Daniel O’Connell | Irish Political Leader & Activist (2024)

Daniel O’Connell (born Aug. 6, 1775, near Cahirciveen, County Kerry, Ire.—died May 15, 1847, Genoa, Kingdom of Sardinia [Italy]) was a lawyer who became the first great 19th-century Irish nationalist leader.

Compelled to leave the Roman Catholic college at Douai, France, when the French Revolution broke out, O’Connell went to London to study law, and in 1798 he was called to the Irish bar. His forensic skill enabled him to use the courts as nationalist forums. Although he had joined the Society of United Irishmen, a revolutionary society, as early as 1797, he refused to participate in the Irish Rebellion of the following year. When the Act of Union (which took effect Jan. 1, 1801) abolished the Irish Parliament, he insisted that the British Parliament repeal the anti-Catholic laws in order to justify its claim to represent the people of Ireland. From 1813 he opposed various Catholic relief proposals because the government, with the acquiescence of the papacy, would have had the right to veto nominations to Catholic bishoprics in Great Britain and Ireland. Although permanent political organizations of Catholics were illegal, O’Connell set up a nationwide series of mass meetings to petition for Catholic emancipation.

On May 12, 1823, O’Connell and Richard Lalor Sheil (1791–1851) founded the Catholic Association, which quickly attracted the support of the Irish priesthood and of lawyers and other educated Catholic laymen and which eventually comprised so many members that the government could not suppress it. In 1826, when it was reorganized as the New Catholic Association, it caused the defeat of several parliamentary candidates sponsored by large landowners. In County Clare in July 1828, O’Connell himself, although (as a Catholic) ineligible to sit in the House of Commons, defeated a man who tried to support both the British government and Catholic emancipation. This result impressed on the British prime minister, Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of Wellington, the need for making a major concession to the Irish Catholics. Following the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, O’Connell, after going through the formality of an uncontested reelection, took his seat at Westminster.

In April 1835 he helped to overthrow Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative ministry, and in the same year he entered into the “Lichfield House compact,” whereby he promised the Whig Party leaders a period of “perfect calm” in Ireland while the government enacted reform measures. O’Connell and his Irish adherents (known collectively as “O’Connell’s tail”) then aided in keeping the weak Whig administration of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, in office from 1835 to 1841. By 1839, however, O’Connell realized that the Whigs would do little more than the Conservatives for Ireland, and in 1840 he founded the Repeal Association to dissolve the Anglo-Irish legislative union. A series of mass meetings in all parts of Ireland culminated in O’Connell’s arrest for seditious conspiracy, but he was released on appeal after three months’ imprisonment (June–September 1844). Afterward his health failed rapidly, and the nationalist leadership fell to the radical Young Ireland group.