20

Daniel O'Connell

1775–1847

 

It may seem strange to place Daniel O'Connell only in twentieth place in this list, long after other patriots and public figures.  Gladstone called O'Connell 'the greatest popular leader the world has ever seen'.  His influence was certainly great, but it was also marred.  If he had managed to achieve all he wished or his people wanted, he would have been further up the scale.  But he did not, and that was his tragedy and Ireland's.

      The creator of the modern Irish democracy sprang from the old Irish rural world of Kerry. O'Connell's people were not peasants, however, but Catholic landlords in their own right, whose wealth derived partly from a vigorous smuggling business.

      He was born near Cahirciveen in August 1775, and was adopted by his uncle Maurice (Hunting Cap) O'Connell, the head of the family.  Daniel spoke Gaelic and was reared in contact with the realities of rural Irish life.  He knew country people thoroughly, a knowledge that served him well in later life, both as a lawyer and a political leader.

      As there were then no schools in Ireland for landed Catholics, he was sent to college abroad at St Omer and Douai in France.  There he was exposed to the bloodier sights of revolutionary France, which gave him a lifelong loathing of political violence.  The school was expelled from France by order of the government, the boys being jeered by the crowds and forced to wear the tricoleur of the revolution.  O'Connell's last gesture as the boat sailed out of Calais was to tear the cockade from his hat and throw it into the sea.  His contemporary WOLFE TONE [11] saw such violence as the nation's salvation.  O'Connell was wiser.

      He studied law in London at the Lincoln's Inns and read widely in European literature.  His reading took him to the position of Catholic liberalism and laissez-faire economics, which would remain his political view to the end of his life.  He was called to the Irish bar in 1798, the year of rebellion in Ireland, in which Tone took part.  The appalling scenes throughout the island in the wake of that aborted uprising confirmed his prejudice against revolution.

      In 1805, he married his cousin, Mary O'Connell, raising with her a large and energetic family.  He got up at four o'clock every morning and worked on his papers till ten.  With hard work he became a figure of substance on the southern legal circuit.  Surprisingly for a Catholic, he was also an active Freemason, involved in lodges in Tralee, Cork, and Dublin.

      Dublin, of which he was later to be lord mayor and over whose main thoroughfare a huge statue of him now looms, was resolutely controlled by Protestant interests.  In 1815 he bitterly attacked the corporation, and the exchange of personalities led to him being challenged to a duel by alderman John D'Esterre.  O'Connell did not have the reputation as a duellist that D'Esterre did, but in the duel it was D'Esterre who was fatally wounded.  The memory of the duel haunted O'Connell for the rest of his life.  He wrote at once to Mrs D'Esterre, who accepted a pension from O'Connell for her daughter, which was paid for thirty years, until his death.  He never went to communion again without wearing a white glove on his right hand, and in passing the D'Esterre house he would raise his hat and pray for the repose of D'Esterre's soul.

      After 1798, the Act of Union had promised Catholic emancipation, but this was resisted.  In 1823 O'Connell began the Catholic Association, which introduced a new notion.  Hitherto politics had been the preserve of the few, and was financed by them.  O'Connell now proposed a 'Catholic rent'; 'a penny a month, a shilling a year' was to be the basic contribution.  Backed by the clergy, it yielded £1,000 a week.  O'Connell did not become rich out of this, for it was for party purposes.  But in an age of democracy it introduced the technique by which political parties of all kinds would fund themselves.

      O'Connell's great work was toward the achievement of the Catholic Relief Bill of 1829.  In Ireland this is often seen as a measure only for Ireland, but of course it affected Catholics in the public life of the United Kingdom as a whole.  Through the Catholic Association he created the first countrywide political organization, the forerunner of the modern parliamentary parties.  He was elected from Clare in 1828, and emancipation was conceded the next year.

      Leaving the bar and relying on an annual collection to maintain his family, he turned to the frustration of repealing, if he could, the Act of Union.  But though he was not a separatist in the way Wolfe Tone and other republicans had been, the fear of an independent Ireland (such as had flourished briefly under Henry Grattan in the last two decades of the eighteenth century) was not appealing to British leaders.  Through the difficult 1830s he persisted, but it was only when the Whigs fell from power in 1841 that the repeal movement began to take on energy.  O'Connell was elected lord mayor of Dublin, and began to hold enormous meetings around the country, one at Tara attracting three-quarters of a million people.  Another was to be held at Clontarf and people were already gathering when the government banned it.  O'Connell, fearful of exposing his unarmed followers to army guns, called it off.  This loss of nerve, as it seemed to young men around the nation, was a turning point.  O'Connell was arrested and jailed but soon released.  Old, tired, and ill, he had no resources left; there were rifts in the association and crop failures.  He left Ireland, and after a last speech in the House of Commons, set out to visit Rome, but died on the way in Genoa in May 1847,

      Balzac said that O'Connell 'incarnated a whole people', and his European reputation among liberals was immense.  He remains a controversial figure, but there is no doubting the extraordinary effect he had (for all his faults) on the Irish people.  That Ireland remains a democracy, which has been unswayed by the further assaults of revolutionary violence upon its civic institutions, can be seen as his greatest legacy.  In the distracted decades since his death it is no small one.