Feargus Edward O'Connor (18 July 1796 – 30 August 1855) was an Irish Chartist leader and advocate of the Land Plan, which sought to provide smallholdings for the labouring classes.

[1] After the failure of his Land Plan, O'Connor's behaviour became increasingly erratic, culminating in an assault on three MPs and a mental breakdown, from which he did not recover.

Feargus O'Connor was born on 18 July 1796[2] in Connorville house, near Castletown-Kinneigh in west County Cork, into a prominent Irish Protestant family.

Much of his early life was spent on his family's estates in Ireland, which included Dangan Castle, the childhood home of the Duke of Wellington.

At one point Feargus and Francis decided to leave, stealing horses from their brother Roderic, travelling to London and asking to be taken in by family friend M.P.

Since he had to take an oath of allegiance to the crown to become a member of the Bar, his father disinherited him because he regarded it as inconsistent with the dignity of a descendant of the Kings of Ireland.

During the 1830s he emerged as an advocate for Irish rights and democratic political reform, and a critic of the British Whig government's policies on Ireland.

He was sarcastically described by Fraser's Magazine as active, bustling, violent, a ready speaker, and the model of an Irish patriot,[8] but as one who did nothing, suggested nothing, and found fault with everything.

[8] He voted with the radicals: for tax on property; for Thomas Attwood's motion for an inquiry into the conditions that prevailed in England; and in support of Lord Ashley's 1847 Factory Bill.

[17] When Chartism again gained momentum O'Connor was elected in 1847 MP for Nottingham, and he organised the Chartist meeting on Kennington Common, London, in 1848.

When the procession was ruled illegal, O'Connor asked the crowd to disperse, a decision contested by other radicals such as William Cuffay.

He began to spend a large part of his time travelling through the north of England, addressing huge meetings, in which he denounced the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and advocated manhood suffrage.

O'Connor, who had seen at first hand the embittered relations between workers and capitalists in the north of England, did not like the strategy of reasonable argument advocated by men like Lovett.

I wish her to win her liberties by peaceful means.When the Chartist petition with 1,283,000 signatures was rejected by Parliament in summer 1839, tension grew, culminating in the Newport Rising.

I have levelled all those pigmy fences and thrown you into an imperial union…[24]O'Connor was jailed; while in prison he continued to write for the Northern Star.

In 1842 a convention of the newly formed National Charter Association was held in order to draw up a new petition that was finally signed by 3,315,752 persons.

The petition was denied a hearing, which added to the frustrations felt by working people at a time of great economic hardship.

Across Britain in summer 1842 a wave of strikes broke out, calling both for an end to wage cuts and the implementation of the People's Charter.

Other factors in their favour were the distrust by working people of anything supported by the employers, and the fear that free trade would cause wages to drop still lower.

Faced with the declining strength of Chartism after the defeats of 1842, O'Connor turned to the idea of settling working people on the land.

I am, nevertheless, a strong advocate of cooperation, which means legitimate exchange, and which circumstances would compel individuals to adopt, to the extent that communism would be beneficial.

[29] In his book A Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms he set forth his plan of resettling surplus factory workers on smallholdings of two, three and four acres.

O'Connor's plan was built on the assumption that land could be bought in unlimited quantities and at reasonable rates, and that all subscribers would be successful farmers who would repay promptly.

O'Connor's colleague Ernest Charles Jones wrote of this development: See there the cottage, labour's own abode, The pleasant doorway on the cheerful road, The airy floor, the roof from storms secure, The merry fireside and the shelter sure, And, dearest charm of all, the grateful soil, That bears its produce for the hands that toil.

When he had taken his seat he proposed in The Labourer that the government take over the National Land Company to resettle working people on a large scale.

[citation needed] On 6 June 1848, the House of Commons investigation found that the National Land Company was an illegal scheme that would not fulfil the expectations held out to the shareholders and that the books had been imperfectly kept.

[41] It is possible (though we have only the evidence of the unreliable diagnostic methods of the time) that O'Connor was in the early stages of general paralysis of the insane, brought on by syphilis.

In 1852 in the House of Commons O'Connor struck three fellow MPs, one of them Sir Benjamin Hall, a vocal critic of the Land Plan.

Over 6 ft tall—he was almost the tallest man in the House of Commons—and with a voice which could easily carry an open-air meetings of tens of thousands, with a handsome appearance, a quick wit and a rich vein of scurrility when it came to abusing his opponents, Connor possessed all the qualities of the first rate popular orator.

His resilience and optimism in his speeches, and in his letters in the Northern Star spurred on rank-and-file Chartists, who came to share his determination to keep up the struggle for their political rights.