Daniel O'Connell(1775–1847)

Daniel O'Connell was born on 6 August 1775 near Cahersiveen in County Kerry, into an old Catholic family of the O'Connell name that had held on to land and standing through the long years of the penal laws, the code that barred Ireland's Catholic majority from the professions, from property, from Parliament and from public life. Educated in France, he came home to become one of the most brilliant barristers in Ireland, a master of the courtroom whose wit, learning and command of a jury made him famous and wealthy, and who used the law again and again to defend the poor and the powerless against an unequal system.

He turned that genius from the courtroom to the nation. Convinced that the wrongs of his people could and must be put right by peaceful, lawful, constitutional means and never by bloodshed, he founded in 1823 the Catholic Association, and did something no one had done before: he organised the Catholic masses of Ireland, collecting a penny a month from millions of ordinary people, the Catholic rent, and welding them into a disciplined, nationwide political movement of a kind the world had not yet seen.

He brought it to a head in 1828 by standing for Parliament himself in a by-election in County Clare, and winning by a landslide, even though as a Catholic he could not legally take the seat. The result confronted the British government with an impossible choice: either deny the clear will of the Irish people and risk an explosion, or give way. They gave way. In 1829 Parliament passed Catholic Emancipation, opening Parliament and the high offices of the state to Catholics for the first time in a century and a half. O'Connell had won it by organisation and moral force alone, and the grateful millions of Ireland gave him the name he has carried ever since: the Liberator.

He went on to lead the long campaign for the repeal of the union between Britain and Ireland, building it on the same foundation of peaceful mass mobilisation and holding immense open-air gatherings, the monster meetings, that drew hundreds of thousands of people. When the government banned the greatest of them, planned for Clontarf in 1843, O'Connell called it off rather than risk his followers' lives in a confrontation, holding to the principle of non-violence that had guided him from the start.

Worn down and in failing health, he set out for Rome in 1847 and died on the way, at Genoa, on 15 May. By his own wish his heart was sent on to Rome and his body brought home to Ireland. The O'Connell name carries his memory as the Kerry advocate who showed that a whole people could be organised and a great injustice overturned by peaceful means, and who won for the Catholics of Ireland, without a shot fired, the rights that generations of rebellion had failed to gain.