Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), a Catholic advocate of non-violent and lawful political action, emerged in the early 1800s as the sole leader of the great masses of peasant and middle class Catholics, who comprised the vast majority of the Irish population. O'Connell dominated Irish history and politics in the first half of the 19th Century like no other single person ever had dominated a half century. This indeed was the "Age of Daniel O'Connell".

O'Connell's principal achievement was organizing previously dispirited Catholics into an extraordinary political machine which impacted England (and Ireland) for almost 100 years. Long after his death, the political machine was still able to exert disproportionate influence in the British Parliament, particularly when neither major party had the votes to form a government, or pass controversial legislation, without the Catholic voting block.

The emergence of a Catholic leader provides stark contrast to 18th Century Irish history, which is essentially the story of Protestants giants -- Wolf Tone, Henry Gratton, and Jonathan Swift -- agitating both peacefully and violently for greater independence from England, and for greater civil rights for the oppressed. However, within a few years after the Union, Presbyterians * and Anglicans alike had become pillars of the Union and had virtually disappeared from history books.

O'Connell first attracted attention as leader of an unsuccessful 1804-07 movement for "emancipation". The issue: Even though Catholics had been granted the right to vote in 1793, they still were prohibited by law from serving in Parliament. "Emancipation" was the term given to repeal of this prohibition, which (as the most notorious of the remaining penal laws) held great symbolic significance **.

O'Connell made a genuine impact in 1823 when he founded the "Catholic Association". Earlier Catholic societies had been for the affluent and the elite, but the Catholic Association aimed for, and actually attained, grass roots mass membership. It used parish priests to solicit members, and most important of all, it charged a membership fee of one penny per month, which became known as "catholic rent." The amount was so low that even the poorest could afford it, but for their penny, the masses soon came to believe in the association as an empowering institution in which they had a genuine stake.

By 1826, O'Connell's Catholic Association began to flex previously unused Catholic muscle. The first goal, naturally, was emancipation. The association enacted a policy to actively oppose, and vote en mass against, any candidate who was anti-emancipation, or who joined the cabinet of an anti-emancipation government. In the general elections of 1826, as the result of an impressive get-out-the-vote drive funded by Catholic rents and supported by many priests, four sitting anti-emancipation members of Parliament were turned out and replaced by pro-emancipation Protestants. O'Connell immediately began to fine-tune his strategy for a truly massive campaign in the next general election.

Before the next general election arrived, however, Vesey Fitzgerald, who had represented Clare in Parliament for ten years, was appointed to the cabinet. Under the law at that time, he was required to stand for reelection at a special election in 1928. Fitzgerald personally was pro-emancipation, and certainly no enemy of Catholics, but he had joined a government that was anti-emancipation, thereby requiring the Association, as a matter of policy, to oppose him. Fitzgerald was so strong that O'Connell could not find any Protestant to run against him. O'Connell therefore declared himself a candidate, thus exploiting a loophole in the election law. Specifically, although the law clearly prohibited Catholics from being sworn in as a Member of Parliament, it did not explicitly prohibit Catholics from filing as a candidate and running for election.

The election results shocked Parliament. O'Connell won by more than a two to one margin (2,057 to 982) over the well respected Fitzgerald, largely because of O'Connell's now highly effective political machine.

Parliament reacted quickly. To avoid the disorders that were expected to follow its refusal to seat O'Connell, Parliament in 1829 passed legislation that not only granted Catholic Emancipation, but repealed virtually all of the remaining Penal Laws as well.

As a member of Parliament, O'Connell played a significant role in several modest reforms for Ireland. The tithe was restructured as a less ideologically offensive rental charge, the number of eligible voters was expanded, corruption in municipal government was addressed, and some modest land reforms were enacted. Overall, though, O'Connell was disappointed at how little he could achieve with his bloc of Irish votes in Commons.

Thus in 1837, O'Connell launched his second great agitation: a grass roots campaign to repeal the Act of Union of 1800. Now a proven organizational genius and compelling orator, O'Connell devised his campaign strategy around "monster" grass roots political demonstrations, which were to be both non-violent and in full conformity with law. O'Connell believed these demonstrations would call worldwide attention to the injustice of the bribe infected vote in 1800 on the Act of Union, and pressure Parliament into "Repeal".

The demonstrations were enormous, and indeed caught the attention of the government. During 1843, more than 40 monster meetings were held and many attracted crowds in excess of 100,000. One demonstration, at Tara, drew 250,000. As Repeal fever approached its peak, O'Connell scheduled what was to be the largest demonstration of all, at Clontarf in October 1843. Only a few hours before the Clontarf demonstration, however, the government issued an order banning the protest. O'Connell thus faced a dilemma by virtue of his own long held insistence that all demonstrations be in full conformity with law.

Much to the dismay of his militant young supporters -- who were called "Young Ireland" -- O'Connell called off the demonstration. Unfortunately for O'Connell, then age 68, this triggered acrimonious debates during which the young militants challenged O'Connell on a variety of long suppressed but highly divisive issues, including whether violence ever could be justified. O'Connell's Catholic Association already was on the verge of fracture when the Great Hunger (1845-48), a.k.a. potato famine, diverted attention away from grass roots politics. Four years after Clontarf, in 1847, O'Connell was dead at age 72.

O'Connell was a pioneer in using lawful and non-violent demonstrations to energize and organize his followers. Later advocates of peaceful protest -- Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King -- borrowed his tactics, but they also learned from his experience that a protest movement cannot be so dedicated to conforming with law that it acquiesces in a government declaration that a peaceful protest is illegal. If demonstrations (O'Connell's principal weapon) always had to be lawful, the government could and would always win, simply by banning demonstrations.


PART 7 FOOTNOTES:

* The mystery is what happened to change attitudes among Ulster Presbyterians, those 1795-99 firebrands, followers of Henry Joy McCracken, who advocated a republic similar to revolutionary France, who demanded independence from, not union with England, who flocked to the Society of United Irishman and took arms in rebellion against the British, who supported Wolf Tone when he twice invited France to invade Ireland, and who were the most vigorous opponents of the Act of Union? Perhaps they were horrified by the Reign of Terror atrocities in the latter stages of the French Revolution. Perhaps they felt Tone went too far in inviting France to invade Ireland. Perhaps it was the growing prosperity of Ulster. Whatever the reason, by 1820 Ulster Presbyterians had settled comfortably into the Union. Indeed, when Daniel O'Connell started a new movement in the 1830s to repeal the Act of Union, he received virtually no support from those northern Presbyterians whose fathers had been United Irishmen.

** Some observers regarded "emancipation" as a non-substantive distraction from more serious economic issues, since in the unreformed Parliament of that era, few Catholics ever could be elected, and similar representation could be achieved by electing pro-Catholic Protestants. These commentators overlook the value of the issue in energizing and organizing Catholics.