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On his deathbed Daniel O’Connell, the man known in his time as “the Liberator” of Ireland, made a request: “My body to Ireland, my heart to Rome and my soul to heaven.”
On Wednesday Ireland marked the 250th anniversary of his birth with speeches and pomp and a nagging question: where is the heart?
After his death in 1847 O’Connell’s heart was sent to Rome and kept as a prized relic in the Irish College at St Agata dei Goti, or the church of the Goths, but in 1927 authorities discovered it was gone.
It is still missing, and the commemorations this week prompted calls for a renewed search to find it.
“It’s a travesty if it was just left like that,” Maurice O’Connell, the statesman’s great-great-great-grandnephew, told RTÉ. “I think with the 250th anniversary, if you’re not going to search now, you’re never going to do it, so at least there’s some impetus behind it. I’m sure there’s interest in government to help the Daniel O’Connell story. But you’ve got to try and find it.”
The descendant would like to see the heart laid to rest on Abbey Island in County Kerry, where O’Connell’s wife, Mary, is buried. “It would be fantastic if the heart was reunited with her.”
The Kerry-born barrister and MP became the founding father of Irish nationalism by securing Catholic emancipation and leading an attempt to repeal the Act of Union that incorporated Ireland into the UK.
His oratory and mobilisation of huge rallies inspired civil rights movements around the world. William Gladstone called O’Connell “the greatest popular leader the world has ever seen”.
Statues of him dot Irish towns and cities, his name adorns thoroughfares and his remains lie beneath a round tower in Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery. Of his heart, however, there is no trace.
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The heart was embalmed and is believed to have been placed in an urn stored behind a marble plaque in the wall of the Irish College’s church. When the Irish College moved to another location in 1927 there was no sign of the urn.
One theory is that it was swept up with other remains during works to expand the Bank of Italy, which encroached into the church’s crypt, and reinterred at the Campo Verano cemetery. Another theory is that it was transferred to a silver casket that was then targeted by thieves.
“What a tragedy to think that the heart of O’Connell could have been swept up and taken and stolen,” a historian, John Crotty, told RTÉ. “But that is the worst-case scenario. The distinct hope has to be that it was swept up in the Campo Verano move, or that it does remain underneath the chapel of the Goths still to this day.”
