Daniel O'Connell

Daniel O'Connell (6 August, 1775 – 15 May, 1847), known as The Liberator or The Emancipator, was Ireland's predominant politician in the first half of the nineteenth century. He campaigned for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Union between Ireland and Great Britain.

He is remembered in Ireland as the founder of a non-violent form of Irish nationalism, but also for the channelling of Irish politics along sectarian lines by the mobilisation of the Catholic community as a political force.

Early life

Born in Carhen, near Cahersiveen, County Kerry, to a once-wealthy Roman Catholic family. O'Connell, under the patronage of his wealthy bachelor uncle, Maurice (Hunting Cap) O'Connell, studied at Douai in France, and was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1794, transferring to Dublin's King's Inns two years later. In his early years, he became acquainted with the pro-democracy radicals of the time, and committed himself to bringing equal rights and religious tolerance to his own country.

While in Dublin studying for the law O'Connell was under his Uncle Maurice's instructions not to become involved in any militia activity. When Wolfe Tone's French invasion fleet entered Bantry Bay in December, 1796, O'Connell found himself in a quandary. In January, 1797, he wrote his uncle saying that he was the last of his colleagues to join a volunteer corps and 'being young, active, healthy and single' he could offer no plausible excuse. Later that month, for the sake of expediency, he joined the Lawyer's Artillery Corps.

On 19 May, 1798, O'Connell was called to the Irish Bar and became a barrister. Four days later the United Irishmen staged their rebellion which was put down by the British with great bloodshed. O'Connell did not support the rebellion; he believed that the Irish would have to assert themselves politically rather than by force. He decided to retire to his Kerry home and took no part in either the rebellion or its repression. For over a decade he went into a fairly quiet period of private law practice in the south of Ireland. He also condemned Robert Emmet's rebellion of 1803.

Statue of Daniel O'Connell outside St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne

Campaigning for Catholic Emancipation

He returned to politics in the 1810s, campaigning for Catholic Emancipation, that is, the repeal of all anti-Catholic legislation enforced in Ireland. O'Connell set up the Catholic Association in order to campaign for Catholic Emancipation. The Association was funded by membership dues of one penny per month, a minimal amount designed to attract Catholic peasants. It was so successful that the Association raised several million pounds in its first year. The money was used to campaign for Catholic Emancipation, specifically funding pro-emancipation MPs standing for the House of Commons. Also, the Catholic Association provided food and money for its poorer members.

As part of his campaign for Catholic Emancipation, O'Connell stood in a by-election to the United Kingdom House of Commons in 1828 for County Clare for a seat vacated by William Vesey Fitzgerald, another supporter of the Catholic Association. After O'Connell won the seat, he was unable to take it because of his refusal to take an oath to the King as head of the Church of England. The Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, and the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, even though they opposed Catholic emancipation, saw that denying O'Connell his seat would cause outrage and could lead to another rebellion or uprising.

Peel and Wellington managed to convince George IV that Catholic emancipation and the right of Catholics and Presbyterians and members of all Christian faiths other than the established Church of Ireland to sit in Parliament needed to be passed; and with the help of the Whigs, it became law in 1829. However, this destroyed the trust other Tory MPs had in Peel and Wellington. (Jews and other non-Christians got the right to sit in Parliament in 1858.)

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Daniel O'Connell as depicted on the £20 note of Series C Banknote of Ireland

Ironically, considering O'Connell's dedication to peaceful methods of political agitation, his greatest political achievement ushered in a period of violence in Ireland. A flaw in his achievement was that one the most unpopular features of the Penal Laws remained in the form of the obligation for all working people to support the Anglican Church (i.e. the Church of Ireland) by payments known as Tithes. An initially peaceful campaign of non-payment turned violent in 1831 when the newly founded Irish Constabulary were used to seize property in lieu of payment resulting in the Tithe War of 1831-36. Although opposed to the use of force, O'Connell successfully defended participants in the battle of Carrickshock when all the defendants were successfully acquitted.

In 1841, Daniel O'Connell became the first Roman Catholic Lord Mayor of Dublin. As the Lord Mayor, he called out the British Army against striking workers in the capital. Nonetheless O'Connell rejected Sharman Crawford's call for the complete abolition of tithes in 1838, as he felt he could not embarrass the Whigs (the Lichfield house compact secured an alliance between Whigs, radicals and Irish MPs in 1835).

Campaign for "Repeal of the Union"

O'Connell also campaigned for Repeal of the Act of Union, which in 1801 merged the Parliaments of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In order to campaign for Repeal, O'Connell set up the Repeal Association. He argued for the re-creation of an independent Kingdom of Ireland to govern itself, with Queen Victoria as the Queen of Ireland. To push for this, he held a series of Monster Meetings throughout much of Ireland outside the Protestant and Unionist-dominated province of Ulster. They were so called because around 100,000 people attended each one. These rallies frightened the British Government and the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, banned one such proposed monster meeting at Clontarf, County Dublin, just outside Dublin City. This move was made after the biggest monster meeting was held at Tara^[1]. Despite appeals from his supporters, O'Connell refused to defy the authorities and he called off the meeting.

This did not prevent him being jailed for sedition, although he was released after 3 months by the British House of Lords. Having deprived himself of his most potent weapon, the monster meeting, O'Connell failed to make any more progress in the campaign for Repeal. His followers deserted him in droves to the refrain of "He should have called us out" and the disappointment led to a group of supporters involved in the pro-Repeal paper The Nation forming Young Ireland under Charles Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel, William Smith O'Brien and Thomas Davis (all of whom were Protestants except for Gavan Duffy) espousing more militant means of winning Irish independence though largely sharing his social conservatism.

Political Beliefs and Programme

A critic of violent insurrection in Ireland, O'Connell once said that the freedom of Ireland was not worth the spilling of one drop of blood, although his killing of John D'Esterre in a duel in 1815 indicates that this belief did not include matters of "gentlemanly honour". ^[2]

Politically, he focused on parliamentary and populist methods to force change and made regular declarations of his loyalty to the British Crown. He often warned the British Establishment that if they did not reform the governance of Ireland, Irishmen would start to listen to the "counsels of violent men". Successive British governments continued to ignore this advice, long after his death, although he succeeded in extracting by the sheer force of will and the power of the Catholic peasants and clergy much of what he wanted, i.e. eliminating disabilities on Roman Catholics; ensuring that lawfully elected Roman Catholics could serve their constituencies in the British Parliament (until the Irish Parliament was restored); and amending the Oath of Allegiance so as to remove clauses offensive to Roman Catholics, such as himself, who refused to take the Oath until it was sanitized of anti-Roman Catholic language, requirements and clauses. Though a native speaker of the Irish language, O'Connell encouraged Irish people to learn English in order to better themselves.

Death and Legacy

O'Connell died of heart disease in 1847 in Genoa, Italy while on a pilgrimage to Rome at the age of 71, his term in prison having seriously weakened him. His head was buried in Rome, and the remainder of his body in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, beneath a huge round tower which can be seen for miles around. His sons all served in Parliament, and are buried in his crypt.

O'Connell is known in Ireland as "The Liberator" for his success in achieving Catholic Emancipation. Though Charles Stewart Parnell (who dominated Irish politics in the last quarter of the nineteenth century) is more usually associated with the title, O'Connell was also popularly described as The Uncrowned King of Ireland.

O'Connell admired Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar, and one of his sons, Morgan O'Connell was a volunteer officer in Bolívar's army at the age of 15 in 1820. The principal street in the centre of Dublin, previously called Sackville Street, was renamed O'Connell Street in his honour in the early twentieth century after the Irish Free State came into being. His statue (made by the sculptor John Henry Foley, who also designed the sculptures of the Albert Memorial in London) stands at one end of the street, with a statue of Charles Stewart Parnell at the other end.

There is a museum commemorating him in Derrynane House, near the village of Derrynane, County Kerry, which was once owned by his family.

Footnotes

^ Tara held a lot of significance to the Irish population as it was the old inaugeration site of the High Kings of Ireland. Clontarf was symbolic because of its association with the battle of Clontarf in 1014, when the Irish King and Gaelic imperialist Brian Boru broke Viking power in Ireland.
^ This duel is notable in that it only further endeared Daniel O'Connell to the people of Ireland. The Dublin Corporation had always been reactionary and bigoted against Catholics, and served the established Protestant Ascendancy. O'Connell in an 1815 speech referred to "The Corpo", as it was commonly referred to, as a "beggarly corporation". Its members and leaders were outraged and because O'Connell would not apologize, one of their number, the noted duellist D'Esterre, challenged him. Their real goal was to eliminate O'Connell as a viable political force and Catholic Reform leader. But surprisingly, O'Connell met D'Esterre and shot him dead. He regretted the deed deeply, and throughout his life took every opportunity to assist and aid D'Esterre's family.

O'Connell quotes

‘The altar of liberty totters when it is cemented only with blood’ [Written in his Journal, Dec 1796]

"Gentlemen, you may soon have the alternative to live as slaves or die as free men" [Speaking in Mallow]

‘Good God, what a brute man becomes when ignorant and oppressed. Oh Liberty! What horrors are committed in thy name! May every virtuous revolutionist remember the horrors of Wexford’! [Written in his Journal, Jan 1799, referring to the recent rebellion]

‘My days – the blossom of my youth and the flower of my manhood – have been darkened by the dreariness of servitude. In this my native land – in the land of my sires – I am degraded without fault as an alien and an outcast.’ [July 1812, aged 37, reflecting on the failure to secure equal rights or Catholic Emancipation for Catholics in Ireland.]

‘How cruel the Penal Laws are which exclude me from a fair trial with men whom I look upon as so much my inferiors..’. [O’Connell’s Correspondence, Letter No 700, Vol II]

‘…I want to make all Europe and America know it – I want to make England feel her weakness if she refuses to give the justice we [the Irish] require – the restoration of our domestic parliament…’. [Speech given at a ‘monster’ meeting held at Drogheda, June, 1843]

‘There is an utter ignorance of, and indifference to, our sufferings and privations….What care they for us, provided we be submissive, pay the taxes, furnish recruits for the Army and Navy and bless the masters who either despise or oppress or combine both? The apathy that exists respecting Ireland is worse than the national antipathy they bear us’. [Letter to T.M. Ray, 1839, on English attitudes to Ireland (O’Connell Correspondence,Vol VI, Letter No. 2588)]

‘No person knows better than you do that the domination of England is the sole and blighting curse of this country. It is the incubus that sits on our energies, stops the pulsation of the nation’s heart and leaves to Ireland not gay vitality but horrid the convulsions of a troubled dream’. [Letter to Bishop Doyle, 1831 (O’Connell Correspondence, Vol IV, No. 1860)]

‘The principle of my political life …. is, that all ameliorations and improvements in political institutions can be obtained by persevering in a perfectly peaceable and legal course, and cannot be obtained by forcible means, or if they could be got by forcible means, such means create more evils than they cure, and leave the country worse than they found it.’ [Writing in The Nation newspaper, 18 November, 1843]

References

Fergus O'Ferrall, Daniel O'Connell (Gill's Irish Lives Series), Gill & MacMillan, Dublin, 1981.

Seán Ó Faoláin, King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O'Connell, 1938.

Maurice R. O'Connell, The Correspondence of Daniel O'Connell (8 Vols), Dublin, 1972-1980.

Oliver MacDonagh, O'Connell: The Life of Daniel O'Connell 1775-1847 1991.

External links

[1] Daniel O'Connell and Newfoundland
[2] Catholic Encyclopedia Article
[3] O'Connell's 1836 'Equal Justice for Ireland' speech in the House of Commons
[4] Article in 1911 Online Encyclopedia
[5] Cork Multitext Project article on O'Connell with extensive image gallery