Each year the College hosts a lecture in celebration of Daniel O’Connell who worked to end the penal laws and bring in catholic emancipation in Ireland.  O’Connell’s work lead to the Lord Stanley Education Act and the founding, in 1833 of this, the oldest catholic school in Ulster.

When St Mary’s Hall in Bank Street was being demolished in 1990  its famous 1889 bust of O’Connell “the liberator” was saved and eventually moved to the College and mounted in the Library in 1996.  The event was marked with a lecture which has developed into an annual College institution and a keystone in the College’s Heritage Programme.

The lectures have encompassed many notable speakers and topics from a wide variety of fields , legal, scientific, cultural and historic.  

This year’s lecture, by Dr. Patrick Geoghegan, Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, is like the very first, on the subject of O’Connell himself.

King Dan:  The rise of O’Connell