71 Facts About Daniel O'Connell

Daniel O'Connell, hailed in his time as The Liberator, was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Roman Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century.

In 1843, a threat of military force induced Daniel O'Connell to call a halt to an unprecedented campaign of open-air mass meetings.

The poet Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill was an aunt; and Daniel Charles, Count O'Connell, an Irish Brigade officer in the service of the King of France, an uncle.

Daniel 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.

Toward the end of his life, Daniel O'Connell claimed, belatedly, to have been a United Irishman.

Daniel O'Connell sat out the rebellion in his native Kerry.

When in 1803, Robert Emmet faced execution for attempting to renew the insurrection against what was now a United Kingdom crown and parliament, of a Daniel O'Connell was scathing: as the cause of so much bloodshed Emmett had forfeited any claim to "compassion".

Daniel O'Connell was long ranked below less accomplished Queen's Counsels, a status not open to Catholics until late in his career.

Daniel O'Connell did so in defiance of his benefactor, his uncle Maurice, who believed his nephew should have sought out an heiress.

Daniel O'Connell was greatly influenced by William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and was, for a period, converted to Deism by his reading of Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason.

At Westminster Daniel O'Connell played a major part in the passage of the Reform Act 1832 and in the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.

Daniel O'Connell spoke in defence of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, censured flogging in the army and opposed the death penalty for all but murder.

Daniel O'Connell welcomed the revolutions of 1830 in Belgium and France, and advocated "a complete severance of the Church from the State".

Such was the unity, Daniel O'Connell argued, the bishops would have sacrificed had they agreed to Rome submitting their appointments for Crown approval.

In 1837, Daniel O'Connell clashed with William Smith O'Brien over the Limerick MP's support for granting state payments to Catholic clergy.

The Catholic Bishops came out in support of Daniel O'Connell's stance, resolving "most energetically to oppose any such arrangement, and that they look upon those that labour to effect it as the worst enemies of the Catholic religion".

Consistent with the position he had taken publicly in relation to the rebellions of 1798 and 1803, Daniel O'Connell focused on parliamentary representation and popular, but peaceful, demonstration to induce change.

Daniel O'Connell's critics were to see in his ability to mobilise the Irish masses an intimation of violence.

Daniel O'Connell insisted on his loyalty, greeting George IV effusively on his visit to Ireland in 1821.

In contrast to his later successor Charles Stewart Parnell, Daniel O'Connell was consistent in his defence of property.

Already in 1822 Daniel O'Connell had manoeuvred his principal foe, the Attorney General, William Saurin, into actions sufficiently intemperate to ensure his removal by the Lord Lieutenant.

Distressed by the killing, Daniel O'Connell offered D'Esterre's widow a pension.

Daniel O'Connell consented to an allowance for her daughter and this O'Connell paid regularly for more than thirty years until his death.

Some months later, Daniel O'Connell was engaged to fight a second duel with the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Robert Peel, Daniel O'Connell's repeated references to him as "Orange Peel" being the occasion.

In July 1828, Daniel O'Connell defeated a member of the British cabinet in a parliamentary by-election in County Clare.

Once in Parliament Daniel O'Connell did speak in favour of parliamentary reform, invoking "the great principle of democratic liberty" in support of a broader franchise.

In 1830, discounting evidence that "unfeeling men had given in favour of cultivating sheep and cattle instead of human beings", Daniel O'Connell sought repeal of the Sub-Letting Act which facilitated the clearings.

Daniel O'Connell's call for a repeal of the 1800 Act of Union, and for a restoration of the Kingdom of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782, which he linked to a multitude of popular grievances, may have been less a considered constitutional proposal than "an invitation to treat".

Daniel O'Connell did prepare the ground for the Home Rule compromise, eventually negotiated between Irish-nationalists and British Liberals from the 1880s to 1914.

Under the pressure of a choice between "effectual union or no union", Daniel O'Connell was seeking to maximise the scope of shorter-term, interim, reforms.

Daniel O'Connell failed to stall the application to Ireland of the new English Poor Law system of Workhouses in 1837, the prospect of which, as de Tocqueville found, was broadly dreaded in Ireland.

Daniel O'Connell's objection was that the poor-law charge would ruin a great proportion of landowners, further reducing the wage fund and increasing the poverty of the country.

In 1841, Daniel O'Connell became the first Roman Catholic Lord Mayor of Dublin since Terence MacDermott in the reign of James II.

In view of Thomas Francis Meagher, in return for damping down Repeal agitation, a "corrupt gang of politicians who fawned on Daniel O'Connell" were being allowed an extensive system of political patronage.

Daniel O'Connell seemed implicitly to concede the separateness of the Protestant North.

Daniel O'Connell spoke "invading" Ulster to rescue "our Persecuted Brethren in the North".

When in 1831 workers in the Dublin trades created their own political association, Daniel O'Connell moved to pack it.

The Trades Political Union was swamped by 5,000 mostly middle-class repealers who by acclaim carried Daniel O'Connell's resolution calling for the suppression of all secret and illegal combinations, particularly those "manifested among the labouring classes".

When in 1841 the Chartists held the first meeting of the Irish Universal Suffrage Association, a TPU mob broke it up, and Daniel O'Connell denounced the association's secretary, Peter Brophy as an Orangeman.

From England, where the Irish-born leader of Chartism Fergus O'Connor had joined the IUSA in solidarity, Brophy denounced Daniel O'Connell in turn as the "enemy of the unrepresented classes".

Karl Marx was of the view that Daniel O'Connell "always incited the Irish against the Chartists", and did so "because they too had inscribed Repeal on their banner".

The "people", the great numbers of tenant farmers, small-town traders and journeymen, whom Daniel O'Connell had rallied to the cause of Emancipation, did not similarly respond to his lead on the more abstract proposition of Repeal; neither did the Catholic gentry or middle classes.

Against a background of growing economic distress, Daniel O'Connell was nonetheless buoyed by Archbishop John McHale's endorsement of legislative independence.

Daniel O'Connell was becoming a figure of international renown, with large and sympathetic audiences in the United States, France and Germany.

At the Hill of Tara, on the feast-day of the Assumption, 15 August 1843, Daniel O'Connell gathered a crowd estimated in the hostile reporting of The Times as close to one million.

Daniel O'Connell planned to close the campaign on 8 October 1843 with an even larger demonstration at Clontarf, on the outskirts of Dublin.

Beckett suggests "Daniel O'Connell mistook the temper of the government", never expecting that "his defiance would be put to the test".

Daniel O'Connell cancelled the rally and sent out messengers to turn back the approaching crowds.

Daniel O'Connell was applauded by the Church, his more moderate supporters and English sympathisers.

When released after three months, the charges quashed on appeal to the House of Lords, Daniel O'Connell was paraded in triumph through Dublin on a gilded chariot.

Daniel O'Connell declared himself content to take a stand "for Old Ireland", and accused Davis of suggesting it was a "crime to be a Catholic".

Daniel O'Connell opposed the colleges bill to inflict a defeat on the Peel ministry and to hasten the Whigs' return to office.

The Young Irelanders' dismay only increased when at the end of June 1846 Daniel O'Connell appeared to succeed in this design.

Daniel O'Connell publicly distanced himself from The Nation setting Duffy up as editor for the prosecution that followed.

Daniel O'Connell championed the "civil and religious liberties" of people throughout the world including those of peasants in India, Maoris in New Zealand, Aborigines in Australia and Jews in Europe.

Daniel O'Connell was entirely undaunted: crowds gathered to hear him on Repeal were regularly treated to excursions on the evils of human traffic and bondage.

When in 1845, Frederick Douglass, touring Britain and Ireland following the publication of his Life of an American Slave, attended unannounced a meeting in Conciliation Hall, Dublin, he heard Daniel O'Connell explain to a roused audience:.

The black abolitionist, Charles Lenox Remond said that it was only on hearing Daniel O'Connell speak in London that he realised what being an abolitionist really meant: "every fibre of my heart contracted [when I] listened to the scorching rebukes of the fearless Daniel O'Connell".

Daniel O'Connell died, age 71, in May 1847 in Genoa, Italy of a softening of the brain.

In leading the charge against the Young Irelanders within the Repeal Association, John Daniel O'Connell had vied for the succession.

John Daniel 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.

An article appearing in The Times on Christmas Day, 1845 created an international scandal by accusing Daniel O'Connell of being one of the worst landlords in Ireland.

Daniel O'Connell's tenants were pictured as "living in abject poverty and neglect".

Sean O Faolain sympathised with the Young Irelanders but allowed that if the nation Daniel O'Connell helped call forth and "define" was Catholic and without the Protestant north it was because Daniel O'Connell was "the greatest of all Irish realists".

In 1922, following the creation of the Irish Free State, Daniel O'Connell was honoured in the renaming of Dublin's principal thoroughfare.

Daniel O'Connell had been "a follower and not a leader of the people".

Daniel O'Connell's aim had never risen above establishing the Irish people as "a free Catholic community".

Those who declared their continued fealty to the Republic that had been proclaimed in 1916 on what was now Daniel O'Connell Street, dismissed his legacy in similar terms.

Daniel O'Connell's statue stands at one end of the boulevard, the figure of Charles Stewart Parnell at the other.

Daniel O'Connell Streets exist in Athlone, Clonmel, Dungarvan, Ennis, Kilkee, Limerick, Sligo, and Waterford.

Daniel O'Connell's life was the subject of a 2022 feature film produced by Red Abbey Productions titled The Liberator.