Daniel O'Connell

Irish social reformer

• Born: August 6, 1775
• Birthplace: Near Carhen, Cahirciveen, County Kerry, Ireland
• Died: May 15, 1847
• Place of death: Genoa, Kingdom of Sardinia (now in Italy)

Once the leader of the struggle for Roman Catholic emancipation in the British Empire, O’Connell is identified with the principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state, nonviolent reform movements, early democratic organizations, and the upholding of the rule of law.

Early Life

Daniel O’Connell was born in a town on the southwest coast of Ireland that was situated at the western end of Iveragh, a mountainous peninsula running forty miles out into the Atlantic from the Lakes of Killarney. Its mountains and sea inlets afford beautiful scenery, and nowhere more so than at Derrynane, where O’Connell’s family lived from the beginning of the eighteenth century (Derrynane is now preserved as a national monument). Iveragh had retained much of the Gaelic culture so that O’Connell was born into a society in which perhaps a majority of the people knew no English.

Roman Catholic landlords, the O’Connells were the principal family in Iveragh for some centuries before O’Connell was born in 1775. Fostered out at birth to a tenant of his father, in accordance with Gaelic custom, he returned to his parents’ house at the age of four, knowing no English. He was the eldest son in a family of ten children. His father ran a general store in Cahirciveen and invested his profits in the purchase of land. His mother was a daughter of John O’Mullane, a Catholic small landlord of old family in County Cork.

When he was still a boy, O’Connell was adopted as heir by his rich but childless uncle at Derrynane. Receiving his first schooling at Derrynane, he then proceeded to a boarding school near the city of Cork. In 1791, he was sent to France, first to the college of St. Omer and then to the English college at Douai. In January, 1793, Douai was closed by the French revolutionary government, and O’Connell left for England as virtually a refugee, a day or two after the execution of Louis XVI. He spent the next three years as a law student in London and then obtained his uncle’s permission to complete his legal studies in Dublin, where he was called to the bar in 1798.

Moderately tall and broadly built, O’Connell looked impressive and distinguished rather than handsome, though his expressive blue eyes were commented upon. Having a powerful voice, he was one of the famous orators of his day, being able to appeal to more educated audiences as well as to great crowds. Although actively engaged in politics, he built up one of the largest practices of his day at the Irish bar. Because of his skill in defending great numbers of poor Catholics against charges they considered unjust, he early won widespread popular fame.

In 1802, O’Connell married his distant cousin, Mary O’Connell, one of the eleven penniless children of a County Kerry physician. For this impecunious marriage, he was disinherited by his uncle. Three years later, however, uncle and nephew were reconciled, and eventually O’Connell was bequeathed Derrynane and a third of his uncle’s estate. The marriage was a happy one, the only cause of distress being his extravagance, which left him always in debt. The charge that he was a womanizer is not supported by historical evidence. The fact that the charge has been made can be explained by the fact that he was the last of the Gaelic folk heroes, and all these heroes from prehistory onward had a reputation for sexual energy—it was seen as part of their greatness—and O’Connell was no exception.

O’Connell entered politics in 1800, when he organized a meeting of Dublin Catholics to oppose the enactment of the Union between Great Britain and Ireland (whereby the Irish Parliament was abolished, and Ireland for the future elected representatives to the British Parliament). He seems to have been the only member of the Catholic propertied classes to oppose the Union. By 1805, he was an energetic member of the Catholic Committee, a body of landlords, businesspeople, and lawyers who sought full freedom and equality for Catholics so that they could enter Parliament and government service and not remain a subject people.

Life’s Work

Politics in Great Britain and Ireland was at that time a matter for landlords and members of the upper-middle classes, for aristocratic dinner parties, and, to a lesser extent, for committees and small public meetings. O’Connell was to alter this pattern when he founded the Catholic Association in 1823, which proved to be the first great popular democratic organization. In February, 1824, he introduced the penny-a-month plan, whereby tens of thousands of the poorer classes were enrolled and politically instructed. By the end of 1824, the whole country was roused, and for the next four years the Catholic Association exerted strong pressure on the British government. In 1828, there occurred a by-election for County Clare, and O’Connell was induced to contest it, the first Catholic to stand for Parliament since the seventeenth century.

It was realized from the start that the Clare election would be decisive. The contest was bitter, and O’Connell, who could be scurrilous, left nothing unsaid or undone to ensure victory. Special contingents of army and police stood by to deal with popular violence, but there was none. Instead, as great numbers gathered in and around the county town of Ennis, where the polling took place, the officials of the Catholic Association with the assistance of the clergy imposed strict discipline, even to the extent of banning the consumption of liquor. On the fifth day of the polling, when the count was two-to-one in O’Connell’s favor, the Tory candidate conceded victory. Organized, disciplined, and instructed, the masses had shown their power. In the weeks that followed, the two chief members of the Tory cabinet, the duke of Wellington as prime minister and Sir Robert Peel as home secretary (the minister in charge of Ireland), decided that Catholic emancipation must be enacted. Accordingly, in the spring of 1829, Peel introduced the bill that was passed by both houses without difficulty and received the royal assent in April.

The reasons for which the anti-Catholic Tory government conceded emancipation have frequently been misunderstood. The threat of civil war in Ireland is usually given as the reason, but that factor would not have been sufficient if the British body politic were united in defense of the Protestant establishment in Ireland. There was no such unity. The Whigs and their Radical supporters, who together made up half of the House of Commons, were sick of the long agitation for emancipation. Though not necessarily committed to any principle of religious freedom, they did respond to the Whig tradition of government by consent.

Also, some of the more liberal of the Tories were prepared to concede. Should the Tory administration, by rejecting emancipation, provoke a civil war in Ireland, they might find themselves voted out of office and replaced by a Whig government willing to enact the measure. There was the additional consideration that twenty or thirty Catholics might be returned for Irish constituencies at the next general election, and the Mother of Parliaments could look ridiculous if she refused them admission. In demanding emancipation for Catholics, O’Connell was careful to ask for it only on the general principle of freedom and equality for men of all religions. As early as 1807, he rested his case “on the new score of justice—of that justice which will emancipate the Protestant in Spain and Portugal, the Christian in Constantinople.”

After being elected to Parliament, O’Connell applied his energies to a large number of causes. These included the extension of the parliamentary and local government suffrages; the Tolpuddle Martyrs; Poles persecuted by czarist Russia; Jewish emancipation; separation of church and state in Catholic as well as in Protestant countries, and even in the Papal States; free trade and especially the repeal of the Corn Laws; and the abolition of black slavery. In pursuing these aims, he was the leading Radical in the British Parliament during the 1830’s.

With the passing of the emancipation bill, O’Connell hoped for great things for Irish Catholics, but his hopes were only partly realized. The Tories and the more conservative of the Whigs were determined to maintain Protestant dominance in Ireland and not to admit Catholics to office. In the general election of 1834, however, the Whigs lost their overall majority and were forced to come to terms with O’Connell if they wished to maintain a stable government. They negotiated an arrangement whereby O’Connell’s party of some twenty-five members of Parliament would support the Whigs and keep them in power provided they admitted Catholics to the Irish administration and sponsored certain reforms. As a consequence, the Protestant monopoly of power was broken, and Catholics were appointed to the civil service, the judiciary, and high posts in a modernized and expanded police force. The legislative reforms demanded by O’Connell were passed by the Commons but amended in an anti-Catholic direction by the House of Lords. Nevertheless, gains were made.

When the Tories returned to power in 1841 with a large majority in the House of Commons, O’Connell believed that he could look for no further reforms. When his year as lord mayor of Dublin ended in October, 1842, he threw himself into the struggle for Repeal, that is, the repeal of the Act of Union. British political opinion was determined to uphold the Union, seeing Repeal as involving sooner or later the breaking away of Ireland from the empire. It was also considered that control of Ireland was essential to British military security.

The question the historian must ask is: How could a perceptive politician such as O’Connell, with a long experience of British politics, believe that he could win Repeal? The only answer that makes sense is that he knew he could not; he was using the carrot of Repeal to rouse the Catholic masses so that, as in the case of Catholic emancipation, he could intimidate a British government into granting not Repeal but major reforms. Whatever his purpose, he had the Repeal Association hold great public gatherings known as monster meetings throughout the country, at which he made menacing speeches. Peel’s nerve held, however, and in October of 1843, he called O’Connell’s bluff by proclaiming that he would speak at the monster meeting announced for Clontarf outside Dublin. O’Connell called off the meeting.

Peel, however, was not the proverbial Bourbon. He realized that the Repeal movement was a response to real grievances, and in the years left to him as prime minister he enacted several reforms pleasing to the Catholic clergy and middle-class Catholics in general, and he planned to enact a measure giving tenant farmers a degree of legal security. Unfortunately for Irish Catholics, Peel was driven from office in 1846 by the Whigs (aided by O’Connell) and a majority of his own Tory Party, as soon as he had enacted the repeal of the Corn Laws.

The Repeal movement brought to the fore a group of idealistic young men who soon came to be known as the Young Irelanders. On the declared policy of Repeal, they were ostensibly at one with O’Connell, but there were fissures under the surface. Where he drew his political principles from the philosophes (excluding Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and the English Rationalists, such as Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and Jeremy Bentham (who though a zealous Catholic in his maturity had been a Deist as a young man), the Young Irelanders subscribed to Romantic Nationalism, the ideology then sweeping through Europe. O’Connell saw the nation as a collective unit, as the sum of all of its parts, whereas the young men of the movement realized that a nation is first and foremost a tradition; from that reality, they drew conclusions that bore little practical relevance to their own day but which would inspire later generations.

Unrealistic in the context of contemporary politics, the Young Irelanders demanded that the small Repeal Party should act independently of the Whig and Tory parties in the British Parliament and that O’Connell must not renew his “alliance” with the Whigs; they rightly suspected that, contrary to his declared policies, he intended to do just that. Though he tolerated much public criticism from the Young Irelanders, he often acted as if the Repeal Association were his private property and as if he were not bound by its decisions.

The break between old and young came in July, 1846, on the question of violence. O’Connell insisted that all members of the Repeal Association must adhere to the principles of nonviolence and constitutionalism, on which the association had been founded and to which the members had pledged their allegiance repeatedly since then. The Young Irelanders insisted that these alleged principles were merely policies. They were constitutionalists by preference, but they considered that the use of violence might be necessary at some time in the future should constitutional methods fail. The two positions were mutually exclusive. The majority of the population sided with O’Connell, regardless of whether they understood the points at issue, but it was his last victory. Within months, the famine was ravaging the country, and by February, 1847, O’Connell knew himself to be dying. On the advice of his doctors, he set out on a pilgrimage to Rome but died on the way at Genoa on May 15, 1847.

Significance

Daniel O’Connell deserved the title “the Liberator,” which was bestowed on him by his followers after Catholic emancipation. Though he had able Catholic lieutenants and received valuable cooperation from a number of Irish Protestants, he was the central figure in politically instructing and organizing a subject people. Catholic emancipation was the first political victory they knew after two centuries of discouragement and failure, and it was irreversible.

The Catholic Association was the first popular democratic organization of the modern world. O’Connell was the first Catholic political leader and perhaps the first politician in any major Christian denomination in Europe to espouse the dual principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state. In the years from Catholic emancipation until his death, he was the outstanding European opponent of black slavery. As a practitioner of nonviolent reform, he ranks with Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He embraced and expanded the British Whig tradition of government by consent that owed much to another Irishman, Edmund Burke. Future generations may well recognize him as the greatest upholder of the rule of law—not merely of law as made by one’s own people but also of law as made by others—that Western civilization has produced.

Bibliography

Hinde, Wendy. Catholic Emancipation: A Shake to Men’s Minds. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992. Focuses on Irish history in the period from January, 1828, through April, 1829, highlighting the events and personalities that brought the question of Catholic emancipation to a crisis, culminating in O’Connell’s election.

McCartney, Donal, ed. The World of Daniel O’Connell. Dublin: Mercier Press, 1980. Fourteen articles, mostly of high quality, describing O’Connell’s image abroad, his role in the British Parliament, his attitude to black slavery, and his influence on the Liberal Catholic movement in Western Europe.

Moley, Raymond. Daniel O’Connell: Nationalism Without Violence. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. A popular biography by a distinguished American political commentator.

Nowlan, Kevin B., and Maurice O’Connell, eds. Daniel O’Connell: Portrait of a Radical. New York: Fordham University Press, 1985. Eight articles on various aspects of O’Connell, notably his association with Gaelic Ireland, his social and economic ideas, and his role in British politics.

O’Connell, Daniel. The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell. Edited by Maurice R. O’Connell. Dublin: Irish University Press, 1972-1980. Thirty-five hundred private letters to and from O’Connell.

O’Faoláin, Seán. King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O’Connell, the Irish Liberator, in a Study of the Rise of the Modern Irish Democracy. London: Nelson, 1938. Entertaining biographical study of O’Connell’s personality. Intuitive rather than scholarly, it is the only work on O’Connell before 1960 that merits consideration.

O’Ferrall, Fergus. Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Rise of Irish Democracy, 1820-30. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1985. Comprehensive study of the Catholic Association as the modern world’s first democratic mass movement. Both grassroots organization and its effect on high politics are described.

Taylor, William Cooke. Reminiscences of Daniel O’Connell: During the Agitations of the Veto Emancipation and Repeal. Edited by Patrick Maume. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005. This biography, originally published shortly after O’Connell’s death, is based on eyewitness accounts and O’Connell’s memoirs and articles. Although Taylor sympathized with O’Connell’s struggle for Catholic liberation, he argues that O’Connell’s abusive oratory hindered emancipation.

Trench, Charles Chenevix. The Great Dan: A Biography of Daniel O’Connell. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984. Historically sound and entertaining, this biography is written with wit and insight.

Williams, Leslie. Daniel O’Connell, the British Press, and the Irish Famine: Killing Remarks. Edited by H. A. Williams. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003. Examines anti-O’Connell reports in nineteenth century English metropolitan newspapers and illustrated journals to determine how this coverage affected British response to the Irish famine.