O'CONNEL, DANIELE. – Statesman, born at Carhen on 6 August 1775, died at Genoa on 15 May 1847. Having obtained a degree in law in England, he began his legal career in 1798.
Only a few years earlier, Catholic lawyers had been granted permission to plead before the British courts, and he took advantage of this to undertake the defense of his fellow believers in numerous trials brought against Irish farmers who refused to pay the legally prescribed tithes to the Anglican Church; thus his legal activity was soon transformed into an ardent work of Catholic apostolate and nationalist propaganda. When, following the Irish insurrection of 1798, Minister Pitt had the Union Act between England and Ireland proclaimed in 1800—with the consequence that the Dublin Parliament was suppressed and one hundred Irish deputies were admitted to the House of Commons and twenty-eight Irish peers to the House of Lords—O'C. became the most energetic opponent of the ill-fated measure, and he devoted all his energies to the repeal of the Union Act, in a battle that was to last throughout his life. At the same time he began another equally strenuous struggle: that of obtaining legal equality between Catholics and Protestants—or, as it was then called, «emancipation»—and here, after twenty-nine years of prodigious oratorical and political activity, he prevailed: the Catholic Relief Bill, which restored to Catholics all the civil and political rights denied to them, was in fact enacted in 1829.
Meanwhile O'C. worked on social foundations to awaken a consciousness among the great mass of Irish peasants, harassed by Anglican landlords. Thus the Catholic Association was born in 1822, which the English government repeatedly dissolved as seditious and which O'C. reconstituted just as many times under different names and with an unchanged program. Elected to the House of Commons in 1828, his election was contested because he was a Catholic; but after the promulgation of the aforementioned Bill, he was triumphantly elected. From that day onward, he sat permanently in the House of Commons and fought there the most courageous battles in defense of his religion and his nation.
In 1835 he reached an agreement with the Liberal Party (the Lichfield House pact) to reduce the amount of the tithes in favor of the Anglican Church; in 1836 he created the Ireland General Association, in 1838 the Precursor Society, and in 1840 the Loyal National Repeal Association, which aimed at the repeal of the Union Act of 1800. To spread it among every stratum of the population, O'C. introduced
the practice of the so-called Meetings monstres, imposing popular gatherings held weekly from one town to another. Concerned, the government in London ordered that they be interrupted and communicated this decision to O'C. on 7 October 1843, on the eve of a meeting called at Clontarf. He obeyed, but was nevertheless arrested as a rebel and sentenced, in March 1844, to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of £2,000, despite being a Member of Parliament and mayor of Dublin. Having lodged an appeal before the Upper House, he himself challenged the validity of the sentence before the Lords, in a speech that was perhaps the high point of his career; and the English peers set him free on 4 September 1844.
O'C.'s return to Ireland, after his acquittal, aroused national jubilation; but that day of genuine apotheosis also marked the beginning of his political decline, since the most ardent nationalists accused him of yielding to the Government’s demands, both by calling off the Clontarf meeting and by agreeing to debate his sentence instead of giving the signal for revolt. The Young Ireland was in fact established against the associations founded by O'C., with an explicitly insurrectionary program, which he was compelled to repudiate because he intended to maintain the movement for revision of the Act of Union within the strictest legality.
Deeply embittered by this split—officially in June 1846—he decided to travel to Rome to seek counsel from Pope Pius IX; but having reached Genoa, he was overtaken by death on 15 May 1847. In his will he left it written that he bequeathed his soul to heaven, his body to Ireland, and his heart to Rome. His remains, which were accorded royal honors, rest in the cemetery of Glasnevin, while his heart was placed at S. Agata dei Goti, then the seat of the Irish Seminary de Urbe.
A substantial selection of his speeches was collected by Cusack in 1875, while Fitzpatrick published a large part of his correspondence: The political and private Correspondence of D. O'C., London 1888.