Daniel O'Connell

Life

Daniel O'Connell was born on 6 August 1775 at Carhen, near Cahersiveen, County Kerry, into an old Gaelic Catholic family of Iveragh. Raised in his uncle's household at Derrynane, he received an unusually wide education for an Irish Catholic of his time, studying at the English Catholic colleges of Saint-Omer and Douai in France until the violence of the French Revolution forced him to flee in 1793. The horror he witnessed in revolutionary Paris confirmed in him a lifelong conviction that political change must be pursued by peaceful, constitutional means.

He was called to the Irish Bar in 1798 and built a successful legal practice. From 1815 onwards he gave himself to the cause of Catholic Emancipation, the lifting of the Penal Laws which still excluded Catholics from Parliament and from senior offices of state. In 1823, with Richard Lalor Sheil, he founded the Catholic Association, whose innovative 'Catholic Rent' of a penny a month enrolled the ordinary Catholic poor and gave the campaign a mass democratic base never before seen in Europe.

His decisive victory in the County Clare by-election of 1828, where he was elected though as a Catholic he could not legally take his seat, forced the British government of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel to concede Catholic Emancipation in April 1829. He took his seat at Westminster as one of the first Catholic MPs in modern British history.

From 1840 he led the Repeal Association, agitating peacefully for the dissolution of the Anglo-Irish Union of 1801. His vast 'monster meetings' of 1843 drew hundreds of thousands; the government banned the meeting at Clontarf and prosecuted him for conspiracy. By the time the Great Famine struck Ireland in 1845, he was a broken man.

He set out on pilgrimage to Rome to die in the city of the Pope, but reached only Genoa, where he died on 15 May 1847, aged 71. His heart was sent to Rome and his body returned to Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, beneath a great round tower.