King Dan: the Rise of Daniel O’Connell, 1775-1829 by Patrick M Geoghegan, Gill & Macmillan, 320 pp, €24.99, ISBN: 978-0717143931

Towards the beginning of this challenging book, the first part of a projected two-volume biography of Daniel O’Connell, Patrick Geoghegan quotes O’Connell’s declaration that future generations would have no idea of the scale of his achievement in emancipating the Catholics because they could have no idea of the difficulties and opposition he had to contend with. This has indeed been the case, partly because the defenders of the Protestant confessional state and its corporate appendages were so utterly routed during the nineteenth century that today it is difficult to grasp their former power or even their rationale (though during the controversies of the 1980s some liberal eulogists of O’Connell, such as Conor Cruise O’Brien, mischievously compared it to the role of the Catholic Church in post-independence Ireland).

Geoghegan proclaims O’Connell as the founder of modern Ireland, whose channelling of popular discontent into political agitation set the precedent for later nationalist movements in dis