Daniel O'connell Quotes

You make me feel like I’ve lost control… of my thoughts… my emotions.” “Is that so bad?” Ethan presses her palm to his chest so she can feel the rhythmic beating of his heart. “You’re not the only one who feels that way. The moment I saw you… my heart beat your name.” Ethan O'Connell & Olivia James - Intractable Souls

The History of Ireland in two words: Ah well. The Invasion by the Vikings: Ah well. The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Daniel O’Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine, Charles Stewart Parnell, Easter Rising, Michael Collins, Éamon De Valera, Éamon De Valera again (Dear Germany, so sorry to learn of the death of your Mr Hitler), Éamon De Valera again, the Troubles, the Tribunals, the Fianna Fáil Party, The Church, the Banks, the eight hundred years of rain: Ah well. In the Aeneid Virgil tells it as Sunt lacrimae rerum, which in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation means ‘They weep for how the world goes’, which is more eloquent than Ah well but means the same thing.

I will go on quietly and slowly, but I will go on firmly, and with a certainty of success.

20 O’Connell’s lifelong love of the theatre began as a child and it was said that at the age of ten he composed a drama about the fortunes of the house of Stuart.21

In this period O’Connell was a radical and willing to express and argue his beliefs in public. From William Godwin he had come to the belief that ‘government is best which laid fewest restrictions on private judgement’.

O’Connell was a lazy child. However ‘the fear of disgrace’ often motivated him to work hard at the last moment, and he boasted that he was ‘remarkably quick and persevering’.

The altar of liberty totters when it is cemented only with blood, when it is supported only with carcases’.66 Instead he vowed to devote his life to the pursuit of a genuine liberty ‘that would increase the happiness of mankind’.

Their views were not shared by two young Irishmen who boarded at Calais, John and Henry Sheares. They entered the cabin one evening when the execution was being discussed and boasted that they had been present to watch it, having bribed two national guardsmen into letting them borrow their uniforms. One Englishman was horrified and exclaimed, ‘But, in God’s name, how could you endure to witness such a hideous spectacle?’ The reply of John Sheares made O’Connell shudder and he never forgot ‘his manner of pronouncing the words: “From love of the cause!”’.

Like many of the radicals of this period, O’Connell came to detest Lord Castlereagh, the chief secretary who crushed the 1798 Rebellion and then co-ordinated the passing of the Act of Union. In March 1797, though, he admired him as ‘a very valuable man’.87 Few Irish politicians were more abused by O’Connell in the years ahead, although in private he was sometimes generous.

immediately was ‘by becoming a violent oppositionist’. But he preferred ‘to serve my country’ and therefore thought that ‘moderation’ was the best policy. ‘Moderation is the character of genuine patriotism’, he insisted, ‘and through it came ‘the happiness of mankind’.

unformed and vulnerable, trying to find his way in the world. In part he was upset because he was suffering from a terrible cold, in part he was beginning to despair about what would happen in Ireland in the event of a rebellion. And worse, this was a rebellion which he believed was being forced on the country by the wilfully destructive actions of the government.

In later years O’Connell spoke harshly about the 1798 Rebellion. Once in the 1840s he was criticised for this by some American visitors, but was uncompromising in his response. He dismissed the rebellion as ‘an ill-digested, foolish scheme, entered upon without the means or the organisation necessary to ensure success’.53 Nor did he have much sympathy for the leaders. While he accepted that some were ‘pure, well-intentioned men’, he believed the majority were ‘trafficking speculators, who cared not whom they victimised in the prosecution of their schemes for self-aggrandisement’.

O’Connell had much greater respect for the people who had risen up, and he accepted that many had been provoked by ‘the cruelty of the administrators, great and small, of English power in Ireland!’55 He insisted that the examples of 1798 and 1803 had convinced him that ‘physical force could never be made an available weapon to regenerate’ Ireland: instead, ‘the best, the only effective combination must be that of moral force’.

Bobby Daniels moaned.

What you had in the chronicle of the country then was a few centuries of a game of Rebellion-Betrayal, Rebellion-Betrayal, Uprising Put-Down, and Hope Dashed. The History of Ireland in two words: Ah well. The Invasion by the Vikings: Ah well. The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Daniel O’Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine, Charles Stewart Parnell, Easter Rising, Michael Collins, Éamon De Valera, Éamon De Valera again (Dear Germany, so sorry to learn of the death of your Mr Hitler), Éamon De Valera again, the Troubles, the Tribunals, the Fianna Fáil Party, The Church, the Banks, the eight hundred years of rain: Ah well.

A few weeks later, in Parliament, Daniel O’Connell read a list of the provisions Ireland had exported to Britain during the scarcity year of 1845: two hundred thousand head of livestock, two million quarters of grain, and several hundred million pounds of flour. Should Britain fail to display generosity in the present circumstance, said O’Connell, her failure would become eternally lodged in the deepest ventricle of Irish memory. “There are five millions of people … on the verge of starvation … and I am speaking from the depth of my conviction when I [say] that … I believe the result of neglect … in the present instance will be death to an enormous amount.

The 1916 Rising is today hailed as the moment when the modern Irish state was born. But it was O’Connell who created the modern Irish nation, for better or for worse, in the nineteenth century.

The decision was presented in stark terms: ‘If you come they’ll be safe; if not, they’ll all be hanged’.7 O’Connell accepted the retainer. That day he set out for Cork, choosing to drive a gig, a light carriage with one horse. The road was bad and he was forced to stop for rest in Macroom for a few hours, before continuing his journey overnight. He arrived in Cork at ten o’clock in the morning.

Daniel O’Connell had to wait until Parliament reassembled to commence his parliamentary career. He finally took his seat on 4 February 1830.

Fifty-odd years after the Gordon Riots, Daniel O’Connell hailed the Emancipation Act as ‘one of the greatest triumphs recorded in history – a bloodless revolution more extensive in its operation than any other political change that could take place.

THE FIRST DAY OF FREEDOM!’: this was how Daniel O’Connell headed one letter on 14 April 1829, the day after Catholic Emancipation became law in Britain and Ireland.

Ireland, it must be admitted, has been ungrateful to her great men’. (SPEECH OF DANIEL O’CONNELL, 10 FEBRUARY 1827).

His émigré friend, De Vigonier, claimed that the emancipated former French slaves at St Domingo were ‘tired of liberty’ and that they wanted a return to slavery.43 O’Connell’s dismissive comment was ‘I have enough of nonsense of my own’.

Wisdom is not hereditary, but undoubtedly prejudice is...

As has been well said by the Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell, ‘no man can be grateful at the cost of his honour, no woman can be grateful at the cost of her chastity and no nation can be grateful at the cost of its liberty’.