O'Connell changed his policy as regards Ireland when Peel became minister in 1841. He declared that a Tory regime in his country was incompatible with good government, and he began an agitation for the repeal of the union. He had denounced the union in early manhood as an obstacle to the Catholic cause; he had spoken against the measure in parliament ; he believed that the claims of Ireland were set aside or slighted in what he deemed an alien assembly; and, though he had ceased for some years to demand repeal, and regarded it as rather a means than an end, he was throughout life an avowed repealer. In his judg ment the repeal of the union would not weaken the real bond between Great Britain and Ireland. The Catholic Association of 1828-29 was recreated for the new project. Enormous meetings convened by the priesthood, and directed or controlled by O'Con nell, assembled in 1842-1843, and probably nine-tenths of the Irish Catholics were unanimous in the cry for repeal. O'Connell seems to have thought success certain; but he had not perceived the essential difference between his earlier agitation and this. The enlightened opinion of the three kingdoms for the most part approved the Catholic claims, and as certainly it condemned repeal. After some hesitation Peel resolved to put down the repeal movement. A vast intended meeting was proclaimed un lawful, and in October 1843 O'Connell was arrested and held to bail, with ten or twelve of his principal followers. He was con victed (February 1844) after the trials that followed, but the judges were biassed, and the sentence of imprisonment for a year and a fine of £2,000 was reversed on a writ of error by the House of Lords (September and he and his colleagues were again free. The spell, however, of O'Connell's power had
vanished ; his health had suffered much from a short confinement ; he was verging upon his seventieth year ; and he was disturbed by the growth of a party in the repeal ranks who scoffed at his views, and advocated the revolutionary doctrines which he had always feared and abhorred. Before long famine had fallen on the land, and under this visitation the repeal movement, already paralysed, collapsed. O'Connell died on May 15, 1847, at Genoa, whilst on his way to Rome. His body was brought back to Dublin and buried in Glasnevin cemetery.
Catholic Ireland calls O'Connell her "Liberator" still; he pos sessed the wisdom, the caution and the tact of a real statesman. But the battle in which he fought was not to be won in his generation. O'Connell married in 1802 his cousin Mary O'Con nell, by whom he had three daughters and four sons, Maurice, Morgan, John (1810-1858), known as the "Young Liberator," and Daniel, who all sat in parliament.
See his son, John's, Life (1846) and Recollections and Experiences (1849), the biographies by W. Fagan (1847), M. F. Cusack (1872), J. O'Rourke and O'Keefe (1875), and J. A. Hamilton (1888) ; also R. Dunlop, Daniel O'Connell and the Revival of National Life in Ireland (1900), R. Houston, Daniel O'Connell: his Early Life and Journal, (1906), and A. Zimmermann, Daniel O'Connell der Befreier and seine politische Bedeutung fur Irland and England (Paderborn, 2909) .