Daniel O'Connell - Early life, Campaigning for Catholic Emancipation, Campaign for "Repeal of the Union"
Irish Catholic political leader, born near Cahirciveen, Co Kerry, SW Ireland. He became a lawyer, and in 1823 formed the Catholic Association, which successfully fought elections against the landlords. His election as MP for Co Clare precipitated a crisis in Wellington's government, which eventually granted Catholic Emancipation (1829), enabling him to take his seat in the Commons. In 1840 he founded the Repeal Association, and agitation to end the union with Britain increased. In 1844 he was imprisoned for 14 weeks on a charge of sedition. In conflict with the Young Ireland movement (1846), and failing in health, he left Ireland in 1847.
Daniel O'Connell (6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847) (Irish: Dónal Ó Conaill), known as The Liberator or The Emancipator, was Ireland's predominant political leader in the first half of the nineteenth century who championed the cause of the down-trodden Catholic population. He campaigned for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Union between Ireland and Great Britain.
He is remembered in Ireland as the founder of a non-violent form of Irish nationalism and also for the mobilisation of the Catholic community as a political force in order to achieve emancipation.
Early life
Born in Carhen, near Cahersiveen, County Kerry, to a once-wealthy Roman Catholic family. O'Connell, under the patronage of his wealthy bachelor uncle, Maurice (Hunting Cap) O'Connell, studied at Douai in France, and was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1794, transferring to Dublin's King's Inns two years later.
While in Dublin studying for the law O'Connell was under his Uncle Maurice's instructions not to become involved in any militia activity. When Wolfe Tone's French invasion fleet entered Bantry Bay in December, 1796, O'Connell found himself in a quandary.
On 19 May 1798, O'Connell was called to the Irish Bar and became a barrister. O'Connell did not support the rebellion;
Campaigning for Catholic Emancipation
He returned to politics in the 1810s, campaigning for Catholic Emancipation, that is, the repeal of all anti-Catholic legislation enforced in Ireland. O'Connell set up the Catholic Association in order to campaign for Catholic Emancipation. The money was used to campaign for Catholic Emancipation, specifically funding pro-emancipation Members of Parliament (MPs) standing for the British House of Commons.
As part of his campaign for Catholic Emancipation, O'Connell stood in a by-election to the British House of Commons in 1828 for County Clare for a seat vacated by William Vesey Fitzgerald, another supporter of the Catholic Association. After O'Connell won the seat, he was unable to take it because of his refusal to take an oath to the King as head of the Church of England. The Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, and the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, even though they opposed Catholic emancipation, saw that denying O'Connell his seat would cause outrage and could lead to another rebellion or uprising.
Peel and Wellington managed to convince George IV that Catholic emancipation and the right of Catholics and Presbyterians and members of all Christian faiths other than the established Church of Ireland to sit in Parliament needed to be passed; (Jews and other non-Christians got the right to sit in Parliament in 1858.)
Ironically, considering O'Connell's dedication to peaceful methods of political agitation, his greatest political achievement ushered in a period of violence in Ireland. A flaw in his achievement was that one of the most unpopular features of the Penal Laws remained in the form of the obligation for all working people to support the Anglican Church (i.e., the Church of Ireland) by payments known as Tithes. Although opposed to the use of force, O'Connell successfully defended participants in the battle of Carrickshock when all the defendants were successfully acquitted.
In 1841, Daniel O'Connell became the first Roman Catholic Lord Mayor of Dublin since the reign of King James II of England and Ireland and VII of Scotland, who was the last Roman Catholic monarch in the British Isles. Nonetheless O'Connell rejected Sharman Crawford's call for the complete abolition of tithes in 1838, as he felt he could not embarrass the Whigs (the Lichfield house compact secured an alliance between Whigs, radicals and Irish MPs in 1835).
Campaign for "Repeal of the Union"
O'Connell also campaigned for Repeal of the Act of Union, which in 1801 merged the Parliaments of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In order to campaign for Repeal, O'Connell set up the Repeal Association. He argued for the re-creation of an independent Kingdom of Ireland to govern itself, with Queen Victoria as the Queen of Ireland. Despite appeals from his supporters, O'Connell refused to defy the authorities and he called off the meeting.
This did not prevent him being jailed for sedition, although he was released after 3 months by the British House of Lords. Having deprived himself of his most potent weapon, the monster meeting, O'Connell failed to make any more progress in the campaign for Repeal. His followers deserted him in droves to the refrain of "He should have called us out" and the disappointment led to a group of supporters involved in the pro-Repeal paper The Nation forming Young Ireland under Charles Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel, William Smith O'Brien and Thomas Davis (all of whom were Protestants except for Gavan Duffy) espousing more militant means of winning Irish independence though largely sharing his social conservatism.
Political beliefs and programme
A critic of violent insurrection in Ireland, O'Connell once said that the freedom of Ireland was not worth the spilling of one drop of blood, although his killing of John D'Esterre in a duel in 1815 indicates that this belief did not include matters of "gentlemanly honour".
Politically, he focused on parliamentary and populist methods to force change and made regular declarations of his loyalty to the British Crown. Successive British governments continued to ignore this advice, long after his death, although he succeeded in extracting by the sheer force of will and the power of the Catholic peasants and clergy much of what he wanted, i.e. and amending the Oath of Allegiance so as to remove clauses offensive to Roman Catholics, such as himself, who refused to take the Oath until it was sanitized of anti-Roman Catholic language, requirements and clauses. Though a native speaker of the Irish language, O'Connell encouraged Irish people to learn English in order to better themselves.
And although he is best known for the campaign for Catholic Emancipation;
Death and legacy
O'Connell died of heart disease in 1847 in Genoa, Italy while on a pilgrimage to Rome at the age of 71, his term in prison having seriously weakened him.
O'Connell is known in Ireland as "The Liberator" for his success in achieving Catholic Emancipation. Though Charles Stewart Parnell (who dominated Irish politics in the last quarter of the nineteenth century) is more usually associated with the title, O'Connell was also popularly described as The Uncrowned King of Ireland.
O'Connell admired Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar, and one of his sons, Morgan O'Connell was a volunteer officer in Bolívar's army at the age of 15 in 1820.
There is a museum commemorating him in Derrynane House, near the village of Derrynane, County Kerry, which was once owned by his family.
Family
In 1802 O'Connell married his cousin Mary O'Connell.
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