This was the Ireland in which Daniel O'Connell would emerge as one of the earliest leaders of a constitutional and democratic mass movement. Born in 1775 near Cahirciveen, County Kerry, O'Connell's family were old Catholic gentry that had been able to maintain a certain degree of well-being through the cooperation of relatives and some Protestants, who connived in evading the full implications of the penal law restrictions on the amassment of land by Catholics. O'Connell's very close roots with Gaelic Ireland are evidenced in his father's fostering him as a very young child to a tenant family, much like a pattern in earlier times where alliances and solidarity between families was secured in such a manner. The family to whom the young boy was sent spoke only Irish and O'Connell only learned English when he returned to his parents. As a teenager he went to live with his wealthy uncle, Maurice, who had an estate at nearby Derrynane and who had amassed a fortune, in no small part through smuggling, especially wines and cognac from France, as well as grazing. His uncle sent O'Connell to Catholic schools in France during the early years of the French Revolution. The oppression of those institutions by the new regime required O'Connell to flee France and continue his studies in England. He began to read for the bar, to which Catholics had become eligible for admission, at Lincoln's Inn in 1794.
The frightening experience of the revolution in France made a permanent impression on the young man and would inhibit him from sympathizing with violence as a means for righting injustice in Ireland. His study in London weaned him from his Catholic beliefs, but not in the direction of accepting the established church. Rather, he was drawn toward the secular or at least Deist ideas of the Enlightenment, particularly the thought of William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham, both critics of traditional institutions and advocates of liberty and democracy. Bentham's theory of utilitarianism, however, was also condemnatory of violent uprisings, as, he affirmed, they stem from emotion rather than reason and would not adequately advance what would be in the best interests of most. O'Connell later returned to Catholicism and, indeed, become
A particularly devout adherent, but he never shed the political liberalism he had accepted as a law student. Later in his career, while championing the rights of his fellow Catholics in Ireland and earnestly adhering to his religion, he advocated religious disestablishment, even in countries where Catholicism was the established religion.
Called to the bar in 1798 in Dublin, he had sympathized with the reform aspect of the United Irishmen program, but he disapproved of the violent direction the movement ultimately took. He even served on a lawyer's yeoman corps against further violence. But while he condemned the insurrection of 1798 as a useless waste of life and property, he was not one with the more conservative Catholic elements, including the hierarchy and the landowners, including his own uncle-patron, in looking to the Act of Union as a means of gaining concessions. He committed himself to the restoration of an Irish parliament quite early in his career. However, Catholic emancipation, that is, the right of Catholics to sit in parliament, would be his first item of consideration.
Within a decade the British government had forwarded the notion of combining Catholic emancipation with the semi-establishment of Catholicism through state financing of the hierarchy and clergy. In return the government would receive a veto power over the appointments of bishops, something common in Catholic nations at the time. Henry Grattan, a longtime champion of relief for Catholics, introduced legislation in 1813 giving Catholic emancipation in return for a governmental veto over church appointment. The English Catholics were supportive as were many in the Irish Catholic upper class, and the concept had tentative papal approbation, but O'Connell was vigorously opposed. Even the Irish Catholic hierarchy came around to agree with him, which prompted the pope to defer to that opposition. Subsequently, the chief secretary, Robert Peel, in 1814 ordered the dissolution of the Catholic Board whose older aristocratic leadership had been replaced by O'Connell and middle-class members.
During these years O'Connell achieved extraordinary success in his legal career, bringing in a formidable income. Relations with his uncle, who had disinherited him because of his "improvident" marriage to a distant cousin and also probably because of his political radicalism, were rectified and he again became a beneficiary, although not of the entire legacy. O'Connell used his legal talents to serve many Catholic defendants in various cases, particularly in cases where judge and jury were inclined to be unsympathetic to the accused. He often used the courtroom to denounce the injustice of the system. Sometimes his rhetoric infuriated officials, one of whom was Robert Peel, whom he labeled "Orange Peel.. . squeezed out of the workings of I know not what factory in England" (a play on Peel's middle-class, rather than landed, background). At one point they came close to actually dueling. It was tragic that O'Connell and Peel developed such enmity, as many of Peel's policies on Ireland were benevolent, such as establishing a police force as an alternative to the sectarian posses recruited by local grand juries consisting of landlords. Later, while prime minister, Peel would undertake relief measures at the outset of the Irish famine that would not be continued by the succeeding government of Whig allies of O'Connell.
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