Wednesday 6 August 2025 marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, probably the most charismatic political leader that Ireland has ever produced. Often dismissed as a ‘conservative Catholic nationalist’, in fact he believed in the separation of Church and State, and in the wider European context he was regarded as a liberal. Left-wing critics cite his conservatism on economic issues—he was a landlord after all. Yet precisely because he was a Catholic landlord he and his family were the people targeted by the penal laws. The law was their enemy, yet O’Connell was to become one of the greatest legal practitioners of his age. He had ‘skin in the game’ and it is therefore no surprise that he empathised with others who were marginalised or excluded. His advocacy of Jewish rights is notable, particularly at a time when Irish people are being stigmatised as ‘anti-Semitic’ for their stand in opposing genocide in Gaza. He was a vocal abolitionist despite there being ‘no votes in it’ and in spite of the potential loss of financial support from the substantial pro-slavery element in Irish America. It was he who invited the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass to Ireland. And it was he who tabled the motion in Westminster in 1837 ordering that all monies paid to compensate slave-owners be published, now a major source for the Legacies of British Slave-ownership database (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/). So O’Connell would have had no truck with our present-day far-right tricolour-waving ‘patriots’ (see Reviews, p. 69).
Cultural nationalist critics cite O’Connell’s indifference to the Irish language despite his being a fluent native speaker, but he can hardly be blamed for the language’s subsequent decline, triggered in particular by the catastrophe of An Gorta Mór. Above all, O’Connell is criticised for ‘bottling it’ by cancelling the 1843 Repeal ‘monster meeting’ at Clontarf in the face of the armed blackmail of the British government. But neither can he be blamed for the latter and, in spite of backing down, he was nevertheless penalised by his subsequent arrest and imprisonment.
According to his biographer Oliver MacDonagh, ‘he was … the greatest innovator in modern democratic politics’, yet he left no party or political machine behind him. Perhaps it was a case of après moi le deluge, in this case a deluge (An Gorta Mór) so great that it swept millions away.
(For our Hedge School, ‘O’Connell 250—the Liberator reassessed’, see https://historyireland.com/hedge-schools/.)
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