Daniel O'Connell breathed his last at 9.37 p.m. in the Hotel Feder, just a few paces from the waterfront in Genoa, on Saturday, May 15th, 1847. The clergy of the cathedral had walked in a torchlight procession through the city in the dead of night to be present at his deathbed. Alter the Last Rites had been performed, his body was opened by Surgeon Ballieri of the local Hospital for Incurables and a team of doctors proclaimed the cause of death as congestion of the brain.

His heart was sent, in a silver urn, to Rome where it was either lost or stolen, and his body returned to Ireland for the most impressive funeral the country had yet seen - at a time when funerals were all too common due to the hunger and pestilence which raged throughout the country.

His death, for a man of such stature, occurred in the squalid circumstances of a battle of wills with his young French physician, Dr Lacour, whom he had come cordially to detest; O'Connell's refusal of food, water and medicine for days after Lacour had performed an enema may have hastened an already certain death.

No Irish politician, before or since, has been such an important figure on the European stage. De Valera made his mark as a head of government; Parnell caught the romantic imagination of many and, posthumously, the fictionalised movie character of Michael Collins has been lionised in some quarters (notably I have discovered, among young male Serbs).

But O'Connell was different. His role on the European political stage was colossal and was put into context by Thomas Babington Macaulay who wrote:

"Go where you will on the Continent: visit any coffee house: dine at any public table: embark on board of any steamboat: enter any diligence, any railway carriage: from the moment that your accent shows you to be an Englishman, the very first question asked by your companions, be what they may, physicians, advocates, merchants, manufacturers, or what we should call yeomen, is certain to be `What will be done with Mr O'Connell?' Look over any file of French journals: and you will see what a space he occupies in the eyes of the French people."

Not surprisingly, therefore, on the day of his death the bells of every church in Genoa rang out in mourning and when news of his death reached the world in a brief, but prominently displayed report in the Moniteur Parisen, political alarms rang through the capitals of Europe.

His status was such that he even gained votes in the 1831 vote for Kingship of the Belgians, though Queen Victoria, whom he greatly admired, had ensured that a member of her cousinage would be victorious. The Emperor of Russia asked the Count Dolgorukov to procure his autograph but O'Connell refused because of the Tsar's treatment of the Poles.

O'Connell himself was quite comfortable with his own reputation as a man of national and international importance and did not hesitate to sign many of his letters as "Daniel O'Connell, Liberator of Ireland".

This bombastic side to his character was a godsend to his detractors in Britain and in Ireland: Torys and Young Irelanders at the time, Unionists and Republicans closer to the present day. On the one hand he was the big Romish Beggarman who had set out to put the Pope before the Queen and was busy undermining the sacred Union; on the other he was the weak, vacillating politician whose bluff had been called at Clontarf and whose defeat proved that physical force was the only language the English understood.

To both sides he was duplicitous and there is little doubt that such an element existed in his character, though his oft-touted womanising appears to have been entirely fictional. Even as he travelled towards his death he called his manservant, Duggan, to his side in his hotel in Lyons and promised him he would mark his gratitude by making him "forever independent of servitude". Duggan knew his master well and noted in his diary: "Such promises signify but little for I have signed the will and codicil which, of course, exclude me in participation of any benefits arising from them.

But there were issues on which O'Connell became remarkably constant and his entire political career is marked by beliefs which might be regarded as commonplace today but which in their time were so liberal that they frequently crossed the borderline into radicalism.

His opposition to physical force, apart from a possible though unproven flirtation with the United Irishmen in 1798, was particularly steadfast, although in latter years he might have been forgiven had his frustration caused him to change his tune. As a schoolboy he had seen some of the violence of the French Revolution and the outrages he witnessed later in Ireland confirmed his anti-revolutionary views.

He also abhorred the subjection of his fellow man and his opposition to slavery in the United States went as far as a refusal to accept invitations to that country and a more telling rejection of financial subscriptions from those who supported the slave system.

Have our politicians of today been as conscientious in their avoidance of donations from those who supported, directly or indirectly, the repressive regimes of South Africa or North Korea? The political inheritance bequeathed by O'Connell to today's Ireland does not go that far, but his role at home and abroad is increasingly being understood and, in more recent years, applauded.

His success in gaining Catholic Emancipation led to the enfranchisement not only of his co-religionists at home but in England, Scotland and Wales. Jewish emancipation followed and his role in this respect was also formidable.

HIS bringing together of the Catholicism and liberalism of his day was a major achievement. The last eulogy read before his faltering ego, his weakening mind and his feeble body in Paris, in the course of his final journey, was from the great French opponent of absolutism in church and state, Charles Montalembert, who told the Irish liberator: "Wherever religion tends to emancipate itself from the thraldom in which several generations of sophists and legists have placed it, to you, after God, it is indebeted."

O'Connell managed only to reply that his physical condition was such that he was unable properly to express his feelings. "Know simply that I regard this demonstration on your part as one of the most significant events of my life."

His life, had at that time, just six short weeks to run.