How the Irish Liberator helped liberate America’s enslaved

Christian E. O’Connell is an attorney in D.C.

Two hundred fifty years ago this August, Daniel O’Connell was born in rural County Kerry, Ireland. His name may no longer ring in American ears — though Dublin’s grandest boulevard, O’Connell Street, bears it proudly — but in his own time, the lawyer and statesman was one of the most celebrated orators in the world, known simply as “the Liberator” for dismantling Britain’s Penal Laws and winning Catholic emancipation in 1829.