Daniel O'Connell

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"The principle of my political life …. is, that all ameliorations and improvements in political institutions can be obtained by persevering in a perfectly peaceable and legal course, and cannot be obtained by forcible means, or if they could be got by forcible means, such means create more evils than they cure, and leave the country worse than they found it." [Writing in The Nation newspaper, 18 November, 1843]

Daniel O'Connell (6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847) (Irish: Dónal Ó Conaill), known as The Liberator or The Emancipator, was Ireland's predominant political leader in the first half of the nineteenth century who championed the cause of the down-trodden Catholic population.[citation needed] He campaigned for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Union between Ireland and Great Britain.

He is remembered in Ireland as the founder of a non-violent form of Irish nationalism and also for the mobilization of the Catholic community as a political force in order to achieve emancipation.[citation needed]

As part of his campaign for Catholic Emancipation, O'Connell stood in a by-election to the British House of Commons in 1828 for County Clare for a seat vacated by William Vesey Fitzgerald, another supporter of the Catholic Association. After O'Connell won the seat, he was unable to take it due to restrictions on Catholics in Ireland at this time. It was only through a legal loop hole that he was allowed to stand in the fisrt place. It is incorrectly assumed that he didn't take his seat because of his refusal to take an oath to the King as head of the Church of England. The Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, and the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, even though they opposed Catholic emancipation, saw that denying O'Connell his seat would cause outrage and could lead to another rebellion or uprising. [citation needed]

Peel and Wellington managed to convince George IV that Catholic emancipation and the right of Catholics and Presbyterians and members of all Christian faiths other than the established Church of Ireland to sit in Parliament needed to be passed; and with the help of the Whigs, [citation needed]it became law in 1829. However, this destroyed the trust other Tory MPs had in Peel and Wellington. (Jews and other non-Christians got the right to sit in Parliament in 1858.)

In 1841, Daniel O'Connell became the first Roman Catholic Lord Mayor of Dublin since the reign of King James II of England and Ireland and VII of Scotland, who was the last Roman Catholic monarch in the British Isles.[citation needed] As the Lord Mayor, he called out the British Army against striking workers in the capital.[citation needed] Nonetheless O'Connell rejected Sharman Crawford's call for the complete abolition of tithes in 1838, as he felt he could not embarrass the Whigs (the Lichfield house compact secured an alliance between Whigs, radicals and Irish MPs in 1835).[citation needed]

O'Connell also campaigned for Repeal of the Act of Union, which in 1801 merged the Parliaments of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.[citation needed] In order to campaign for Repeal, O'Connell set up the Repeal Association.[citation needed] He argued for the re-creation of an independent Kingdom of Ireland to govern itself, with Queen Victoria as the Queen of Ireland.[citation needed] To push for this, he held a series of Monster Meetings throughout much of Ireland outside the Protestant and Unionist-dominated province of Ulster.[citation needed] They were so called because around 100,000 people attended each one.[citation needed] These rallies frightened the British Government and the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, banned one such proposed monster meeting at Clontarf, County Dublin, just outside Dublin City.[citation needed] This move was made after the biggest monster meeting was held at Tara[4]. Despite appeals from his supporters, O'Connell refused to defy the authorities and he called off the meeting.[citation needed]

This did not prevent him being jailed for sedition, although he was released after 3 months by the British House of Lords

Daniel O'Connell died of heart disease in 1847 in Genoa, Italy while on a pilgrimage to Rome at the age of 71,[citation needed] his term in prison having seriously weakened him.[citation needed] According to his dying wish, his heart was buried in Rome and the remainder of his body in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, beneath a huge round tower which can be seen for miles around.[citation needed] His sons all served in Parliament, and are buried in his crypt.[citation needed]