O'CONNELL, DANIEL. - Statesman, b. at Carhen on 6 Aug. 1775, d. at Genoa on 15 May 1847. Having obtained a degree in law in England, in 1798 he began his forensic career.
Only a few years earlier had Catholic lawyers been permitted to practice before the British courts, and he availed himself of this to undertake the defense of his coreligionists in numerous trials brought against Irish farmers who refused to pay the legal tithes to the Anglican Church, so that his legal activity was soon transformed into an ardent work of Catholic apostolate and nationalist propaganda. When, following the Irish insurrection of 1798, the minister Pitt had the Union Act between England and Ireland proclaimed in 1800 - with the consequence of abolishing the Dublin Parliament and admitting one hundred Irish deputies to the House of Commons and twenty-eight Irish Peers to that of the Lords -, O'C. was the most energetic opponent of the ill-fated measure, and to the revocation of the Union Act he devoted all his energies, in a battle that was to last his whole life. At the same time he began another equally strenuous struggle: that of obtaining the legal equalization of Catholics and Protestants - or, as it was then called, "emancipation" -; and here, after twenty-nine years of prodigious oratorical and political activity, he won: the Catholic Relief Bill, which restored to Catholics all the civil and political rights that had been denied them, was in fact promulgated in 1829.
Meanwhile O'C. worked on social foundations to awaken a conscience in the great mass of Irish peasants, harassed by Anglican landowners. Thus in 1822 the Catholic Association was born, which the English government dissolved several times as seditious and O'C. just as many times reconstituted under different names and with an unchanged program. Elected deputy to the Commons in 1828, the election was contested because he was a Catholic; but after the promulgation of the aforementioned Bill, he was triumphantly elected. From that day, he sat permanently in the House of Commons and there fought the most courageous battles in defense of his religion and his nation.
In 1835 he came to an agreement with the Liberal Party (pact of Lichfield House) to reduce the amount of tithes in favor of the Anglican Church; he created in 1836 the Ireland General Association, in 1838 the Precursor Society, in 1840 the Loyal National Repeal Association, which proposed the revocation of the Union Act of 1800. In order to spread it among every stratum of the population, O'C. introduced the use of the so-called Meetings monstres, imposing popular gatherings held weekly from town to town. Alarmed, the London government ordered that they be interrupted and communicated this decision to O'C. on 7 Oct. 1843, on the eve of a meeting called at Clontarf. He obeyed, but was nonetheless arrested as a rebel and sentenced, in March 1844, to a year of imprisonment and a fine of 2000 pounds, despite being a deputy in Parliament and mayor of Dublin. Having lodged an appeal before the Upper House, he himself challenged the validity of the sentence before the Lords, with a speech that is perhaps the highest of his career; and the Peers of England set him free on 4 Sept. 1844.
O'C.'s return to Ireland, after the acquittal, aroused national rejoicing; but that day of authentic apotheosis also marked the beginning of his political decline, in that the most fervent nationalists accused him of having yielded to the Government's impositions, both for having called off the Clontarf rally and for having agreed to discuss his conviction instead of giving the signal for revolt. Against the associations founded by O'C., in fact, The young Ireland was formed, with a clearly insurrectionary program, which he had to disavow because he intended to keep the movement for revision against the Act of Union within the strictest legality.
Deeply embittered by this split - officially in June 1846 - he decided to make a journey to Rome to consult with Pope Pius IX: but having reached Genoa, he was overtaken by death, on 15 May 1847. In his will he left written instructions to bequeath his soul to heaven, his body to Ireland and his heart to Rome. His remains, to which royal honors were rendered, rest in the Glasnevin cemetery and his heart was deposited at S. Agata dei Goti, then the seat of the Irish Seminary de Urbe.
A rich 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.
Bibliography2 works
Renzo U. Montini