Daniel O'Connell: One of Ireland's most important figures and ahead of his time

Irish Daily Mirror

06-08-2025

Today, August 6, marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O'Connell, one of Ireland's most significant historical figures.
O'Connell - known as The Great Liberator for freeing Catholics from the Penal Laws - was born this week in 1775, near Cahirsiveen in Co Kerry. A formal State-led commemoration will take place at his ancestral home in Derrynane House to remember how his life-long pursuit of justice, equality and civil rights changed Ireland.
The capital's main street is named after the man who managed to achieve his political goals through peaceful means, securing emancipation and repealing the Act of Union.
Here, historian Donal Fallon looks at the life and work of a man far ahead of his time, a man who was an anti-slavery pacifist but who also had his critics and who had an enduring impact on us as a nation. Portrait of Daniel O'Connell (Image: Getty Images)
The next time you're passing the Daniel O'Connell monument facing onto Dublin's O'Connell Bridge, look closely.
On top, when a seagull isn't claiming the position, we see The Great Liberator O'Connell, but in the row below him, the central figure is Ireland herself.
She's standing on broken chains and holding the Act of Catholic Emancipation in her hand. Around her are artisans, lawyers, artists, a bishop, children and more besides. The monument has a simple message: all of Ireland stood behind Daniel O'Connell.
But closer inspection still reveals bullet holes aplenty. Ireland has taken one to her arm, while several are in O'Connell's chest. The end product of the fierce fighting at Easter Week 1916, there's a certain irony in their presence here. O'Connell was very much a pacifist and someone who rejected revolution. No freedom, he believed, "is worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood".
O'Connell entered the world on August 6, 1775, 250 years ago today. Born near Cahersiveen in the Kingdom of Kerry, his life was greatly shaped by the turbulence of the world in the late 18th century.
In an Ireland where Catholics were denied many fundamental rights, the generosity of his wealthy uncle Maurice allowed O'Connell to seek an education in France, a place he happened to find himself in when the revolution there took hold.
One story has it that the young O'Connell, fleeing from France on boat, encountered the Irish brothers John and Henry Sheares. Rather than being horrified by what had taken hold in France, they instead showed Daniel a handkerchief they had dipped in the blood of the guillotined French king. In 1798, the brothers would meet their own end, hanged outside Dublin's Newgate Prison.
In time, O'Connell's political machine became the Catholic Association, a mass movement that charged a membership fee of a single penny, thus bringing the Irish poor into the political arena.
Opponents would mock O'Connell as the 'King of the Beggars', but he maintained: "A people who can be thus brought to act together, and by one impulse, are too powerful to be neglected and too formidable to be long opposed."
Perhaps fearful of what such a movement could become, the London government granted Catholic Emancipation in 1829, ensuring O'Connell would enter Irish folk memory as 'The Liberator'.
In his own lifetime, O'Connell inspired many other movements. Most famously, the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass would spend several months touring the island of Ireland, speaking in cities as diverse as Limerick and Belfast and telling a Dublin audience of the need for a 'Black O'Connell' to emerge in the US.
O'Connell was a consistent opponent of slavery wherever it existed and caused major divisions in Irish America by refusing to accept any financial or political support from those who participated in it.
Douglass remembered that "while with one arm the Liberator was bursting the fetters of Irishmen, with the other he was striking off the literal chains from the limbs of the Negro".
When Barack Obama spoke on College Green in 2011, he focused his speech on the alliance between O'Connell and Douglass, bringing the story to a new generation here. Former US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama attend a rally on College Green on May 23, 2011 in Dublin (Image: Getty Images)
O'Connell also condemned "the vicious and atrocious conduct of the East India Company towards the natives" when it came to India and its place in the Empire.
But in England, O'Connell was sometimes at loggerheads with democrats and trade unionists, clashing publicly with the Chartists (who believed in many things we take for granted today, like universal suffrage and vote by secret ballot) on several occasions.
On the economy, he could be conservative and he dismissed trade unions as "the childish folly of regulating the labour of adults".
James Connolly, the executed leader of the Easter Rising, came to hold a deep distaste for O'Connell's record on such issues.
The Liberator could also be gushing towards monarchy, insisting when Victoria became queen that "we have on the throne a monarch educated to cherish the rights and liberties of all the people, free from preoccupations and prejudice, and ready to do justice to all".
By the end of the century, she would be denounced here as 'The Famine Queen'. If O'Connell was a liberal icon in the eyes of some, he was far too conservative to others. But there is universal agreement on the good O'Connell's commitment to breaking sectarianism in Irish society did.
Glasnevin Cemetery and Goldenbridge Cemetery were both founded, thanks to the Catholic Association, as non-denominational cemeteries, finally bringing equality to burials.
Many would agree too that O'Connell's 'Monster Meetings', where hundreds of thousands of people would come together demanding political reform, gave Irish people a long-denied voice.
New stamps released by An Post capture some of the energy of those massive demonstrations, where people would assemble from all directions at a rallying point. They were a riot of colour, banners and marching bands.
The two great political crusades of O'Connell's life were Catholic Emancipation and the return of an Irish Parliament to Dublin.
While one of these missions succeeded, the other did not and when O'Connell's statue was put in place in Dublin in 1882, it was looking across the Liffey in the direction of the old Irish Parliament on College Green.
At the time of his death in 1847, his passing was noted around the world, reminding us that he was an Irishman whose interest in change extended beyond this tiny island.
Donal Fallon is a historian, broadcaster, writer and host of the podcast Three Castles Burning.
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