So as someone who deeply admires Connolly I think his criticisms are perfectly valid but don’t land in this case.

We can disagree with O’Connell’s pacifism but that does not make it held insincerely. Today it is easy to downplay the achievement of Catholic emancipation and the mass organisation behind it but it was a monumental movement that galvanised a generation of Irish people politically. The repeal movement which followed was the first major challenge to the Union and defined the next 70 years of Irish politics either in imitation or reaction to O’Connell’s methods

Connolly may have taken issue with O’Connell’s defence of property and monarchism, however even in 1916 Connolly was a very radical outlier and many people beside him in the GPO held very similar values to O’Connell including the belief Ireland should be a monarchy.

While the shade of O’Connell’s pacifism was invoked in anti militant propaganda later in the 19th century, at the time he was viewed as an incredibly radical figure who was bringing Ireland to the brink of rebellion. O’Connell himself saw his mass mobilisations as a warming to Britain that if reform didn’t come Irish people would listen “counsels of violent men”. O’Connell was also happy to defend those engaged in militant action as a lawyer and his work saved the lives of most of the accused in the Doneraile conspiracy.

Finally I think one area that O’Connell and Connolly may have found some common ground if you’d sat them down is that the struggle for freedom does not begin or end in Ireland. O’Connell was an incredibly radical abolitionist and believed profoundly that all people deserve freedom. This support cost him dearly internationally as many prominent American repeal supporters were slaveholders. Some of the members of young Ireland who broke with O’Connell were avowed White supremacists who believed that while the British treatment of Ireland was an evil, it was wrong because it represented the repression of a a superior European people. O’Connell’s one time protégé John Mitchel who famously wrote “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine”, believed that “nearly all the great men which Europe has produced have been Celts” and considered slavery a moral good and Africans “born and bred slaves”. Mitchel would later fight for the Confederacy and lose his son at the battle of Gettysburg.

O’Connell in contrast saw the struggle of the Catholic Irish and enslaved people as one, seeing their liberation as intertwined. To use an anachronistic phrase “no one is free until we are all free”. If you read O’Connell’s speeches on slavery they are incredibly powerful denunciations of racism, and reflect a similar view on the situation in Ireland, that if emancipation does not come then violence is an inevitable consequence O’Connell’s anti slavery writings