Today marks the 250th year since the birth of Daniel O’Connell, the most famous Irish politician and agitator of the 19th century. He was known as the Great Liberator even while he was alive. Born to wealthy Catholic parents who had held on to their estate by the forbearance of Protestant trustees, O’Connell absorbed much of the radical and liberal literature of his day. He was seen as a Benthamite, and almost an English radical. He championed the abolition of slavery. His reversion to the Catholic faith of his birth renewed in him a passion for the freedom of the Catholic Church and for Catholic emancipation — the repeal of the last of the penal laws and legal disabilities inflicted on Catholics in what had become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland just a few decades earlier.
Today, modern Ireland’s representatives seem loathe to even mention Catholic emancipation while commemorating him:
Catholicism is now cast as the foreign oppression of the Irish, not the primary reason for foreign oppression of the Irish.
But O’Connell’s liberalism was an interesting sort in his day. It lacked the anti-clerical edge that so many others had, especially in Europe. He defended the liberty of the Catholic Church to appoint its own bishops without any reference to the veto power held by the government. He went so far as to say that Catholics should “remain forever without emancipation” rather than let the king interfere with the pope’s administration of the church in Ireland. At the same time that he defended the pope’s prerogatives in the church, he criticized Pope Gregory XVI’s treatment of Jews in the Papal States and bragged about Ireland’s tolerance for Jews. He was admired by Frederick Douglass who revered him despite his own prejudices against Catholics, and his antipathy toward Irish-Catholic immigrants in America. O’Connell was a master mobilizer in democratic politics, and his most powerful invention was called the “Monster Meeting” — basically vast public assemblies. His conservative opponents rightfully detected that the power of these demonstrations lay not just in their awe-inspiring size, but in the dread of imagining them turning violent. Eventually O’Connell would cease using them, even as his rhetoric against the Union grew more militant.