![]() The head of an old established family, as well as a trader and smuggler, Hunting Cap epitomized the survival mentality of a Catholic chieftain, who, during the long era of the Penal Laws, was prepared to barter conspicuous prosperity for the comparative benefit of being left in undisturbed possession of his semi-lawless fastness. 7 Soon afterwards he left the house of his father, a farmer and storekeeper, to live at Derrynane as the adopted heir of his childless and idiosyncratic uncle Maurice, who, in a reference to the headgear which he habitually adopted in order to avoid the hat tax, was known as Hunting Cap. 6 Fostered out to a peasant couple till the age of four, he was imbued with the language and traditions of the then still vibrant Gaelic culture, and ever afterwards he displayed a deep love for the common people, whose ways were second nature to him, even if he was unsentimental about the gradual abandonment of the Irish tongue. 5Īlthough it was in the context of listening to their reports of the parliamentary deeds of Grattan and the Patriots that the young O’Connell once startled his adult relatives by asserting that ‘I’ll make a stir in the world yet’, his birth into a minor Catholic gentry family on the remote Iveragh peninsula was an inauspicious beginning for a would-be politician. Conscious since childhood that he would one day, as he put it, ‘write my name on the page of history’, he long envisaged a parliamentary career and, even though he had to wait till his mid-fifties to obtain a seat, it was to the Commons, ideally in some relocated and reformed version, that he looked as the summit of his hopes for the salvation of his country. Nevertheless, his purpose was always to advance the interests of Ireland by promoting any form of legal and peaceful pressure that could be brought to bear on Parliament. 3 Acclaimed and beloved, by turns, as a Kerry clan chief, ‘the Councillor’, a national folk hero, one of the ablest of Catholic agitators, ‘the Liberator’, a leading advocate for repeal of the Union and ‘the moral king of Ireland’, 4 O’Connell had many identities. Bold, eloquent and committed, he was instantly recognizable as a public figure by his broad featured face, with its snub nose, wide mouth, ‘potent’ but ‘crafty’ eyes, and strong forehead, which, according to the poet Aubrey de Vere, was ‘well adapted for thinking purposes, but better still, apparently, for butting against opponents or pushing his way through them’. Tall and deep-chested with a frank and good-humoured countenance, O’Connell was a physically imposing and theatrically seductive character. 2 Certainly, for his ambitions were high and his reach almost unlimited (except in Ulster and the far West), he dominated Irish politics in the first half of the nineteenth century to an extent which was unmatched in Britain, save perhaps for the statesmanship of his antithesis and arch adversary Robert Peel*, with whom, for nearly four decades, he contended for the destiny of Ireland. Yet it was not his activities in the House, early on at least, that won him lasting fame as an MP, so much as the simple fact of his election for Clare in 1828, his candidacy as a Catholic heavyweight being an act of such stupendous audacity that his triumphant victory was to signal the capitulation of the Protestant governing élite. 1 Arguably, he was one of the greatest of all Members in this period, at least in terms of his hugely significant role in the attainment of Catholic emancipation in 1829. O’Connell was by far the most prominent Irishman in the Commons from February 1830, when he was finally allowed to take his seat, death having removed ‘old Harry Grattan’, whom he considered his country’s leading man ‘ next to myself’, just after the general election of 1820. 1809 uncle Maurice O’Connell to Derrynane 1825. of Thomas O’Connell, physician, of Tralee, co. Omer 1791, Douai 1792 Chevalier Fagan’s acad. of John O’Mullane of Whitechurch, Mallow, co. of Morgan O’Connell of Carhen, Cahirciveen, co. ![]()
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