Irish statesman; b. Carhen, Cahirciveen, Co. Kerry, Aug. 6, 1775; d. Genoa, Italy, May 15, 1847. O'Connell was the eldest son of Morgan (1739–1809) and Catherine (O'Mullane) O'Connell. The O'Connells farmed and traded in Kerry, where their ancestors had held military and church offices before the wholesale confiscation of Irish land by Oliver Cromwell. On the advice of an uncle, Count Daniel Charles O'Connell (1745–1833), a distinguished French general, Daniel was sent for education to the Austrian Netherlands—first to the English College at St. Omer (1791) and, the following year, to the Douay English College. Early in 1793, the French overran this area and O'Connell went to London, where he studied law until 1797; he was called to the Irish bar in 1798. In 1802 he married his cousin Mary, daughter of Dr. Thomas O'Connell of Tralee.
Emancipation Advocate. O'Connell had been an able student. His diary reveals that he had grasped quite clearly the idea of the English common law, and particularly the concept of the rights of the subject. He was one of the first Catholic lawyers permitted to practice in Ireland after the first anti-Catholic penal laws were modified. O'Connell, one day to be called "the Liberator," was quickly drawn toward the defense of his coreligionists whose political ambitions were being frustrated by the refusal of emancipation. In 1797 he had been associated with the revolutionary society of United Irishmen and also had joined the volunteer artillery corps of the Dublin lawyers. Yet he took no part in the rebellion of 1798. From 1799 for at least ten years he was a freemason—the Irish bishops did not implement papal condemnations of freemasonry until much later. O'Connell was instrumental in securing the reelection as grand master of Richard Hely-Hutchinson, Lord Donoughmore (1756–1825), a man whose services in the cause of Catholic emancipation he greatly admired. O'Connell probably ended his connection with the freemasons before 1824, and apparently on the advice of Abp. John troy (1739–1823).
A highly successful barrister who was earning nearly £8,000 a year by the late 1820s, he was particularly effective in cross-examination, and in defense. His aggressive technique gave courage to Catholics long exploited legally by the Protestant ascendancy. But his method, as in the John Magee case (1814), while it weakened the reputation of opponents, was not always fully effective; the loss of one of his cases could entail the imposition of heavy punishments on his clients. Magee, for example, was imprisoned and fined for publishing criminal libels against the government.
As early as 1800 O'Connell had spoken at a meeting of Dublin Catholics in opposition to the legislative union with Great Britain; his position was contrary to the views of many of the bishops and upperclass laymen. During his 30-year career as a lawyer he gave much time to the successive Catholic organizations that attempted to secure political and social equality. Until 1812 the most important of these was the Irish Catholic Committee on which O'Connell replaced John Keogh (1740–1817) in the year (1807) when the policy of petitioning Parliament for the abrogation of the penal laws was again taken up systematically. This committee was suppressed by the government in 1812 and was succeeded by the Irish Catholic Board, of which O'Connell was also made a member. In 1813 English members of Parliament, who were pro-Catholic and who believed emancipation could be secured, introduced relief measures. These empowered the government by arrangement with the Holy See to exercise a veto on nominees to bishoprics in Great Britain and Ireland. The proposal was acceptable to the papal secretary of Propaganda G. B. (later Cardinal) Quarantotti, but the bill was abandoned because of the opposition of Bp. John Milner (1752–1826) and of O'Connell, whose views were those of the majority of the board. O'Connell's objection was that if the veto power was thus conceded, the clergy would appear to be civil servants, and in that role would forfeit the people's confidence. For this same reason O'Connell later rejected several relief bills introduced by Henry Grattan (1746–1820). Furthermore, O'Connell had hopes that if Grattan's friends, the Whigs, failed in their purpose, he could secure it through pro-Catholic Tories such as William Conyngham Plunket (1764–1854). For these reasons, also, he avoided committing himself on the subject of parliamentary reform. This issue had become associated with the Whig opposition to the Tory government of Robert Banks Jenkinson, second Earl of Liverpool (1770–1828). At this point of history, however, the pro-Catholic Tories were too weak to be truly effective and, accordingly, on April 25, 1823, O'Connell and Richard Lalor Sheil (1791–1851) started the Catholic Association, which charged membership dues of one shilling a year. Within 12 months O'Connell had gained a nationwide support, which had been effectively organized by the diocesan clergy and by the Catholic professional classes.
Alarmed at this development, the government introduced an act to suppress all such societies (1825). O'Connell went to London to promote a Catholic petition; he was persuaded by Plunket and Sir Francis Burdett (1770–1844) to accept a relief bill balanced by provisions for state payment of Catholic clergy and for disfranchisem*nt of 40-shilling freeholders. Despite support by a majority of government ministers in the House of Commons, the proposal was defeated in the House of Lords, a vote largely influenced by a speech of the prime minister Lord Liverpool. In July of the same year, O'Connell organized the New Catholic Association, which in the general election of 1826 achieved spectacular successes and which ended the monopoly of political control of the freeholders in Waterford, Louth, and Monaghan. The government now began to fear that O'Connell would make it impossible for them to win Irish elections.
It was in this atmosphere that Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769–1852), who succeeded as
prime minister in 1828, now was obliged to give way on the emancipation issue, for O'Connell had himself defeated the government supporter, William Vesey-Fitz Gerald (1783–1843), at a by-election for Co. Clare. Since Wellington was in power, the Irish Catholic Association had decided to oppose the reelection of any member accepting office from the government. Although Vesey-Fitz Gerald had been favorable to Catholic emancipation, his defeat made it clear that the government risked losing supporters, and that it dare not risk a general election. Such an election in Ireland would almost certainly result in the return of a solid bloc of pro-Catholics hostile to the government's policy.
O'Connell's victory, by a vote of 2057 to 982, was regarded as the death knell of landlord control of freeholders' votes. The clergy had utilized every influence in stimulating their people to believe that the issue was essentially a religious one. Thus, to Wellington, emancipation became a necessary concession in a final effort to ensure "that the Irish nobility and gentry would recover their lost influence, the just influence of property." It was the great merit of O'Connell that his efforts helped to build for the Irish masses the growing power that led to eventual control of their elected representatives. The passage of the act of Catholic emancipation, however, was accompanied by the statutory abolition both of the Catholic Association and of the voting rights of the 40-shilling freeholders (1829). Only those Catholics who would take an oath of allegiance to the British king, and thereby deny the temporal power of the pope in the United Kingdom, might thus secure legal exemption from the penal laws. Future members of religious orders need not expect such protection. Even O'Connell himself, without reelection, could not take his seat in Parliament unless he first subscribed to the anti-Catholic oath and declaration made applicable to all members before the Clare election. That no one dared oppose his reelection was some indication that the center of political gravity in Ireland had changed permanently.
Further Political Struggles. For some years after 1829, O'Connell's connections with Catholic issues were peripheral. His attempt to organize a nondenominational movement to repeal the union of the British and Irish parliaments was unsuccessful. He was feared by the dominant Protestant ascendancy, which in any case was not prepared to share its power. Determined to break that power, O'Connell appealed to the parliamentary reformers and to the democracy. In November 1830, Wellington, convinced that he could no longer prevent reform, retired and was succeeded as prime minister by Charles Grey (Viscount Howick and Earl Grey, 1764–1845). With O'Connell's support, this Whig leader secured the passage of the great reform act of 1832, which abolished many unrepresentative boroughs and gave to the upper middle class some share in political power. The Irish act (1833), which maintained many of the unrepresentative bulwarks of Protestant ascendancy, was less satisfactory. Further, social equality was still denied to farming Catholics who now began to refuse to pay tithes to Protestant clergy. The result was that a new form of agrarian revolt, partly countenanced by the Catholic clergy, became common. After 1834, under Grey's successor, William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne (1779–1848), O'Connell made more progress in securing "justice for Ireland" and in particular for the Catholics. A reform administration in Dublin, one particularly influential among the police, abandoned the habit of equating loyalists and Protestants. Catholics were slowly admitted to government offices, but legislative reforms did not go beyond converting tithes into a rent charge upon lands (1838), and abolishing the more indefensible parliamentary boroughs (1840). Meanwhile, since 1830 the existence of a nondenominational system of elementary education was causing increased Catholic and Protestant resentment particularly on the part of Abp. John machale] (1791–1881) of Tuam; his opposition led him to support O'Connell who had revived the repeal of the union question in the Precursor Society in 1838. O'Connell convinced MacHale that the Repeal Association, established in 1839, would prevent the Tory government of Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), Melbourne's successor (1841), from reestablishing Protestant ascendancy, or, at the least, from permanently obstructing further Catholic emancipation. With renewed clerical support in most parts of the country (Abp. Daniel murray of Dublin almost alone held aloof) O'Connell organized an enthusiastic national following. Despite his confident predictions of success for this great moral movement in 1843, Peel secured O'Connell's imprisonment for seditious conspiracy (June 30, 1844). He was released, after a successful appeal, three months later. Catholic Ireland treated this event as an occasion for spiritual rejoicing; even Archbishop Murray took part by sanctioning a Te Deum. Meanwhile, Peel had endeavored to divert Catholics from the Repeal Association by supporting a more moderate policy, which featured the state endowment of nondenominational higher colleges and a substantially increased subsidization of St. Patrick's of Maynooth. Through a bequests act, Peel also offered improved facilities for Catholic charities. A simultaneous approach was made to Rome to discourage Irish ecclesiastical involvement in politics. This attempt boomeranged when MacHale insisted on the danger to Catholicism from the colleges and bequests bills. Unfairly, O'Connell argued that the bequests law would be used to bar charities to religious orders. Rome ultimately condemned the legislation for colleges but not the bequests act. Immediately afterward, O'Connell was able to influence the clergy against that more militant group in the Repeal Association, the Young Irelanders, who were opposed to a renewed Irish alliance with the Whigs who had returned to power under Prime Minister Lord John Russell in June 1846. Rather than deny the right to resort to force in any extremity, the Young Irelanders left the Repeal Association.
Thereafter O'Connell desired to persuade the state to take measures to counteract the potato blight, which had first appeared in the autumn of the preceding year. The attempt was unsuccessful; the Whig government proved incapable of arresting the catastrophe, now known as the "Great Famine." Within ten years, the resultant fever, starvation, and emigration reduced by 25 percent the population of Ireland, which had once been more than eight million.
After O'Connell's death from a sudden cerebral illness, suffered at Genoa while he was on a pilgrimage to Rome, his son Daniel was received by Pope Pius IX. Under that pope's auspices a two-day funeral oration for O'Connell was delivered by Gioacchino ventura diraulica (1792–1861). The speech glorified the union of religion and liberty.
O'Connell's religious convictions, apparently weakened in his youth, had been reinforced during his maturity, and were quite strong in his last years. Those years were, however, somewhat darkened by what seems to have been almost an obsession with the possibility of his eternal damnation.
O'Connell's Significance. This Irish statesman was the greatest single influence in the emergence of Irish political nationalism. He linked the constitutional movement of Grattan and of the 18th-century Protestant patriots to the emancipated Catholics. In his appeal to the masses he was closer to Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98) and to the United Irishmen than to Grattan, though in his mature years he opposed both the use of physical force and of revolutionary methods. His substitution of the clergy for the landlords as the local leaders of the people strengthened their mutual ties even after clerical interference at the end of the career of Parnell had weakened the Church's relations with the nationalists. A friend to Catholic liberal Europe and a forceful supporter of the advocates of Negro emancipation in America, O'Connell's influence on Irish nationalism helped to shape the 20th-century Republic of Ireland.
Bibliography: r. d. edwards, "The Contribution of Young Ireland to the Development of the National Idea," in Essays Presented to T. Ua Donnchadha, ed. s. pender (Cork 1947). a. houston, ed., D. O'Connell: His Early Life, and Journal, 1795 to 1802 (London 1906). d. o'connell, A Memoir on Ireland, Native and Saxon (Dublin 1843; 2d ed. 1844). j. o'connell, ed., Life and Speeches of D. O'Connell, 2 v. (Dublin 1846), by his son. w. j. fitzpatrick, ed., Correspondence of D. O'Connell, 2 v. (London 1888). O'Connell MSS in National Library of Ireland, and University College Dublin. j. a. reynolds, The Catholic Emancipation Crisis in Ireland, 1823–1829 (New Haven 1954). j. f. broderick, The Holy See and the Irish Movement for the Repeal of the Union with England, 1829–1847 (Rome 1951). c. g. duffy, Young Ireland, 1840–1849, 2 v. (2d ed. Dublin 1884–87). g. s. lefevre, Peel and O'Connell, a Review of Irish Policy (London 1887).
[r. d. edwards]
New Catholic Encyclopedia EDWARDS, R. D.
