Daniel O'Connell (Irish: Dónall Ó Conaill; 6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847), hailed in his time as The Liberator, was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century. His mobilisation 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 (being internationally renowned as an abolitionist) but he failed in his declared objective for Ireland – the repeal of the Act of Union 1800 and the restoration of an Irish Parliament.
In 1843, the Dublin Castle administration used troops to induce O'Connell to call a halt to an unprecedented campaign of open-air mass meetings. The loss of prestige, combined with the perceived indifference to the Great Famine of the Whigs whom he had supported in government , dispirited and divided his following. In his final year, criticism of his political compromises and of his system of patronage split the national movement that he had singularly led.
Irish nationalists continued to dispute O'Connell's legacy — honoured in 1922 in the renaming of Dublin's principal thoroughfare. Biographers have suggested that his combination of confessional politics and liberal principle, which had early imitators in Germany, was a forerunner of European Christian democracy.
O'Connell was born at Carhan House, 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 childless 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 younger brother Maurice were sent to continue their schooling in France at the English Jesuit college of Saint-Omer. Revolutionary upheaval and their mob denunciation as "young priests" and "little aristocrats", persuaded them in January 1793 to flee their Benedictine 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.
After further legal studies in London, including a pupillage at Lincoln's Inn, O'Connell returned to Ireland in 1795. The Roman Catholic Relief Act 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 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, belatedly, 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." Whatever the case, O'Connell had little faith in the United Irishmen 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 to renew the rebellion against what was now a United Kingdom crown and parliament, O'Connell declared that 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.
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, Ellen (1805–1883), an accomplished poet, 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). In time, each of the boys was to join their father as Members of Parliament. Despite O'Connell's early infidelities, the marriage was happy and Mary's death in 1836 was a blow from which her husband is said never to have recovered.
O'Connell's personal principles reflected the influences of the Enlightenment and of radical and democratic thinkers some of whom he had encountered in London and in masonic lodges. He was greatly influenced by William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (public opinion the root of all power, civil liberty and equality the bedrock of social stability), and was, for a period, converted to Deism by his reading of Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason.
By 1809, he had returned to the Church, "becoming thereafter more devout by the year". Yet in the 1820s, he was still regarded by some as an "English rationalist utilitarian", a "Benthamite". For a time Jeremy Bentham and O'Connell did become personal friends as well as political allies.
At Westminster O'Connell played a major part in the passage of the Reform Act 1832 and in the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (an international cause in which he continued to campaign). He spoke in defence of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, censured flogging in the army and opposed the death penalty for all but murder. He welcomed the revolutions of 1830 in Belgium and France, and advocated "a complete severance of the Church from the State". Such liberalism (as "thorough", William Ewart Gladstone suggested, as that of an English liberal with "no Ireland to think of") made all the more intolerable to O'Connell the charge that as "Papists" he and his co-religionists could not be trusted with the defence of constitutional liberties.
O'Connell protested that, while "sincerely Catholic", he did not "receive" his politics "from Rome". At the same time, he insisted on the political independence of the Church. In 1808 "friends of emancipation", Henry Grattan among them, proposed that fears of Popery might be allayed if the Crown were accorded the same right exercised by continental monarchs, a veto on the confirmation of Catholic bishops. Even when, in 1814, the Curia itself (then in a silent alliance with Britain against Napoleon) proposed that bishops be "personally acceptable to the king", O'Connell was unyielding in his opposition. Refusing any instruction from Rome as to "the manner of their emancipation", O'Connell declared that Irish Catholics should be content to "remain forever without emancipation" rather than allow the king and his ministers "to interfere" with the Pope's appointment of their senior clergy.
In his travels in Ireland in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on the "unbelievable unity between the Irish clergy and the Catholic population". The people looked to the clergy, and the clergy "rebuffed" by the "upper classes" ("Protestants and enemies"), had "turned all its attention to the lower classes; it has the same instincts, the same interests and the same passions as the people; [a] state of affairs altogether peculiar to Ireland". Such was the unity, O'Connell argued, the bishops would have sacrificed had they agreed to Rome submitting their appointments for Crown approval. Licensed by the government they and their priests would have been as little regarded as the Anglican clergy of the Established Church.