Daniel(I) O’Connell (Irish: Dónall Ó Conaill; 6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847), hailed in his time as The Liberator,[1] was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Roman Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century.

The poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill was an aunt; and Daniel Charles, Count O'Connell, an Irish Brigade officer in the service of the King of France (and twelve years a prisoner of Napoleon), an uncle.

O'Connell, nonetheless, remained of the opinion that in Ireland the whole policy of the Irish Parliament and the London-appointed Dublin Castle executive, was to repress the people and to maintain the ascendancy of a privileged and corrupt minority.

Asked how that could be reconciled with his membership of the government's volunteer Yeomanry (the Lawyers Artillery Corps), he replied that in '98 "the popular party was so completely crushed that the only chance of doing any good for the people was by affecting ultra loyalty.

He was greatly influenced by William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (public opinion the root of all power, civil liberty and equality the bedrock of social stability),[14] and was, for a period, converted to Deism by his reading of Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason.

In 1808 "friends of emancipation", Henry Grattan among them, proposed that fears of Popery might be allayed if the Crown were accorded the same right exercised by continental monarchs, a veto on the confirmation of Catholic bishops.

Although the language is associated with many recollections that twine round the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication is so great, that I can witness, without a sigh, the gradual disuse of Irish.

[38]O'Connell's "indifference to the fate of the language", a decade before the Famine, was consistent with the policies of the Catholic Church (which under Paul Cardinal Cullen was to develop a mission to the English-speaking world)[39] and of the government-funded National Schools.

Their investment enabled O'Connell (derided by his enemies as the "King of Beggars") to mount "monster" rallies (crowds of over 100,000) that stayed in the hands of authorities and emboldened larger enfranchised tenants to vote for pro-Emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords.

[44] (Thomas Moore privately proposed that "removing, by his example, that restraint which the responsibility of one to another under the law of duelling imposed", was "one of the worst things, perhaps, O'Connell had done for Ireland", and had given his penchant for personal abuse free rein).

[53] Receiving its royal assent on the same day, the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829, brought the Irish franchise into line with England's by raising the property threshold in county seats five-fold to ten pounds.

In a pattern that had been intensifying from the 1820s as landlords cleared land to meet the growing livestock demand from England,[58] tenants had been banding together to oppose evictions, and to attack tithe and process servers.

An initially peaceful campaign of non-payment of tithes turned violent in 1831 when the newly founded Irish Constabulary in lieu of payment began to seize property and conduct evictions.

[67] But as regards the general conduct of the Dublin Castle administration under the Whigs, Beckett concludes that "O'Connell had reason to be satisfied, and "the more so as his influence carried great weight in the making of appointments".

In view of Thomas Francis Meagher, in return for damping down Repeal agitation, a "corrupt gang of politicians who fawned on O'Connell" were being allowed an extensive system of political patronage.

William Crolly, Bishop of Down and Connor and later Archbishop of Armagh, was ambivalent, anxious lest clerical support for Repeal disrupt his "carefully nurtured relationship with Belfast's liberal Presbyterians".

According to the extensive coverage of his response in The Times,[74] having drawn attention to Disraeli's "Jewish origin", in speech in Dublin O'Connell suggested that the young Peelite had, not only the "perfidy, selfishness, depravity, and want of principle" typical of a would-be Tory MP, but also the qualities of "the impenitent thief on the cross .

The Trades Political Union (TPU) was swamped by 5,000 mostly middle-class repealers[83] who by acclaim carried O'Connell's resolution calling for the suppression of all secret and illegal combinations, particularly those "manifested among the labouring classes".

To O'Connell, he ascribed the fear that, drawing together national and democratic demands, the Chartist influence might induce his following to break "the established habit of electing place-hunting lawyers" and of seeking "to impress English Liberals".

The "people", the great numbers of tenant farmers, small-town traders and journeymen, whom O'Connell had rallied to the cause of Emancipation, did not similarly respond to his lead on the more abstract proposition of Repeal;[87] neither did the Catholic gentry or middle classes.

At the Hill of Tara (by tradition the inaugural seat of the High Kings of Ireland), on the feast-day of the Assumption, 15 August 1843, O'Connell gathered a crowd estimated in the hostile reporting of The Times as close to one million.

As the site of Brian Boru's famous victory over the Danes in 1014, it resonated with O'Connell's increasingly militant rhetoric: "the time is coming", he had been telling his supporters, when "you may have the alternative to live as slaves or to die as freemen".

The new ministry of Lord John Russell deployed the Whigs' new laissez-faire ("political economy") doctrines to dismantle the previous government's limited efforts to address the distress of the emerging, and catastrophic, Irish Famine.

[109] Meagher, Davis and other prominent dissidents, among them Gavan Duffy; Jane Wilde; Margaret Callan; William Smith O'Brien; and John Blake Dillon, withdrew and formed themselves as the Irish Confederation.

[118][20] In 1838, in a call for a new crusade against "the vile union" in the United States "of republicanism and slavery", O'Connell denounced the hypocrisy of George Washington and characterised the American ambassador, the Virginian Andrew Stevenson, as a "slave-breeder".

[120][121] In the United States, fearful that it would further inflame anti-Irish nativist sentiment, Bishop John Hughes of New York urged Irish Americans not to sign O'Connell's abolitionist petition ("An Address of the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America").

[118] In the 1846, Margaret Fuller compared O'Connell in The Liberty Bell to the biblical Daniel, able "to brave the fiery furnace, and the lion's den, and the silken lures of a court, and speak always with a poet's power.

When the Great Famine hit in 1846, he wished his son Maurice "to be as abundant to the people as you can", and was so intent on securing relief that he sought to buy the government food depot in Cahersiveen, an offer refused from the Treasury by Charles Edward Trevelyan.

In the German states (where he counted Goethe and Ludwig I of Bavaria among his admirers), O'Connell became a "folk hero" among Catholics (his portrait hanging in many homes and taverns), particularly in the Rhineland where they grated upon their union with Lutheran Prussia.

Echoing a reassessment that was offered by Eamon De Valera,[141] he has O'Connell forging "a new Irish nation in the fires of his own idealism, intolerance and determination" and becoming for a people "broken, humiliated and defeated" its "chieftain".