Daniel O'Connell (6 August 1775-15 May 1847) was the Irish Repeal Association MP for Clare from 5 July 1828 to 29 July 1830 (succeeding William Vesey-FitzGerald and preceding William Macnamara), for Dublin City from 22 September 1832 to 16 May 1836 (succeeding Frederick Shaw and preceding George Alexander Hamilton) and from 5 August 1837 to 10 July 1841 (succeeding Hamilton and preceding John West), and for Cork County from 1841 to 1847 (succeeding Garrett Standish Barry and preceding Edmund Burke Roche). For his advocacy for Catholic emancipation and Home Rule, he was nicknamed "The Liberator" and "The Emancipator". O'Connell was also the father of MPs Maurice, Morgan, John, and Daniel O'Connell Jr.
Biography[]
A statue of O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell was brn in Cahersiveen, County Kerry, Ireland on 6 August 1775, and he was admitted to the bar in 1794 and became affiliated with pro-democracy radicals. O'Connell became devoted to the cause of equal rights and religious tolerance for Irish Catholics like himself and his family. He believed that the Irish would have to assert themselves politically and not by force, and he did not support the Irish Rebellion of 1798 or Robert Emmet's 1803 rising for this reason. In 1811, he established the Catholic Board to campaign for Catholic emancipation, and he soon became known as a radical leader who was able to marshal Irish Catholic support into a cohesive political movement, the Repeal Association, which sought to repeal the 1801 Act of Union and restore a devolved Parliament to Ireland. In 1828, O'Connell was elected to Parliament as MP for Clare, but he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, as it was incompatible with his Catholic faith. Rather than prevent O'Connell from taking his seat and thus risk another Irish uprising, the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, convinced King George IV to successfully back Catholic emancipation in 1829, allowing for O'Connell to take his seat; all Christians, including Catholics and Presbyterians, were now able to sit in Parliament alongside their Anglican counterparts.
After Emancipation, O'Connell campaigned for Home Rule, holding "Monster Meetings" of around 100,000 people each to rally support for his cause. After O'Connell held a large meeting at Tara, a site of great importance to Irish nationalism, Prime Minister Robert Peel banned further "Monster Meetings". O'Connell went on to work with the Whigs to win support for his programme in the House of Commons, although Whig support for O'Connell meant that O'Connell was forced to assent to their controversial laissez-faire economic policies during the Great Famine of the 1840s. O'Connell died of fever in Genoa, Italy in 1847 at the age of 71 while on a pilgrimage to Rome.