanely provided that an alien must be tried by a mixed jury, half being foreigners, but an Irish Catholic in Ireland was tried by a jury composed exclusively of his opponents. The Catholic Bar in Ireland, which had become numerous, followed this lead, and held an aggregate meeting to denounce jury-packing, in which Richard Shiel took a leading part. It was less than four years since these things had happened, and the Whig orators were now Ministers of the Crown. The Irish barristers were its law officers, and credulous persons were confident that under such a régime political prisoners contending for changes in the Constitution would receive fair trial. But a fair trial was a phenomenon unknown in Ireland.
Mr. Martin, Mr. Williams, and Mr. O'Doherty were already tried, and every Catholic juror who took the Testament in his hand to be sworn, was ordered to stand aside by the Crown Solicitor, acting under the direction of the Attorney-General, Mr. Monahan. The old system, as it was administered in the darkest days of Protestant ascendancy, was revived by Catholic lawyers acting under the orders of Whig Ministers.[1]
- ↑ The Attorney-General's antecedents must have made the task odious
