page_title: Daniel O'Connell
section_title: Eulogies and interpretation
hierarchical_section_title: Daniel O'Connell / Death and commemoration / Eulogies and interpretation
context_page_description: Daniel O'Connell, hailed in his time as The Liberator, was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Roman Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century. His mobilisation of Catholic Ireland through to the poorest class of tenant farmer helped secure Catholic emancipation in 1829 and allowed him to take a seat in the United Kingdom Parliament to which he had twice been elected. At Westminster O'Connell championed liberal and reform causes but failed in his declared objective for Ireland: the restoration of a separate Irish Parliament through repeal of the 1800 Acts of Union. Against the background of a growing agrarian crisis and, in his final years, of the Great Irish Famine, O'Connell contended with dissension at home. Criticism of his political compromises and system of patronage led to a split in the national movement he had singularly led.
context_section_description: Calling O'Connell an "incarnation of a people", Honoré de Balzac noted that for twenty years his name had filled the press of Europe as no man since Napoleon. Gladstone, an eventual convert to Irish Home Rule, described him as "the greatest popular leader the world as ever seen". Frederick Douglass said of O'Connell that his voice was "enough to calm the most violent passion, even though it were already manifesting itself in a mob. There is a sweet persuasiveness in it, beyond any voice I ever heard. His power over an audience is perfect.” 
  O'Connell's oratory is a quality to which James Joyce (a distant relative) plays tribute in Ulysses: "a people", he wrote, "sheltered within his voice." Other Irish literary figures of the independence generation were critical. For W.B Yeats found O'Connell "too compromised and compromising" and his rhetoric "bragging". Sean O'Foalain sympathised with the Young Irelanders but allowed that if the nation O'Connell helped call forth and "define" was Catholic and without the Protestant north it was because O'Connell was "the greatest of all Irish realists". 
  The predominant interpretation of O'Connell in the last generation may that of liberal Catholic portrayed in Oliver MacDonagh's 1988 biography. This builds on the view of the historian Michael Tierney who proposes O'Connell as a "forerunner" of a European Christian Democracy. His more recent biographer Patrick Geoghegan has O'Connell forging "a new Irish nation in the fires of his own idealism, intolerance and determination", and becoming for a people "broken, humiliated and defeated" its "chieftan"..
caption: O'Connell Monument on O'Connell Street in Dublin
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