A Life in Time: Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847) – ‘The Liberator’ Early life
Daniel O’Connell was born in 1775 in Cahirciveen, Co. Kerry. He was born into a wealthy Catholic middle-class family. He grew up amongst the tenant farmers of his uncle’s lands and learned both Irish and English. Like most sons of well-off Catholic families, he was sent to France to get a university education (Catholics were not permitted to go to Trinity College Dublin). His time in Paris overlapped with the very violent phase of the French Revolution known as ‘the Terror’, when thousands of people were executed for supposedly being enemies of the revolution. O’Connell returned home in 1793 with a lifelong hatred of political violence. He supported the aims of the United Irishmen in the 1798 Rebellion, but rejected their use of violence.
Catholic emancipation
O’Connell became a barrister. In 1811, he founded the Catholic Board to campaign for Catholic emancipation. This had a limited impact until he founded the Catholic Association in 1823 to campaign not just for emancipation, but also for the end of tithe payments and for the rights of tenant farmers. It was a mass membership organisation. The membership fee of one penny a month – low enough to be affordable to all but the poorest – was collected at church gates and became known as the ‘Catholic Rent’. This money funded the campaign, supported pro-emancipation MPs, paid the legal costs of those arrested for campaigning and paid for publicity material.
DID YOU KNOW?
Daniel O’Connell killed a man named John D’Esterre in a pistol duel in 1815!
In 1828, O’Connell stood in Clare for election to Westminster. He won the seat easily but refused to take the parliamentary oath and so was unable to take his seat. The British Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington (the only British Prime Minister to have been born in Ireland), feared another rebellion in Ireland if emancipation was not granted. Westminster passed the Emancipation Act in 1829 and O’Connell took his seat. It was O’Connell’s greatest achievement and led to him being known as ‘the Liberator’. King George IV referred to him as ‘the King of Ireland’, such was O’Connell’s popularity and power after emancipation.
