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hand and dialogizes his predecessors and contemporaries on
the other. The orators in Crawford’s office
—
the barrister
O’Molloy and the academic MacHugh in particular
—
are
somewhat reminiscent of Daniel O’Connell, a lawyer and
renowned orator, whose forceful speeches incited audiences
and helped bring about the success of Catholic Emancipation.
Unlike O’Molloy’s and MacHugh’s empty talks, O’Connell’s
oratorical and organizational skills did exercise tremendous
power, but there were limits: the Liberator acquiesced on the
government’s prohibition against meetings for fear of risking
bloodshed, and this submission, as mentioned before, resulted
in a decline in his influence and the failure of the Repeal
movement. O’Connell’s case suggests that the effectiveness of
words is conditional on their being delivered to the public and
inspiring action. Deprived of either of those conditions, words
are rendered empty and powerless, as were O’Connell’s
speeches delivered outside of the rallies. The Dubliners’
utterances in the newspaper office lack the necessary
conditions to be effective; their forceful speeches, repeating
others’ words in a windy locale occupied by a gang of flatulent
underachievers, are therefore reduced to empty rhetoric, and
have no practical effect. O’Connell’s advocacy of Jewish
emancipation, moreover, is replaced by these Dubliners’
anti-Semitism, as their hostility toward Bloom demonstrates.
Despite Joyce’s likely appreciation of O’Connell’s espousal of
Jewish emancipation and the abolition of slavery, he would
have certainly frowned at the Liberator’s sectarian inclination,
for his idea of Catholic Ireland would have expelled the
Anglo-Irish like Parnell from their homeland. Not only do the
orators in the
Telegraph
office remind us of O’Connell, but
Professor MacHugh’s acclaim for Taylor’s speech is evocative
of Douglas Hyde, also a professor and champion of the revival
of Gaelic. The representations of Crawford and other
pressmen, furthermore, recall the journalistic intellectuals, the