Clodagh Finn: Mary O’Connell, the Liberator’s wife, remains almost invisible (2024)

Little wonder. You can’t miss the colossal monument to him in the centre of the capital. The bronze statue of the famous Kerry man stands some 12 metres high on a plinth surrounded by an array of almost 30 figures representing everything that was important in his life — the professions, the arts, trades, church, and ordinary people.

A Maid of Erin, standing on broken shackles, holds the 1829 Act of Catholic Emancipation while the winged victories on the granite base speak of patriotism, courage, eloquence, and fidelity. Bullet holes in two of them are testament to a later milestone in history, the Easter Rising of 1916.

This is the story of Ireland in bronze and granite— with one glaring and shameful omission. Where is the recognition of Daniel O’Connell’s wife, Mary O’Connell?

Without her, the man who is feted nationally and internationally would never have achieved what he did

Historian and author Erin Bishop provides this neat summary of her neglected role: “Over the course of her marriage, she oversaw her household, managed the servants, diligently maintained family connections, practised her faith, raised her children, and often acted as an agent to her husband, whose circuit practice took him away from home for nearly four months every year.”

Controversy

There is much to add to that, not least how she stood by her husband after Ellen Courtenay from Cork published a pamphlet accusing O’Connell of fathering her son in 1818, some 16 years into what was, undoubtedly, a happy marriage.

Courtenay did not mince her words. Her account of what happened was published under the robust title: “A narrative of most extraordinary cruelty, perfidy, and depravity, perpetrated against her by Daniel O’Connell”, but she was not believed either in a legal court or the court of public opinion.

Daniel O’Connell strenuously denied her allegations, but he did not hide his rakish past when he first met his future wife in 1800. He confessed that his passions had led him astray when “the blood was bubbling in my veins”, as he colourfully put it.

He also admitted that he had professed love to a woman before, but this was the first time he really meant it.

He did mean it; that’s clear from the 1,000 or so surviving letters the couple wrote to each other between 1800 and 1836.

When they first met, those letters were exchanged in secret, partly because the couple were distant cousins but mostly because Daniel feared (rightly) that he would be disinherited if he married Mary, a woman without a dowry.

Mary was already an O’Connell before she married Daniel secretly, with her mother and sister’s help, in July 1802. She was born in Tralee on September 25, 1778, to Ellen Tuohy and her physician husband Thomas O’Connell but, so tellingly, her life doesn’t appear in the historical record until she meets a man of note.

And even then, she was kept hidden. The couple lived apart— Mary in Kerry and Daniel in Dublin — and they kept up their clandestine correspondence until it could be hidden no longer because Mary was about to give birth to the couple’s first child.

As feared, Daniel O’Connell was disinherited by his uncle, Maurice ‘Hunting Cap’ O’Connell, although Daniel’s parents — Morgan and Catherine O’Connell — invited Mary to live with them near Cahersiveen.

It is hard to imagine what Mary O’Connell went through during the early days of her marriage and the loneliness of her first difficult pregnancy, although some of those feelings are eloquently expressed in her letters.

“I can’t, as I see other women do, enjoy themselves in their husband’s absence,” she wrote shortly after they were married in 1802. “When you are away my wish is never to stir out … Do not, my darling, be angry with me when I own to you that hardly a day passes that I do not shed tears on your picture.”

Her new husband was far from angry, responding that the “evil of absence” was soothed by thoughts of her love. “Sweet Mary,” he wrote, “I rave of you! I think only of you! I sigh for you, I weep for you! I almost pray to you! Darling, I do not — indeed I do not — exaggerate.”

Yet, the “evil of absence” was to become a feature of their married life as he worked the legal circuit and became ever more involved in politics.

Heartache

After the birth of their first child Maurice in 1803, 11 more pregnancies followed. A second son, Morgan, was born in 1804. A daughter Ellen arrived the following year and, in 1807, a second daughter Kate was born. In 1808, Edward was born but he died as an infant.

Two years later, in 1810, Mary O’Connell gave birth to two children: Elizabeth in February and John in December. She was pregnant again between 1812 and 1816 and gave birth to five more children, but only one of them, her youngest Daniel, made it into adulthood.

In all, Mary lost five children and although her own feelings on the subject are not recorded in her letters to her husband— presumably she told him in person — she showed deep empathy in letters to other family members who lost children.

Caring for her children was work enough, but Mary O’Connell had a constant battle trying to rein in her husband’s reckless spending. When he wouldn’t — or couldn’t — Mary and six of the children moved to the south of France in 1822 where they could live more cheaply to ease the family’s ever-present financial woes.

O’Connell told his wife to fall “in love with every farthing” so that they could end their enforced separation as quickly as possible. Mary proved to be a master at frugal living, yet when she returned to Dublin after two years of economising the couple still had money problems.

Yet, their love and devotion remained steadfast. When the Ellen Courtenay scandal threatened to negatively affect her husband in April 1836, Mary O’Connell did what so many political wives have done since, she joined her husband on a political tour of England even though she was in poor health.

A month later, she went to the spa town of Tunbridge Wells “to take the waters” in an attempt to improve her health, but she died shortly afterwards, aged 58, at Derrynane in Co Kerry. Her grieving husband was said never to have got over it.

Why then is Mary O’Connell so little celebrated when she played such a key role in Irish history?