O'Connell, Daniel

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O'CONNELL, DANIEL

utilitarian principles
the catholic association
legacy
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O'CONNELL, DANIEL (1775–1847), Irish politician.

Daniel O'Connell was reared in an Irish-speaking environment. He always retained the instinctive feel of a populist politician for what ordinary people thought, and more importantly how they felt—a legacy of his childhood immersion. Never a great writer, his political philosophy was displayed through rhetoric, and he was a master at tailoring his message to suit his audience. His wit, vituperation, good humor, and energy gave him enormous command when speaking, never more so than when the crowd was large: O'Connell fed off his audiences as they fed off him, a protean figure of enormous energy and insatiable combativeness. He also carefully cultivated his self-image. A master of political theater, he blended oratorical flamboyance with meticulous organization, imposing his massive personality on every aspect of a national movement. No one more thoroughly saturated the Irish popular imagination.

utilitarian principles

O'Connell always claimed to act on utilitarian principles—"the greatest good for the greatest number." The two leading influences on him were the English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and the English philosopher and writer William Godwin (1756–1836). Bentham balanced the English tradition of rational dissent with the Continental Enlightenment, insisting that political

rights rested fundamentally with the individual. Utilitarian politics were accordingly democratic and an instrument for social reform: "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one." He was also profoundly influenced in his London years, 1794–1796, by William Godwin. Invoking the adage that all government rests on opinion, Godwin believed that as public opinion was progressively Enlightened, government institutions would inevitably lose their spurious authority. He diagnosed the corrupting effects of inherited property and privilege: here can be traced the origins of O'Connell's lifelong pursuit of the destruction of the unearned privilege of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.

O'Connell believed that that there was no incompatibility between his religious and his political ideas. He was able to create a novel blend of Catholicism and radicalism, two concepts hitherto considered incompatible. Although O'Connell maintained a strong sense of Catholic identity and acknowledged papal authority in the areas of faith and doctrine, he deplored the temporal power and possessions of the church. Throughout O'Connell's political career, he fought for freedom of religious practice and belief for all, not just Catholics, and the absolute separation of church and state.

O'Connell consistently retained a late Enlightenment belief in the power of the law to effect social and political change. The failure to incorporate Catholics fully into the new United Kingdom in 1801 convinced them that there was a close link between their political impotence and their legal isolation. O'Connell absolutely shared this conviction, informed by his daily experiences in the Irish courts. O'Connell was to be the ultimate beneficiary of this politicization of the law in the eyes of Irish Catholics.

A common thread throughout O'Connell's long career was his consistent opposition to the use of violence. O'Connell used the term bloodless revolution to describe his own achievement of Catholic emancipation. His capacity to harness what he called the "moral force" of mass nonviolent action became his lasting contribution to the emerging Ireland. O'Connell's innovation was to actualize the latent potential of superior Catholic numbers. The first detailed religious census in 1834 turned in Catholics at 81 percent of the total population of Ireland.

the catholic association

The Catholic Association, founded by O'Connell in 1823, flexed this newly conditioned political muscle. The democratic penny-a-month membership, astute cooption of priests, the widespread distribution of the Catholic Register, and the careful cultivation of a coterie of politically astute organizers created an unprecedented mobilization of Irish Catholics. The Catholic Association eventually decided to challenge landlord control of this Catholic vote. The campaign's spearhead would be the structures and personnel of the institutional church—the sole national institution available, sympathetic, and responsive to Irish Catholic needs. The 1826 general election provided an opportunity to bring this newly honed weapon to bear on O'Connell's constant target—the Irish Protestant gentry and their unearned constitutional privileges. O'Connell backed a liberal Protestant standing as a "Catholic" candidate in Waterford. His victory achieved a symbolic victory of stunning proportions for the Catholics. The transition effectively marked the end of the road for the Irish landed gentry as the dominant player in Irish politics. O'Connell conducted a further audacious coup in 1828. He personally won the Clare by-election. These sweeping victories were irresistible demonstrations of political momentum. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 inevitably followed. O'Connell was instantly dubbed "The Liberator" by his grateful Irish supporters.

O'Connell insisted on the necessity for Catholics to be fully incorporated on equal terms within the public sphere of postemancipation Ireland. One of the most galling aspects of the Penal Laws was that they had consigned Catholics—the majority of the population—to a permanent status as noncitizens. After Catholic Emancipation, O'Connell led Catholics in a determined campaign to reclaim that public space; hence it was hugely important for O'Connell to make the Catholic presence felt. His "Monster Meetings," rallies, parades, and processions around the Dublin streets all staked out the public space as open to Catholics, unhindered by the previous collusion between the state and the gentry to keep them invisible and marginalized.

Just as they reclaimed public space, Catholics also sought unfettered access to the public sphere—the domain of civil society, a virtual public sphere, mediated by print culture. O'Connell's ability to orchestrate a national campaign depended on the second print revolution that gathered momentum in the 1820s. O'Connell was quick to realize the potential of the new print media to foster national opinion and hence mobilize political campaigns.

legacy

O'Connell's achievement was the democratization of Irish politics, an achievement that soon would generate spillover effects in Britain. In this sense, the long eighteenth century lasted from 1690 to 1829 in Irish politics, and it was O'Connell who terminated it. His victory in forcing the Irish state to shed its sectarian character was followed by the great reform act of 1832, which performed a similar function for the British state, marking the transition from an ancien régime to a modern parliamentary democracy.

O'Connell's long dominance of nationalist politics was finally challenged in the 1840s through the growing disenchantment of the group coalescing around the Nation newspaper (established 1842), which was eventually to be called Young Ireland. They formed part of a common European trend: other young movements occurred across Europe, notably in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Greece, and Bohemia. The philosophical underpinnings of Irish nationalism shifted dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth century. O'Connell's political philosophy—essentially late Enlightenment liberalism—was eclipsed by the spread of Romanticism. This philosophical difference was the intellectual basis of O'Connell's split with Young Ireland in the 1840s. Within Irish nationalism, the emphasis on cultural nationality found little to admire in the O'Connellite approach.

O'Connell's significance should always be understood within the larger European context. He offered a role model for other European Catholic activists, because he invented an authentic relationship between tradition and modernity, and between Catholicism and democracy, salvaging positive aspects of the Enlightenment without succumbing to its irreligion. This is why O'Connell proved so inspiring to the European Catholic liberals, who sought to advance Catholicism beyond an automatic association with social conservatism, the monarchy, and a return to the ancien régime. O'Connell suggested that it was possible to reconcile the hierarchical world of Catholic obedience with secular democratic values of individual autonomy and equality. Other Catholic nationalist movements emerged across Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Poland and Belgium, closely observing the Irish example, developed a similar blend of persecuted national traditions and Catholicism, which jettisoned Enlightenment irreligion and anticlericalism while retaining its democratic principles. While he is conventionally seen as a commanding figure in Irish politics, O'Connell was arguably the most influential Catholic activist in nineteenth-century European politics. He fused Catholicism with Enlightened thinking in a potent combination that fascinated Continental Catholics. The French writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville visited Ireland in 1835 to explore at first hand the O'Connell phenomenon of a mass-based Catholic democratic movement. In that sense, O'Connell can legitimately be claimed as an early progenitor of the European Christian democratic tradition.