seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Charles Stewart Parnell


by Leave a comment

First Burial at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin

glasnevin-tower

The first burial takes place at Glasnevin Cemetery in Glasnevin, Dublin, on February 22, 1832.

Prior to the establishment of Glasnevin Cemetery, Irish Catholics have no cemeteries of their own in which to bury their dead. The repressive Penal Laws of the eighteenth-century place heavy restrictions on the public performance of Catholic services, forcing Catholics to conduct a limited version of their own funeral services in Protestant churchyards or graveyards. This situation continues until an incident at a funeral held at St. Kevin’s Churchyard in 1823 provokes public outcry when a Protestant sexton reprimands a Catholic priest for proceeding to perform a limited version of a funeral mass. The outcry prompts Daniel O’Connell, champion of Catholic rights, to launch a campaign and prepare a legal opinion proving that there is actually no law forbidding praying for a dead Catholic in a graveyard. O’Connell pushes for the opening of a burial ground in which both Irish Catholics and Protestants can give their dead a dignified burial.

Glasnevin Cemetery is consecrated and opened to the public for the first time on February 21, 1832. The first burial, that of eleven-year-old Michael Carey from Francis Street in Dublin, takes place on the following day in a section of the cemetery known as Curran’s Square. The cemetery is initially known as Prospect Cemetery, a name chosen from the townland of Prospect, which surrounds the cemetery lands.

SONY DSC

Originally covering nine acres of ground, the area of the cemetery has now grown to approximately 124 acres and is the final resting place of some 1.5 million people. The cemetery consists of two parts. The main part, with its trademark high walls and watchtowers, is located on one side of the road from Finglas to the city centre, while the other part, called St. Paul’s, is located across the road and beyond a green space, between two railway lines.

Glasnevin is one of the few cemeteries that allows stillborn babies to be buried in consecrated ground and contains an area called the Angels Plot for that purpose. In 1982, a crematorium is constructed within the cemetery grounds by Glasnevin Trust and has since been used for people of various religious denominations who wish to be cremated.

Glasnevin contains historically notable monuments and the graves of many of Ireland’s most prominent national figures. These include the graves of Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Collins (pictured at right), Éamon de Valera, Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, Kevin Barry, Roger Casement, Constance Markievicz, Pádraig Ó Domhnaill, Seán MacBride, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Frank Duff, Brendan Behan, Christy Brown, and Luke Kelly of the Dubliners.

Glasnevin Cemetery remains under the care of the Dublin Cemeteries Committee and the development, expansion, and refurbishment of the cemetery is an ongoing task.

The Catholic Mass is celebrated by members of the parish clergy every Sunday at 9:45 AM. An annual blessing of the graves takes place each summer as it has since the founding of the cemetery in 1832.


by Leave a comment

John Redmond Elected Leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party

john-redmond-1917

John Edward Redmond, Irish nationalist politician, barrister, and Member of Parliament (MP) in the British House of Commons, is elected leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party on February 6, 1900.

Redmond is born at Ballytrent House, his grandfather’s old family mansion, in Kilrane, County Wexford. As a student at Clongowes Wood College, he exhibits the seriousness that many soon come to associate with him. After finishing at Clongowes, Redmond attends Trinity College, Dublin to study law, but his father’s ill health leads him to abandon his studies before taking a degree and, in 1876, goes to live with him in London. As a clerk in the House of Commons he increasingly identifies himself with the fortunes of Charles Stewart Parnell, one of the founders of the Irish Land League.

Redmond first attends political meetings with Parnell in 1879. Upon the death of his father, a Member of Parliament for Wexford, in 1880, Redmond writes to Parnell asking for adoption as the Nationalist Party, which becomes the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1882, candidate in the by-election to fill the open seat, but is disappointed to learn that Parnell has already promised the next vacancy to his secretary Timothy Healy. When a vacancy arises in New Ross, he wins election unopposed as the Parnellite candidate for the seat. He served as MP for New Ross from 1881 to 1885, for North Wexford from 1885 to 1891 and finally for Waterford City from 1891 until his death in 1918.

In 1890, the Irish Parliamentary Party splits over Parnell’s leadership when his long-standing adultery with Katharine O’Shea is revealed in a spectacular divorce case. Redmond stands by Parnell and works to keep the minority faction active. When Parnell dies in 1891, Redmond takes over leadership of the Parnellite faction of the split party, called the Irish National League (INL). The larger anti-Parnellite group forms the Irish National Federation (INF) under John Dillon.

Through the initiative of William O’Brien and his United Irish League (UIL), the INL and the INF re-unite on February 6, 1900, within the Irish Parliamentary Party. Redmond is elected its chairman, a position he holds until his death in 1918, a longer period than any other nationalist leader with the exceptions of Éamon de Valera and Daniel O’Connell.

The achievement of Home Rule is his life’s goal, having strongly supported William Gladstone’s Home Rule bills of 1886 and 1893. His best opportunity arises when the Irish Parliamentary Party holds the balance of power under H. H. Asquith in the period from 1910 onwards.  Opposition by the Ulster Unionists frustrates his plans, his main worry being that Home Rule will result in the permanent exclusion of at least some of the Ulster counties. He also fears that the activities of the Irish Volunteers might hinder the enactment of Home Rule. To guard against this eventuality, he secures the control of the organisation in June 1914.  He welcomes the Government of Ireland Act, 1914 as the only measure of Home Rule then possible. Its suspension for the duration of the war postpones addressing the issue of partition.

To ensure the success of the war effort and the speedier implementation of Home Rule, Redmond offers the services of the Irish Volunteers for the defence of the country, an offer rejected by the government. By encouraging the Volunteers to join the British army, he splits the organisation. The vast majority, totaling 170,000 and thereafter known as the National Volunteers, follow Redmond, many of them enlisting in the British army.  Those who aspire to an Irish republic or who have lost faith in Home Rule remain as the Irish Volunteers, their numbers now reduced to about 10,000.

Consequently, the 1916 Easter Rising takes him completely by surprise. Committed to keeping Ireland within the Union, he regards the Rising as treason and a “German intrigue.”  He has no sympathy with the leaders or their objective of a republic.  Nevertheless, he pleads for leniency in the House of Commons.

An operation in March 1918 to remove an intestinal obstruction appears to progress well at first, but then he suffers heart failure. He dies a few hours later at a London nursing home on March 6, 1918. One of the last things he says to the Jesuit Father who is with him to the end is, “Father, I am a broken-hearted man.”


by Leave a comment

Death of Katharine O’Shea Parnell

katharine-osheaKatharine O’Shea, called Katie O’Shea by friends and Kitty O’Shea by enemies, dies on February 5, 1921 in Littlehampton, England. O’Shea is an English woman of aristocratic background whose decade-long secret affair with Charles Stewart Parnell leads to a widely publicized divorce in 1890 and, ultimately, his political downfall.

Katharine first meets Parnell in 1880, when she is separated from but still legally married to Captain William O’Shea, a Catholic Nationalist Member of Parliament (MP) for County Clare. As a result of her family’s connection to the Liberal Party, she acts as liaison between Parnell and William Gladstone during negotiations prior to the introduction of the First Irish Home Rule Bill in April 1886. During the summer of that year, Parnell moves into her home in Eltham, near the London-Kent border. Parnell fathers three of Katharine’s children.

Captain O’Shea is aware of the relationship and challenges Parnell to a duel in 1881, however, when Parnell accepts the challenge, O’Shea backs down. Initially, O’Shea forbids his ex-wife to see Parnell, although she says that he encourages her in the relationship. O’Shea keeps quiet publicly for several years, possibly in hopes of an inheritance from Katharine’s rich aunt who has been in failing health. When she dies in 1889, however, her money is left in trust to cousins.

Although their relationship is a subject of gossip in London political circles from 1881, later public knowledge of the affair in an England governed by “Victorian morality” with a “nonconformist conscience” creates a huge scandal, as adultery is prohibited by the Ten Commandments.

After the divorce proceedings in November 1890, in which Parnell is named as co-respondent, the court awards custody of Katharine’s two daughters by Parnell to her ex-husband. The divorce and eventual remarriage leads to Parnell being deserted by a majority of his own Irish Parliamentary Party and to his downfall as its leader in December 1890.

Catholic Ireland feels a profound sense of shock when Katharine breaks the vows of her previous Catholic marriage by marrying Parnell on June 25, 1891. The marriage, however, is short-lived. With Parnell’s political life and health essentially ruined, he dies in Katharine’s arms at the age of 45 in Hove, England, on October 6, 1891, less than four months after their marriage. The cause of death is determined to be cancer of the stomach, possibly complicated by coronary heart disease inherited from his grandfather and father.

Katharine publishes a biography of Parnell in 1914 as “Katharine O’Shea (Mrs. Charles Stewart Parnell),” though to her friends she is known as Katie O’Shea. Parnell’s enemies, in order to damage him personally, call her “Kitty O’Shea” because “kitty,” although a Hiberno-English version of Katharine, is also a slang term for a prostitute. After Parnell’s death, Katharine suffers from a nervous breakdown and disappears from public life. She dies on February 5, 1921 after spending her final years moving from rented house to rented house all over the south coast of England. Katharine O’Shea is buried in Littlehampton, Sussex, England.

Captain Henry Harrison, MP, who acts as Parnell’s bodyguard and aide-de-camp, devotes himself after Parnell’s death to the service of his widow. From her he hears a completely different version of the events surrounding the divorce issue from that which had appeared in the press in 1890. This forms the seed of two of Harrison’s later books defending Parnell which are published in 1931 and 1938. They have a major impact on Irish historiography, leading to a more favourable view of Parnell’s role in the O’Shea affair.