Daniel O'Connell (I) (Irish: Dónall Ó Conaill; 6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847), hailed in his time as The Liberator,[1] was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Roman Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century. His mobilization of Catholic Ireland, down to the poorest class of tenant farmers, secured the final installment of Catholic emancipation in 1829 and allowed him to take a seat in the United Kingdom Parliament to which he had been twice elected.
At Westminster, O'Connell championed liberal and reform causes (he was internationally renowned as an abolitionist) but he failed in his declared objective for Ireland—the restoration of a separate Irish Parliament through the repeal of the 1800 Act of Union. Against the backdrop of a growing agrarian crisis and, in his final years, of the Great Famine, O'Connell contended with dissension at home. Criticism of his political compromises and of his system of patronage split the national movement that he had singularly led.
Early and professional life
Kerry and France
O'Connell was born at Carhan near Cahersiveen, County Kerry, to the O'Connells of Derrynane, a wealthy Roman Catholic family that, under the Penal Laws, had been able to retain land only through the medium of Protestant trustees and the forbearance of their Protestant neighbours. His parents were Morgan O'Connell and Catherine O'Mullane. The poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill was an aunt; and Daniel Charles, Count O'Connell, an Irish Brigade officer in the service of the King of France (and twelve years a prisoner of Napoleon), an uncle. O'Connell grew up in Derrynane House, the household of his bachelor uncle, Maurice "Hunting Cap" O'Connell (landowner, smuggler and justice of the peace) who made the young O'Connell his heir presumptive
In 1791, under his uncle's patronage, O'Connell and his elder brother Maurice were sent to continue their schooling in France at what is now Downside School. Revolutionary upheaval and their mob denunciation as "young priests" and "little aristocrats", persuaded them in January 1793 to flee their Jesuit college at Douai. They crossed the English Channel with the brothers John and Henry Sheares who displayed a handkerchief soaked, they claimed, in the blood of Louis XVI, the late executed king. The experience is said to have left O'Connell with a lifelong aversion to mob rule and violence.
1798 and Legal Practice
After further legal studies in London, including a pupillage at Lincoln's Inn, O'Connell returned to Ireland in 1795. Henry Grattan's third Catholic Relief Act in 1793, while maintaining the Oath of Supremacy that excluded Catholics from parliament, the judiciary and the higher offices of state, had granted them the vote on the same limited terms as Protestants and removed most of the remaining barriers to their professional advancement. O'Connell, nonetheless, remained of the opinion that in Ireland the whole policy of the Irish Parliament and of the London-appointed Dublin Castle executive, was to repress the people and to maintain the ascendancy of a privileged and corrupt minority.
On 19 May 1798, O'Connell was called to the Irish Bar. Four days later, the United Irishmen staged their ill-fated rebellion. Toward the end of his life, O'Connell claimed to have been a United Irishman. Asked how that could be reconciled with his membership of the government's volunteer Yeomanry (the Lawyers Artillery Corps), he replied that in '98 "the popular party was so completely crushed that the only chance of doing any good for the people was by affecting ultra loyalty."
O'Connell appeared to have had little faith in the United Irish conspiracy or in their hopes of French intervention. He sat out the rebellion in his native Kerry. When in 1803 Robert Emmet faced execution for attempting an insurrection in Dublin he was condemned by O'Connell: as the cause of so much bloodshed Emmett had forfeited any claim to "compassion".
In the decades that followed, O'Connell practised private law and, although invariably in debt, reputedly had the largest income of any Irish barrister. In court, he sought to prevail by refusing deference, showing no compunction in studying and exploiting a judge's personal and intellectual weaknesses. He was long ranked below less accomplished Queen's Counsels, a status not open to Catholics until late in his career. But when offered he refused the senior judicial position of Master of the Rolls.
Family
In 1802 O'Connell married his third cousin, Mary O'Connell. He did so in defiance of his benefactor, his uncle Maurice, who believed his nephew should have sought out an heiress. They had four daughters (three surviving), Ellen (1805-1883), Catherine (1808-1891), Elizabeth (1810-1883), and Rickarda (1815-1817) and four sons. Maurice (1803-1853), Morgan (1804-1885), John (1810-1858), and Daniel (1816-1897), all of whom were all to join their father as Members of Parliament. Despite O'Connell's early infidelities, the marriage was happy and Mary's death in 1837 was a blow from which her husband is said never to have recovered.
Death and commemoration
Following his last appearance in parliament, and describing himself "oppressed with grief", his "physical power departed", O'Connell travelled on pilgrimage to Rome. He died, age 71, in May 1847 in Genoa, Italy of a softening of the brain (Encephalomalacia). In accord with his last wishes, O'Connell's heart was buried in Rome (at Sant'Agata dei Goti, then the chapel of the Irish College), and the remainder of his body in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, beneath a round tower. His sons are buried in his crypt.
Lack of a successor
In leading the charge against the Young Irelanders within the Repeal Association John O'Connell had vied for the succession. But Gavan Duffy records that the Liberator's death left no one with "acknowledged weight of character, or solidity of judgement" to lead the diminished movement out beyond the Famine: such, he suggests, was the "inevitable penalty of the statesman or leader who prefers courtiers and lackeys to counsellors and peers".
John O'Connell opposed Duffy's Tenant Right League, and eventually accepted, in 1853, a sinecure position as "Clerk of the Crown and Hanaper" at Dublin Castle.
Reputational controversy
O'Connell saw himself as a champion of Jewish emancipation and bragged that Ireland was the "only Christian country that I know of unsullied by any one act of persecution of the Jews". He publicly criticised Pope Gregory XVI's treatment of Jews in the Papal States. But in 1835 O'Connell elicited a charge of anti-Jewish slander. Stung by reports that Benjamin Disraeli had called him a "traitor and incendiary", on the floor of the House of Commons O'Connell referred to the future Conservative leader in the following terms:
His name shows that he is of Jewish origin. I do not use it as a term of reproach; there are many most respectable Jews. But there are, as in every other people, some of the lowest and most disgusting grade of moral turpitude; and of those I look upon Mr. Disraeli as the worst. He has just the qualities of the impenitent thief on the Cross... I forgive Mr. Disraeli now, and as the lineal descendant of the blasphemous robber, who ended his career beside the Founder of the Christian Faith, I leave the gentleman to the enjoyment of his infamous distinction and family honours.
Disraeli reputedly responded, "Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon." He also demanded "satisfaction". As it was known that O'Connell had forsworn duelling following the death of D'Esterre, the challenge went to his duelling son, and fellow MP, Morgan O'Connell. Morgan, however, declined responsibility for his father's controversial remarks.
An article appearing in The Times on Christmas Day, 1845 created an international scandal by accusing O'Connell of being one of the worst landlords in Ireland. His tenants were pictured as "living in abject poverty and neglect". The Irish press, however, was quick to observe that this was a description of famine conditions and to dismiss the report as a politically motivated attack.
Courtesy -- wikipedia
- Denzil O Connell