O'Connell, Daniel

A lawyer and politician who earned the moniker "the Great Liberator" for his efforts to secure full civil rights for Catholics, Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847) was born near Cahirciveen, Co. Kerry, on 6 August 1775. O'Connell belonged to a locally prominent Catholic landowning family and was adopted as heir by his wealthy uncle at an early age. Called to the Irish bar in 1798, he quickly established a very successful legal practice.

O'Connell became a national figure well before he founded the Catholic Association in 1823. Ably organized at the grassroots level by clergymen and others and led at the national level by the charismatic O'Connell, the Association is often regarded as the first European populist political movement. Assembling his supporters at huge meetings, O'Connell deployed thunderous oratory and militaristic language to intimidate the British government into granting Catholic Emancipation. After O'Connell was handily elected as MP for County Clare in June 1828, the government relented and the Emancipation Act was signed in April 1829.

Once in Parliament, O'Connell supported a number of radical causes, such as the secret ballot and separation of church and state. He also worked toward his second great political goal: repeal of the Act of Union of 1800. Finding Parliament firmly opposed to repeal, O'Connell pursued lesser concessions through an informal political alliance with the Whig party between 1835 and 1841. The fruits of this alliance included an overhaul of local government machinery in Ireland, which provided a large number of administrative and political posts for Catholics. Some of O'Connell's followers benefited greatly from this alliance, but others remained deeply dissatisfied. After the Conservative Party under Robert Peel regained control of Parliament in 1841, O'Connell decided to renew his campaign for repeal. Once again O'Connell combined a widespread popular organization, the Repeal Association, with numerous large public meetings at which he used fiery language and thinly veiled threats to pressure the government. This time the government was not willing to yield for fear that repeal of the union would lead to the dissolution of the British empire. In October 1843 Peel called O'Connell's bluff by prohibiting a meeting announced for Clontarf outside Dublin. O'Connell backed down and cancelled the meeting rather than risk bloodshed, signaling the end of repeal as a credible political movement.

Heartbroken by his inability to secure more aid for famine-struck Ireland and in rapidly failing health, O'Connell set out several years later on a pilgrimage to Rome but died on the way at Genoa on 15 May 1847. Despite his failure to repeal the union, the Liberator is generally regarded as one of the most influential and certainly the most popular politician in modern Irish history.

Bibliography

MacDonagh, Oliver. The Hereditary Bondsman: Daniel O'Connell, 1775–1829. 1988.

MacDonagh, Oliver. The Emancipist: Daniel O'Connell, 1830–47. 1989.

Nowlan, Kevin. B. The Politics of Repeal: A Study in the Relations between Great Britain and Ireland, 1841–50. 1965.

O'Connell, Maurice. Daniel O'Connell: The Man and His Politics. 1990.