Sat 10 Apr 10: Daniel O'Connell - Did you know ...
Daniel O’Connell was born on the 6th August 1775 near Cahirciveen in County Kerry. He came from a wealthy Catholic family. He was adopted at an early age by his uncle Maurice “Hunting Cap” O’Connell and brought up at his home, Derrynane House, near Waterville.
A fluent Irish speaker, he absorbed the Irish traditional culture of song and storytelling which was strong and vibrant in the county. It was said of the young O’Connell that he was “destined to make a remarkable figure in society”.
Ireland in the late 1700’s was a difficult and oppressive place for a Catholic. Under Penal Laws, people who were not members of the Protestant Church of Ireland were denied many basic civil rights, such as religious freedom, education and property ownership.
O’Connell began his education in Cork, and later attended the Catholic schools at Saint-Omer and Douai in France. It was during his education in France that he developed his lifelong abhorrence of violence for political ends as he witnessed the horror and bloodshed of the French Revolution. He became committed to equal rights and religious tolerance.
In 1794 O’Connell enrolled in Lincoln’s Inn in London and two years later transferred to the King’s Inn in Dublin to study law. Previous to the year 1793, Catholics were not admitted to the Bar and O’Connell was one of the earliest candidates for legal advancement. He was called to the Irish Bar in May 1798 and very quickly became an efficient lawyer with a reputation for his radical political views. Although he initially supported the Young Ireland movement, which sought Irish Independence, the bloodshed that followed the 1798 rebellion confirmed his aversion to violence. He would later say “not for all the universe contains” would he “consent to the effusion of a single drop of human blood, except my own”.
Daniel O’Connell made his first speech on the 13th January 1800 at the Royal Exchange, Dublin, at which he declared his opposition to the proposed Act of Union between Britain and Ireland. Lady Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s mother, noted “he was then twenty-five, with a fine, tall, manly, athletic figure and a noble commanding air, with considerable dignity about the carriage and movement of the head and shoulders. Among ten thousand a stranger’s eye would at once have fixed on him as the true king. Even to the last he retained this majesty of bearing”.
In 1802 O’Connell married his cousin Mary O’Connell; they had three surviving daughters and four sons. His sons Morgan and John both served in Parliament. Mary died in 1836. In 1815 an event that would have a major impact on O’Connell took place. Dublin Corporation had always taken a strong anti-Catholic stand. When he accused it of being a “beggarly corporation”, he was challenged to a duel by one of the members John Norcott D’Esterre. Shots were fired and D’Esterre was fatally wounded. O’Connell, stricken by remorse, vowed never to fight again and paid a pension to the widow for the rest of his life.
During the first half of the 19th century, while Henry Grattan was pleading the case for Catholic emancipation which involved the removal of many of the restrictions imposed on Roman Catholics by the Penal Laws, including denying the right for Catholics to become members of parliament, O’Connell was the driving force behind the Catholic machinery in Dublin. In 1823 he founded the Catholic Association which held its first meeting in Coyne’s bookshop on Dublin’s Capel Street on May 13th . The group was funded by the “monthly emancipation rent”, which was nicknamed “the penny-a-month plan for liberating Ireland”. Members were asked to donate the small amount of one penny per month and in a short time, large sums of money were being gathered.
In 1828 O’Connell stood in a by-election in County Clare. He won the seat with a 1075 vote majority, but could not enter parliament as Catholics were still not permitted. Fearful of further rebellions and uprisings in Ireland, the then Prime Minister, The Duke of Wellington, and the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel convinced King George IV that Catholic emancipation should be allowed. On April 13th 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Bill was passed, O’Connell proudly announced that April 14th was “The first day of freedom”. From that day on he became known as “The Liberator” and “The Emancipator”. Before emancipation, Catholic churches and graveyards were the property of the Established Church.
Catholics could not be buried in Catholic ground and the only prayers that could be said at a burial were those prescribed in the Protestant Book of Common prayer. Following the passing of the Bill in April 1829, O’Connell established the Dublin Cemeteries’ Committee with the aim of founding a non-denominational burial ground, which he believed was the solution to the problem. The first Catholic burial ground was opened in Goldenbridge in Dublin on the 15th October 1829 and Prospect Cemetery in Glasnevin received its first burial on the 22nd February 1832.
Daniel O’Connell moved his focus to the repeal of the Act of Union, which in 1801 had merged the parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland. He founded The Repeal Association in April 1840 and in 1841 was elected the first Catholic Lord Mayor of Dublin. To gain awareness and publicity for the Repeal Association O’Connell organised a series of Monster Meetings across Ireland. They achieved their name because of the sheer size of the crowds who turned up, sometimes over 100,000 people. Following a meeting at the historical site of Tara in August 1843, another one was planned for Clontarf in October of that year. Concerned by the rallies, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel banned the meeting in Clontarf and O’Connell agreed to call it off. The following year he was arrested and charged with sedition. He was imprisoned in Richmond prison and released after 3 months.
By early 1847 Ireland was still suffering from the aftermath of the Famine which had left the population decimated by starvation, disease and emigration. O’Connell made his last speech in the House of Commons on the 8th February 1847, when he appealed for help to alleviate the sufferings of his stricken country. Having been weakened by his term in prison, O’Connell set out on a pilgrimage to Rome. He died en-route in Genoa on May 15th 1847. His dying wish was that his heart be buried in Rome and his body in Glasnevin cemetery. Matthias O’Kelly, secretary of the board of Glasnevin, left Ireland for Genoa charged with the mission of guarding the embalmed corpse and escorting it back to Dublin. O’Connell’s remains lay in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral for four days and then were carried on a bier which was drawn by six horses. The triumphal car on which O’Connell had stood after his release from prison followed accompanied by a long train of mourning coaches. A huge procession of all the trades, confraternities, philanthropic societies, bishops, judges, barristers and merchants followed the cortege as it passed through the city. Ships along the River Liffey lowered their flags and manned their yards.
Daniel O’Connell was buried in the O’Connell Circle in Glasnevin cemetery on August 5th 1847. On May 14th 1869 the remains were exhumed and reinterred in a crypt beneath an Irish round tower, especially built to house the coffin. See below the Online Genealogy Book Extract:
Entrance to the Daniel O'Connell Crypt (also part of the Glasnevin Cemetery Tour):
The original outer coffin was found to have deteriorated significantly, but the mountings remained intact and these were transferred to a new coffin. A witness to the events wrote “sublime Gregorian music rose from four hundred voices; a grand procession was formed and moved slowly through the grounds; the robes of clergy and corporators intermingled their hues with the rich foliage of trees and flowers. Fifty thousand persons were there to honour the memory of O’Connell”. The coffin was placed in a tomb which was covered in a single slab of Kilkenny marble, nine feet by four. Three pierced panels are on either side, with one at the west end so that the coffin can be seen. Inscriptions around the walls of the crypt read; “My body to Ireland, My heart to Rome, My Soul to Heaven” ;“The Liberator of his Country”; “the Friend of Civil and Religious Liberty all over the world”; “The Emancipator of his Catholic Fellow Subjects”.