O'Connell
also Connell, Ó Conaill
The family of Daniel O'Connell, The Liberator, and the most influential Catholic of 19th-century Britain.
- Origin
- Munster, Ireland
- Motto
- Ciall agus neart
- Famous bearer
- Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847), 'The Liberator', leader of Catholic Emancipation
- Register
- Irish family
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of O'Connell
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the O'Connell community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once O'Connell has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The O'Connell clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the O'Connell clan →Motto
Ciall agus neart
“Wisdom and strength”
What does the O'Connell name mean?
From Ó Conaill, descendant of Conall (a personal name probably derived from cú, 'wolf' or 'hound'). The Ó Conaill were a Munster sept anciently seated near Lough Currane in south Kerry, the Iveragh peninsula. The Anglicised O'Connell remained densely Kerry-rooted through the medieval and modern periods, with the family's principal seat at Derrynane on the Atlantic coast at the south-west tip of Iveragh, the seat from which Daniel O'Connell, 'The Liberator', emerged in the 19th century.
The history of O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847), born at Carhen near Cahersiveen in Co. Kerry into a Catholic landed family that had survived the Penal Laws by judicious participation in the European 'Wild Geese' trade (his uncle General Count Daniel Charles O'Connell served in the French royal army), led the Catholic Emancipation movement that won Irish Catholic political rights in 1829. He was elected MP for Clare in 1828, illegally under the Penal Laws, and his admission required the passage of the Catholic Relief Act, the most consequential single Catholic-rights bill in the history of the British state. Through the 1830s and 40s he led the Repeal Association in pursuit of the dissolution of the Act of Union, holding 'monster meetings' of hundreds of thousands across Ireland; the Clontarf monster meeting of October 1843 was banned by Peel, O'Connell complied to avoid bloodshed, and the political momentum collapsed.
Maurice O'Connell, his son, was MP for Tralee. John O'Connell, another son, was MP for Kilkenny. The Derrynane Abbey estate, the family seat, is preserved as a state house-museum. O'Connell Bridge in Dublin and O'Connell Street, the city's main thoroughfare, both carry the family name; Limerick, Ennis, Sligo and Cork all have an O'Connell Street. The shape of public space across modern Ireland is, more than any other surname's, a Kerry-Connell shape.
Champions of the O'Connell name
The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has its own page — biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.
Step Into History
Walk the streets and seats the O'Connell name knew — a photoreal walk through time, on foot.
Notable bearers of the O'Connell name
- Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847), 'The Liberator', leader of Catholic Emancipation
- Count Daniel Charles O'Connell (1745–1833), Wild Goose general in the French royal army
- Maurice O'Connell (1803–1853), MP for Tralee
- John O'Connell (1810–1858), MP for Kilkenny, son of the Liberator
Stories of O'Connell
The duel with D'Esterre
1815On the late afternoon of the first of February 1815, in a snowy field at Bishop's Court near Naas in County Kildare, Daniel O'Connell, then thirty-nine years old, the rising Catholic barrister of the Munster Bar and the principal organiser of the Catholic Association, met John D'Esterre, a Protestant member of the Dublin Corporation, in a formal duel with pistols. D'Esterre had taken offence at O'Connell's description of the Corporation, in a public meeting two weeks earlier, as a beggarly corporation. O'Connell, by his second the surgeon Sir Edward O'Connell of Lyons, refused to retract. The two men met at Bishop's Court at four in the afternoon. O'Connell hit D'Esterre at the first exchange in the right hip; the ball lodged in the bladder. D'Esterre died two days later, on the third of February 1815, at his Dublin lodgings. O'Connell never challenged or accepted another duel for the rest of his life. He wore a black silk glove on his right hand at every public function in Ireland for the next thirty-two years, in mourning for the man he had killed.
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Clontarf, the cancelled meeting
1843On the afternoon of Saturday the seventh of October 1843, on the eve of the great public meeting Daniel O'Connell had called for the next day, Sunday the eighth, on the strand at Clontarf outside Dublin (intended to draw, by the Repeal Association's planning, between five hundred thousand and one million people, the largest political assembly ever held in Britain or Ireland), the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland Earl De Grey, on the personal direction of the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, issued a formal proclamation banning the meeting. Peel had moved British army regiments and a battery of artillery into Dublin during the previous week. The proclamation was posted at the Pillar at four o'clock in the afternoon. O'Connell, who had been at the Repeal Association headquarters in Burgh Quay since noon, summoned the committee at five and, after two hours' debate, ordered the cancellation of the meeting on the grounds that he would not lead a peaceful assembly into the muskets of the British army. The cancellation was, by every careful reading of subsequent Irish political history, the moment at which Repeal as a constitutional movement died. O'Connell himself was tried and convicted for sedition the following year, served four months of a one-year sentence in Richmond Bridewell, and emerged a broken political force. He died at Genoa in May 1847 on a pilgrimage to Rome.
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