The naming of O’Connell Street in the North Adelaide section of Colonel William Light’s plan of the city is almost certainly the work of one man: Sir John Jeffcott, the newly arrived Chief Justice in the colony.
Having spent several months in Van Diemen’s Land before yielding to his better judgement and taking up his appointment, Jeffcott was one of the twelve on the Street Naming Committee which sat on 23 May 1837. At some point during this meeting Jeffcott was accorded the honour of having what was then the principal thoroughfare through the North Adelaide precinct named after himself. As a corollary, it is almost certain that he subsequently and concomitantly put forward the name of O’Connell for the other north/south road running parallel through the area.
Today, for reasons best described as topographical and geographical, O’Connell Street rather than Jeffcott Street is the main street northward through the area from the city. Be that as it may, what is perhaps less well known, and probably contentious with some scholars, is that O’Connell Street might have been named after the O’Connell family at large and not simply after the great Irish Catholic patriot alone. Some writers have even claimed that the street is not named after Daniel but after his son, Maurice, who was a fellow student of Sir John Jeffcott at Trinity College Dublin in 1815.
Jeffcott, however, was probably intent on embracing the whole O’Connell family but especially Daniel, to whom he was personally indebted. Fleeting and personal memories of the son Maurice, who like his father also sat in the House of Commons in 1836–37, probably cemented his resolve. There were other members too of the O’Connell family who might equally have been considered in Jeffcott’s thinking, especially given that the Jeffcott and O’Connell families had been close for at least two generations. Sir John Jeffcott’s father was a close associate and classmate of Daniel O’Connell in Kerry. Furthermore, besides Jeffcott’s friendship with Maurice, there were other family members working for the Irish Catholic cause in Britain during the mid-1830s. It must also be remembered that it was O’Connell’s uncle, Maurice ‘Hunting Cap’ O’Connell of Derrynane House who took the young Daniel under his wing during his formative years, schooling him in France and tutoring him towards greatness. If the street was named after the family at large then he too must surely be included.
However, perhaps it is with some justification that whatever the original intent, most people in Adelaide today think only of Daniel when they think of O’Connell Street. His accomplishments in life were monumental and his name is etched in folklore. From relative obscurity in 1823, Daniel forged and built the large and successful Catholic Association, a ‘populist base for the campaign for emancipation’. This movement grew to such an extent that O’Connell drew as many as 250,000 people to his rallies and ultimately challenged the very foundations of British polity.
By 5 July 1828 his power was legendary in Ireland and he decided to challenge the British electoral system, which hitherto precluded Irish Catholics from taking a seat in the House of Commons. They were allowed to contest elections, but if they won were barred from parliament unless they subscribed to the Anti-Catholic Oath. This O’Connell rightly believed to be discriminatory. He put himself forward for a by-election in County Clare and won the contest handsomely – O’Connell 2,057 votes to Fitzgerald 982.
Rather cleverly he then ‘used his “frank” as a member of Parliament but did not present himself at the House’. In the weeks which followed there was a huge groundswell of support for his stand. This forced the hand of the government. The result was the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, which allowed Catholics to sit in both the Lords and the Commons, provided they took a lengthy prescribed oath ‘not to subvert the sovereign or the constitution, the Protestant religion as by law established, or the settlement of property’.
His election to parliament opened the floodgates. Following the Reform Bill, which widened the electoral franchise on several fronts, he was joined on the parliamentary benches by three of his sons and two of his sons-in-law. At this momentous general election of 1832 O’Connell was responsible for personally nominating at least half of the Irishmen seeking election. At the next sitting there were 105 Irish MPs in the House, and at least 45 of these were Roman Catholic ‘Repealers’ who fought strenuously against the Act of Union and Grey’s Coercion Act 1833.
By the time South Australia was first settled by Europeans, the O’Connell name was indelibly etched on the minds of those who had an eye for politics, and especially among those young South Australian Commission employees who were part of the street naming process. Daniel O’Connell was a household name throughout Britain and still is in the west today. One can imagine little dissent over this decision, and it could very well have been carried by acclamation, despite the fact that it might have left a bitter taste in the mouth of some intensely dissident Protestants in the colony like the Reverend Thomas Quinton Stow. His opinion was that Catholicism was full of superstition and idolatry, dressed up in popery.
To understand Daniel O’Connell and the power he held over all Irish Catholics it is necessary to trace some early influences in his life. He was born near Caherciveen, in County Kerr, on 6 August 1775. This puts him of an age similar to Colonel Robert Torrens, George Fife Angas, Governor Hindmarsh and Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm at the time of the first European settlement in Adelaide.
Daniel’s parents were Morgan O’Connell, a storekeeper and farmer of Carhen House, Caherciveen, and Catherine (nee O’Mullane) of Whitechurch, County Cork. Daniel obtained the rudiments of an early education from David Mahoney before being adopted by his Uncle Maurice of Derrynane House – a property that Daniel was to later inherit. Precluded from a university education, his uncle sent both Daniel and his brother to be educated in France, although his time there was truncated by the French Revolution of 1789. Nevertheless, he still came to be accomplished in or at least familiar with seven languages. Gaelic was his spoken tongue; English his medium for correspondence; and he was competent in Latin, Greek, French, German and Spanish. In the mid-1790s he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, before being admitted to the Bar in Dublin in 1798.
By the time he was 40 years old O’Connell had a flourishing law practice in Ireland, built largely by defending exploited Catholic peasantry. His legal fees in the first year of practice amounted to a mere £58, but each year thereafter his income grew exponentially until he was grossing as much as £9,000 per annum. This made him potentially a very rich man. Nevertheless, he still found time to defend pro bonothose of his own religion who could not afford to pay. He served as both Alderman and then Lord Mayor of Dublin (1841–42); and was in service to the law as Queen’s Counsel in Ireland. In all this he became what one might call a constitutional Catholic who abhorred the aggression of the 1798 and 1803 uprisings, and who always attempted to induce change and promote liberation from within the law – and especially without violence.
This was always difficult, given the passionate sentiments of Irish Catholics and their deep-seated resentment towards the English who they disparagingly referred to as ‘the Saxons’. O’Connell led what was a non-violent revolution and was both a cipher and a conduit, through which he brought the Irish Catholic population into the mainstream of British society. Perhaps his greatest legacy was to link ‘the Catholic emancipation movement to parliamentary traditions’.
Daniel O’Connell furtively married his mendicant Protestant cousin, Mary O’Connell, in the summer of 1802, the year that Matthew Flinders was mapping the coastline of South Australia. Rather oddly, Mary and her sisters were brought up as Roman Catholics, while their brothers were raised as Protestants. Daniel and Mary had been secretly courting for at least two years. This marriage was against the wishes of his Uncle Hunting Cap O’Connell, who considered it beneath Daniel’s station. As punishment Daniel had his hereditary entitlements reduced considerably. Nevertheless, the young couple was apparently completely devoted to each other, and of the eleven children they produced seven survived into adulthood.
Despite his large income, it is said that Daniel was not a good manager of money, succumbing to some extravagance at home, as well as lending monies to many of his countrymen which was never repaid.
By 1811 he and Mary had purchased and moved into the house on Merrion Square, in Dublin. This was the beginning of what is described as his radical period, when the ideas earlier gleaned from his time at Lincoln’s Inn between 1794 and 1796 began to prompt him to action.
O’Connell had been deeply moved by both the French and the American revolutions but came to a reasoned position that change should only be taken gradually and without force. This he called his ‘moral force’ and as a result, sometime between 1815 and 1823, the year he first formed the Catholic Association, he fell in behind Jeremy Bentham in a call for universal suffrage, the equal distribution of parliamentary seats and annual parliaments.
Once admitted to parliament O’Connell soon made his presence felt. Naturally he was driven principally by matters which directly affected his countrymen: the Repeal of the Union which he brought before the House on 29 April 1834; the inequity of the tithe; and the discriminatory practices bearing on Roman Catholics throughout Britain. He reminded the House that prior to the Roman Catholic Relief Act, Catholics were excluded from ‘over 30,000 offices in parliament, law and the army and the navy’. He was also tangibly influenced by many of the utilitarians who were also swept into the House on the back of the Reform Bill. It is said that he exchanged ideas with Bentham, the apotheosis of utilitarianism, on many occasions during these heady days. On entering parliament he was considered by many to be Bentham’s ‘mouthpiece’ in the Commons. O’Connell supported the anti-slavery movement and took to ‘ripping shreds’ from the Tories for their reactionary position on so many questions.
In debate he was known for his support of Church Reform and Corporation Reform, but unlike some of the more radical MPs like Henry George Ward and Raikes Currie, he opposed the abolition of the Corn Laws on the grounds that it would injure Irish interests. He also opposed Henry Brougham’s Poor Laws because they constituted a move towards the secularisation of social welfare and the removal of the church from the pastoral care of the people.
O’Connell was an avid reader of the Westminster Review, the public face of radicalism which figured so prominently in advocating Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s ideas on systematic colonisation and which was owned by Sir William Molesworth and edited by John Stuart Mill. There is no doubt that O’Connell was aligned with the Philosophical Radicals and some of the more liberally inclined Whigs. Their ideas were similar on many pressing issues.
One matter which goes to the very heart of the likelihood that Jeffcott nominated O’Connell for a street name in North Adelaide was the fact that both men shot and killed another man in a duel. In fact, four names venerated in North Adelaide belong to men who fought in a duel at some point. The Duke of Wellington faced Lord Winchelsea, and Molesworth faced his tutor over a dispute at Cambridge. No one was injured in either of these two confrontations. O’Connell, however, fatally shot John Desterre, a Dublin merchant who took exception to a remark made about the Corporation of Dublin in 1815. Affairs of honour were still very commonly resolved this way in Ireland and on this occasion O’Connell was feted as a hero for putting one of the Orangemen down. It apparently helped build his stature among Catholics everywhere. Ironically, within months O’Connell was at it again. For some inexplicable reason, he further took offence at a calumniating remark by Foreign Secretary Peel in the House of Commons. He challenged Peel to a duel to be fought on foreign soil, there being a rising antipathy to the practice in England. Peel sailed to Ostend, where they were to meet. However, the authorities got wind of this fracas and intercepted O’Connell before he could leave England. Violence was averted and both men walked away.
O’Connell’s popularity continued unabated. In 1843 he decided not to attend parliament so as to completely devote his energies to the Repeal of the Union. Unlike his earlier success with Catholic emancipation this was not popular throughout the remainder of Britain, there being too much at stake. Between March and August 1843, thirty large assemblies were held throughout Ireland. Huge crowds gathered, usually on a Sunday morning. Ecclesiastical dignitaries administered communion to thousands of followers at makeshift altars, and O’Connell’s exhortation for all present to peacefully agitate for repeal rang out across the hillside. On 8 October this series of meetings was to be crowned with a monster meeting at Clontarf, just outside Dublin. But on the evening of 7 October a government proclamation was issued, forbidding the gathering. Prime Minister Robert Peel had finally drawn a line in the sand. Warrants were issued for the arrest of O’Connell and his confreres.
The case went to trial on 16 January and O’Connell was convicted on all eleven counts, sent to Richmond Bridewell prison for twelve months, fined £2,000 and bound over to keep the peace for seven years. During his time in prison he was treated with every consideration and freely allowed to receive visitors. The prison authorities were overwhelmed with the response to this concession and scores of carriages crowded the entrance. The authorities were forced to remain at hand, martialling the arrivals and departures with military precision.
Three months later a writ of error was brought before the House of Lords on appeal and the decision of the court was reversed. O’Connell was set free with great jubilation, and a crowd of thousands accompanied him in a triumphal procession back to his home in Merrion Square. However, as he was by this time approaching his 70s the stress of the incarceration, although short-lived, took a toll and his health began to decline.
Unfortunately, by the mid-1840s Ireland was brutally affected by what became known as the Great Irish Famine and O’Connell began to despair at the calls from some of his countrymen to rise up in violence. Tired and feeble he rose to make his last speech in the House on 8 February 1847. With some difficulty, and in a voice which was barely audible, he made his last plaintiff appeal for Ireland: ‘She is in your hands, in your power … If you do not save her, she cannot save herself.’
His time was drawing to a close and his physicians advised him to go to the continent. He began to make his way to Rome, where he could die with the blessing of the Pope. He didn’t make it and died in Genoa on 15 May 1847. He bequeathed his heart to Rome, where it rests in the church of St Agatha. His body was removed to Ireland, where it lay in state in Dublin before being finally laid to rest at Glasnevin.
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