On 23 May 1997, in a commemorative issue to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Daniel O’Connell, the Kerryman newspaper contained the following description of the ‘monster’ meeting campaign of 1843: ‘O’Connell held monster meetings in about thirty centres during the summer and autumn of 1843. Between 3 and 4 million people attended’. To the extent that O’Connell's ‘monster’ rallies remain in the public consciousness, these grossly inflated numbers of attendance have been the norm. It has been argued that the O’Connellite campaign of repeal événements during the spring and summer of 1843 not only ‘transformed public life in Ireland’ on the eve of the Famine, but brought Ireland ‘to the brink of agrarian revolution’. To analyse the role the environment played during the O’Connellite ‘monster’ meetings it is necessary to note that there is a dearth of sources beyond contemporary newspaper coverage to illuminate this aspect of the campaign, and that hitherto scholarship focusing on nature and the environment in Ireland in this period has been overwhelmingly drawn to the catastrophe of the Famine (1845–51). Nonetheless, it is possible to use newspaper accounts to consider how the ‘monster meetings’ allowed contemporaries to undertake the temporary dominance of public landscapes by associating in crowds, and the manner in which these occasions constituted a political charivari when norms could be contested, such as the deployment of decorative flora as a political symbol in defiance of then-existing property rights: landscapes are integral to modes of self-formation and identity, as well as being connected to structures of power and authority. There are thus insights to be drawn from the consideration of O’Connellite ‘monster’ meetings as a phenomenon that occurred within a charged political atmosphere, and did so within specific environments in which place, identity, and a discourse of nationalist grievance was negotiated through a historicization of the Irish landscape.

It is perhaps surprising that O’Connell did not adopt a more explicit discourse of ‘improvement’ during 1843, although it is in keeping with his characteristic vagueness regarding economic matters throughout his career, and it is telling that the Repeal Association did not explicitly turn towards such matters until two years after the ‘monster meeting’ campaign when the members of ‘Young Ireland’ had attained a greater prominence in the Repeal Association.