Napoleon Bonaparte wasn’t impressed by the United Irishmen who went to Paris in 1797 and 1798 to urge the French government, the Directory, to invade Ireland. Years later, in exile on St Helena in the south Atlantic, he claimed that if Ireland had sent him honest men he would have made an attempt on the country but he had no confidence in the integrity or the talents of the Irish leaders in Paris. They could offer no plan, were divided in opinion and constantly quarrelled with one another.

In at least one instance, the antipathy was mutual. After meeting France’s leading general in December 1797, Wolfe Tone wrote in his diary that Bonaparte’s manner was cold, that he spoke little, and, that while he was perfectly civil, it was impossible to augur anything good or bad from anything the writer had seen or heard.

Inspection

On his advice, the Directory decided to strike at the British Empire by invading Egypt instead.

In 1803, when he was “first consul”, effectively dictator of France, Napoleon ordered the establishment of an Irish legion under an adjutant general, Dublin-born Bernard MacSheehy, with a view to its use in Ireland. It took part in a number of engagements in Belgium, Germany, Spain and Portugal but, following the defeat of the French and Spanish navies off Cape Trafalgar in 1805, an invasion of Ireland remained impractical.

Despite Napoleon’s views about the Irishmen he met, he gave a pension to Tone’s wife Matilda and an army commission to their son William and, early in 1802, when Britain and France were negotiating a peace treaty, he obtained the release of Napper Tandy, who was under sentence of death in Ireland and gave him a general’s pension.

Ironically, Napoleon didn’t meet the two Irishmen who would be most influential in his life until after his defeat at Waterloo and his abdication and surrender to the British on July 15th, 1815. When the British government dispatched him to the remote island of St Helena, he was accompanied by a small entourage that included Edward Barry O’Meara, a 29-year-old Co Cork man who had obtained some elementary medical training in Ireland and practical experience as a ship’s surgeon. O’Meara’s qualifications to act as Bonaparte’s doctor also included his knowledge of Italian and French.

The two men became friends and the ex-emperor urged him to keep a diary that could be a source of profit in the future.

Shortly after they landed on the island on October 15th, 1815, another ship with a new governor, Hudson Lowe, arrived.

Lowe was born in Galway to a local woman and an English soldier but he spent most of his youth abroad and his task was to keep Napoleon under virtual house arrest and to ensure that he didn’t escape. O’Meara objected to the ill-treatment, as he saw it, of Bonaparte, and Lowe managed to have him dismissed and returned to England in July 1818 for allegedly claiming that the governor had urged him to poison Napoleon.

The surgeon used his diaries to write a book, Napoleon in Exile, A Voice from St Helena, in 1822, and it sold 10,000 copies within two years. He also married a rich 66-year-old double divorcée and grew fat and prone to gout.

O’Meara was an Anglican but he became a supporter of Daniel O’Connell and in June 1836 he went to a meeting to raise funds for O’Connell in the Crown and Anchor, a large tavern on the Strand in London.

The room was crowded and he had to stand at an open window where he was exposed to a stiff breeze and picked up a chill that may have led to his death a few days later.

The French invasion that never happened, apart from minor incursions, is one of the might- have-beens of Irish history.

According to his secretary on the island, the Count de Las Cases, Napoleon once speculated about how England would have fared if he had invaded Ireland instead of Egypt, and he told O’Meara that he would have separated the two countries, made Ireland a republic and then left the people to themselves after “after having sown the seeds of republicanism in their morale”.