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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Daniel O'Connell Biography O'CONNELL, Daniel (1775–1847). An Irish national leader. He was the eldest son of an ancient but unimportant family of County Kerry, Ireland, and was born on Aug. 6, 1775. O'Connell received his first education from a hedge schoolmaster, but afterward, under the patronage of his uncle, Maurice O'Connell, attended Father Herrington's school at Cove and the Catholic colleges of Saint-Omer and Douai, France. His scholarship had just begun to win for him promises of a brilliant future when he was driven home prematurely by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and in 1794 he entered as a law student at Lincoln's Inn. In 1798 he was called to the Irish bar. By degrees, the Roman Catholic party having begun to rally from the prostration into which it had been thrown by the rebellion of 1798, O'Connell was drawn into public life, and his unquestioned ability soon made him a leader. He was an active member of all the successive associations which, under the various names of Catholic Board, Catholic Committee, Catholic Association, etc., were organized for the purpose of procuring the repeal of the civil disabilities of the Catholic body. Of the Catholic Association he was himself the originator, and by means of this association he created so formidable an agitation throughout Ireland that it gradually became apparent that the desired measures of relief would no longer be safely withheld. The crisis was precipitated by the bold expedient adopted by O'Connell, of causing himself to be elected member of Parliament for Clare in 1828, notwithstanding his incapacity to serve in Parliament in consequence of his being obliged to refuse the prescribed oaths of abjuration and supremacy, which then formed the ground of the exclusion of Roman Catholics from the Legislature. This step, although it failed to procure for O'Connell admission to Parliament at the time, led to discussions within the House and to agitations outside so formidable that in the beginning of the year 1829 the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel found it expedient to give way, and, deserting their party in the face of strenuous Tory and royal resistance, they introduced and carried through, in the spring of that year, the well-known measure of Catholic emancipation. O'Connell was at once reëlected and took his seat for Clare, and from that date until his death continued to sit in Parliament. During all these years he received, by means of an organized annual subsidy, a large yearly income from the voluntary contributions of the people, by whom he was idolized as their liberator, and who joined with him in all the successive agitations against the Act of Union, against the Protestant church establishment, and in favor of reform, in which he engaged. In the progress of more than one of these political agitations his associations were opposed by the government. The agitation for the repeal of the Union, begun in 1841, was carried on by monster meetings throughout Ireland, at which O'Connell himself was the chief speaker. This agitation assumed proportions so formidable that O'Connell, in common with several others, was indicted for a seditious conspiracy in 1843 and was convicted and sentenced to a year's imprisonment, with a fine of £2000. This judgment was reversed by the House of Lords, and O'Connell, on his discharge, resumed his career. But his health had suffered from confinement and still more from dissensions and opposition in the councils of his party; and since, on the return of the Whigs to power in 1846, he consented to support their government, the malcontents of the repeal association openly separated from him, and a bitter feud between young and old Ireland ensued. In this quarrel O'Connell steadfastly maintained his favorite precept of moral force, and was supported by the great body of the Catholic bishops and clergy; but his health gave way in the struggle. He was ordered to try a milder climate, and on his journey to Rome in the spring of 1847 he was suddenly seized with paralysis and died at Genoa on May 15 of that year. As a public speaker, and especially as a master of popular eloquence, he was almost unsurpassed in his day. His ability as a lawyer was of a high order. He published a single volume, A Memoir of Ireland, Native and Saxon, and a few pamphlets, the most important of which, as illustrating his personal history and character, is A Letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XVII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 358-359. |