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Birth of D. D. Sheehan, Nationalist Politician & Labour Leader

Daniel Desmond (‘D. D.’) Sheehan, Irish nationalist, politician, labour leader, journalist, barrister and author, is born on May 28, 1873, at Dromtariffe, Kanturk, County Cork.

The eldest of the three sons and one daughter of Daniel Sheehan, tenant farmer, and his wife, Ellen (née Fitzgerald). He is educated at the local primary school. In his book Ireland since Parnell (1921) he states that witnessing the ragged poverty of labourers’ and smallholders’ children who attended the school made him determined to do something for the poor. The family’s Fenian tradition and his parents’ eviction from their holding in 1880 form his early years. At the age of sixteen he becomes a schoolteacher.

In 1890, Sheehan takes up journalism, serving as correspondent of the Kerry Sentinel and special correspondent of the Cork Daily Herald in Killarney. He also becomes correspondence secretary to the Kanturk trade and labour council, which campaigns on behalf of agricultural labourers. He manages to get reports of meetings into the Cork papers, and this helps the rapid spread of the association, which in 1890 becomes the Irish Democratic Trade and Labour Federation, under the leadership of Michael Davitt. It is, however, fatally disrupted by the Parnell split. While Sheehan continues to admire Davitt, and despite the pre-split Irish party leadership having opposed the federation as a threat to Charles Stewart Parnell‘s leadership, he becomes a Parnellite, and always remembers his only meeting with Parnell at Tralee, when the chief is presented with a loyal address (drafted by Sheehan) from his Killarney supporters. After Parnell’s death and the defeat of the Second Home Rule Bill, he temporarily drops out of Irish politics.

Following his marriage on February 6, 1894, to Mary Pauline O’Connor of Tralee, Sheehan joins the staff of the Glasgow Observer in pursuit of journalistic experience, then becomes editor of the Catholic News in Preston, Lancashire. In 1898, he returns to Ireland and works on various papers, including the Cork Constitution, before serving as editor of the Skibbereen-based Cork County Southern Star (1899–1901), where his Parnellism brings him into conflict with the Bishop of Ross, Denis Kelly. He expresses sympathy for the newly founded United Irish League (UIL), established by William O’Brien in Connacht with the dual aim of representing western smallholders and using a new land agitation as a vehicle for Irish Party reunion. He does not, however, join the UIL himself.

In August 1894, the Clonmel solicitor J. J. O’Shee, anti-Parnellite MP for West Waterford from 1895, forms the Irish Land and Labour Association (ILLA) to agitate on behalf of agricultural labourers and small tenant farmers. Its appearance reflects the breakdown of the centralised party discipline which had existed before the Parnell split, and recognition that the land war’s prime beneficiaries had been large and middle-sized tenant farmers rather than the nation as a whole. On returning from Britain in 1898, Sheehan throws himself into organising the ILLA and becomes its president. In 1900 there are 100 branches, mostly in Cork, Tipperary, and Limerick. The Irish Party leadership look on this organisation with some suspicion.

At the 1900 United Kingdom general election in Ireland Sheehan seeks the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) nomination for South Cork but was defeated by Edward Barry. After the death of Dr Charles Tanner, however, he succeeds in obtaining the IPP nomination for the constituency of Mid Cork, despite the party leadership’s attempts to deny recognition to ILLA branches in order to hand the nomination to its favoured candidate. Sheehan is elected unopposed on May 17, 1901. At the age of 28, he is the youngest Irish member of parliament. Although he has been admitted to the party, his position as a labour representative and his perceived independent base make him something of an outsider.

From October 1904 Sheehan allies himself with O’Brien, writing regularly for the latter’s weekly a The Irish People. Redmondites accuse him of opportunism, but he always maintains that his personal inclination as an old Parnellite has been towards John Redmond and that his support for O’Brien derives from the older man’s willingness from 1904 to identify himself with the labourers’ campaign. Although their alliance originally likely contains elements of expediency, Sheehan and O’Brien develop a deep personal friendship.

Sheehan’s support for O’Brien leads to a split in the ILLA in 1906, with Tipperary and Waterford branches following O’Shee and Redmond, and Sheehan retaining the support of his Cork base and of some branches in Limerick and Kerry. He serves on the Cork advisory committee which represents tenant interests in land purchase negotiations under the Wyndham Land Act. It’s policy of “conference plus business” combines an offer to negotiate with willing landlords and a threat of agitation against those unwilling to give satisfactory terms. His faction of the ILLA becomes the basis for the grassroots organisation of O’Brien’s followers, and sporadic attempts, financed by O’Brien, are made to spread it outside its Munster base. Both factions of the ILLA claim credit for the passage of the 1906 and 1911 Labourers’ (Ireland) Acts which provide for the allocation of cottages and smallholdings to labourers. In Cork and some other parts of Munster these buildings become popularly known as “Sheehan’s cottages,” a term which long outlives Sheehan’s political career. He also helps to bring about the creation of a “model village” at Tower, near Blarney, the result of cooperation between the local ILLA branch and the rural district council.

At the 1906 general election the Redmond leadership attempts to avoid an open split by allowing O’Brien’s supporters to return unopposed. However, the continuing conflict between the two factions rapidly leads to a formal break. Shortly after the election Sheehan is excluded from the IPP, and thereby deprived of the parliamentary stipend paid to MPs with insufficient resources to maintain themselves. With the support of O’Brien and the small group of O’Brienite MPs, he maintains that the party has no right to exclude an elected MP willing to take the party pledge. After resigning his seat to which he was re-elected without opposition on December 31, 1906, he demands readmission to the party and mounts an unsuccessful lawsuit demanding payment of the stipend. He is subsequently supported from the proceeds of collections outside church gates on Sundays.

Sheehan and the other O’Brienite MPs are readmitted to the party in 1908 as part of an attempt at general reconciliation after the disruptions following the rejection of the Irish Council Bill. Dissensions rapidly reappear over Augustine Birrell‘s 1909 land act, which the O’Brienites see as wriggling out of the financial responsibilities accepted by the British government in the Wyndham land act and as sabotaging land purchase, since landlords will not accept the terms offered. Sheehan’s section of the ILLA is denied official recognition and thereby prevented from sending delegates to a party convention called to consider the bill. At the convention, groups of “heavies”recruited from Joseph Devlin‘s Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) exclude delegates with Cork accents, while O’Brienite speakers are howled down. This leads to the formation in March 1909 of the All-for-Ireland League (AFIL), a body based on the existing O’Brienite organisation and advocating O’Brien’s policy of gradually implementing home rule through step-by-step cooperation with moderate unionist supporters of devolution. Although O’Brien’s temporary retirement for health reasons in April 1909 leads to the suspension of the AFIL, it is revived in response to an attempted purge of the O’Brienite MPs by the leadership and by O’Brien’s reappearance in response to the January 1910 general election. Sheehan writes regularly for its paper, the Cork Free Press.

In the general election the O’Brienites hold their seats while two Cork Redmondites are displaced. Sheehan is re-elected for Mid Cork, defeating the Redmondite W. G. Fallon in a campaign marked by widespread rioting and impassioned clerical denunciations of Sheehan. Fallon subsequently attempts to get up a “red scare” against the ILLA. The Cork ILLA later splits over Sheehan’s slightly erratic leadership. While the split is initially personality-driven, the breakaway faction, led by Patrick Bradley and centred in east Cork, moves back toward alignment with Redmond. At the December 1910 election the AFIL consolidates its position in Cork, but is defeated everywhere else. Sheehan retains his Mid Cork seat against a local candidate but is defeated in a simultaneous contest in East Limerick. He is also defeated when he stands for Cork County Council in June 1911, though the AFIL wins control of that body.

Sheehan studies law at University College Cork (UCC) (1908–09), where he is an exhibitioner and prizeman, and at King’s Inns, where he graduated with honours. He is called to the bar in 1911 and practised on the Munster circuit. In 1913–14 he is active in the AFIL’s attempts to avert partition by trying to recruit sections of British political opinion in favour of a conference between the parties. He becomes vice-chairman of the Imperial Federation League. This receives considerable attention among the British political classes but contributes to the decline of the AFIL’s electoral base. The policy of conciliation has been driven to a considerable extent by the belief that it is the only way of achieving home rule. The abolition of the House of Lords’ veto and the introduction of the third home rule bill by the Asquith government undercuts this argument and increases Redmond’s prestige, while AFIL denunciations of Redmondism are seen as driven by personal resentment and playing into the hands of unionists. The decision of the AFIL MPs to abstain from supporting the bill on its final passage through the House of Commons in 1914 as a protest against the prospect of a partition-based compromise is represented by Redmondites as a vote against home rule itself and contributed to AFIL loss of Cork County Council in June 1914.

On the outbreak of World War I, Sheehan supports O’Brien in calling for Irish enlistment for foreign service. In November 1914, at the age of forty-two, he enlists himself and is gazetted as a lieutenant in the Royal Munster Fusiliers. It is claimed that he is almost single-handedly responsible for raising the 9th (service) battalion of this regiment. Three of his sons also enlist. Two of his sons are killed in action with the Royal Flying Corps, and a daughter is disabled by injuries received in an air raid while serving as a nurse. In the spring and summer of 1915 he organises and leads recruiting campaigns in Cork, Limerick, and Clare. This is part of a nationwide drive for recruits, aimed in particular at the farming community, which reflects the realisation that the war is going to last much longer than expected.

In 1915, Sheehan is promoted to the rank of captain and serves with his battalion on the Loos-en-Gohelle salient and at the Battle of the Somme, contributing a series of articles from the trenches to the London Daily Express. Various ailments, including deafness caused by shellfire, and hospitalisation necessitate his transfer to the 3rd Royal Munster Fusiliers (Reserve) Battalion, and he resigns his commission on January 13, 1918, due to ill health. In April 1918 he speaks at Westminster against the bill extending conscription to Ireland, threatening to resist it by force. One of his last parliamentary speeches (in October 1918) is in support of a bill providing land grants for Irish ex-servicemen. With the growth of Sinn Féin and the virtual demise of the AFIL, his position in Cork grows increasingly untenable. The Sheehan family faces intimidation and are obliged to leave their home on the Victoria Road for London, where he has secured the Labour Party nomination for the Limehouse–Stepney division of the East End, later represented by Clement Attlee.

Sheehan is unsuccessful in the 1918 United Kingdom general election, and is obliged to leave politics after a financially disastrous involvement in an Achill Island mining company leads to his bankruptcy. Unable to practise at the bar because of the hearing loss caused by his war service, he returns to journalism and becomes editor and publisher of The Stadium, a daily newspaper for sportsmen. In 1921, shortly before the Anglo-Irish truce, he publishes Ireland since Parnell, a history of recent events heavily dependent on the writings of O’Brien but incorporating some personal reminiscences. It concludes by blaming the outbreak of the IRA guerrilla campaign on provocation by Crown forces, denouncing reprisals, and pleading for British recognition of Dáil Éireann and dominion home rule for an undivided Ireland.

Sheehan moves to Dublin in 1926 after hearing that the threats against him have been lifted. His wife, who has never fully recovered from the stresses and bereavements she has experienced since 1914, dies soon afterward. Sheehan himself becomes managing editor of Irish Press and Publicity Services and, in 1928, publisher and editor of the South Dublin Chronicle. The paper gives critical support to the Irish Labour Party, publishes campaigning articles on slum conditions, and advocates housing reform. In September 1930, he is an unsuccessful Labour candidate for Dublin County Council. In the 1930s, as his health deteriorates further, he works as coordinator for the ex-servicemen’s group the Old Comrades’ Association, editing both northern and southern editions of its annual journal. In 1942, he offers himself to Richard Mulcahy as a Fine Gael candidate for Cork South-East, but is turned down. He dies on November 28, 1948, while visiting his daughter at Queen Anne Street, London. Both he and his wife are buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.

(From: “Sheehan, Daniel Desmond (‘D. D.’)” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Caroline Agnes Gray, Owner of the “Freeman’s Journal”

Caroline “Carrie” Agnes Gray, English hostess and owner of the Freeman’s Journal, is born Caroline Agnes Chisholm in London, England, on May 13, 1848.

Gray is the sixth child of the eight children of the philanthropist Caroline Chisholm (née Jones) and Archibald Chisholm, an officer in the army of the East India Company.

Gray meets her husband, Edmund Dwyer Gray, in September 1868 when she witnesses him saving five people from a wrecked schooner during a storm in Killiney Bay, near Dún Laoghaire. She later meets him, and the couple are married in 1869. They had four children, with three surviving to adulthood: Edmund, Mary and Sylvia. She places both of her daughters in convents after their education and the early death of their father, supposedly as she fears they will harm her chances of remarrying.

Gray is a noted hostess during her husband’s political career, in particular while he is Lord Mayor of Dublin. Following his death in 1888, she holds over 40% of the shares in her husband’s newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal. While she is not involved in the day-to-day running of the company, she does exert influence over the newspaper. When Charles Stewart Parnell‘s party splits, the paper sides with Parnell at Gray’s consent. She is one of a number of prominent Catholic women in Dublin who continue to support Parnell. In 1891, she appears with Parnell in public, leading to the Archbishop of Dublin describing her as “a rock of scandal.”

It is only when the Freeman’s Journal‘s circulation and revenue suffers after the establishment of an anti-Parnell newspaper, the National Press, that Gray’s loyalty to Parnell wavers. Influenced by her son, she decides that the Freeman’s Journal will abandon its relationship with Parnell. This decision is formalised at a special general meeting to the Freeman company on September 21, 1891, seeing the pro-Parnell board replaced with one that includes her son and Captain Maurice O’Conor. The Freeman’s Journal and the National Press merge in March 1892, after which Gray is bought out of the company with her son and O’Conor stepping down from the board, thus ending the Gray family’s 50-year relationship with the Freeman’s Journal.

Gray marries Captain O’Conor in November 1891. A Captain, and later a Major, with the Connaught Rangers, he is a relative of Charles Owen O’Conor and George Moore. She is twelve years his senior, and the couple has no children. They live on Inisfale Island on Lough Allen, County Leitrim. She lives the last thirty years of her life there, with failing eyesight and eventual blindness. She dies there April 15, 1927. O’Conor dies in a hotel in Dún Laoghaire on January 3, 1941, in poor circumstances.


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Birth of Timothy McCarthy Downing, Solicitor & Politician

Timothy McCarthy Downing, solicitor and an Irish Liberal Party and Home Rule League politician, is born at Kenmare, County Kerry, on May 11, 1814.

Downing is the second son of Eugene Downing, a local merchant, and his wife, Helena, daughter of Timothy McCarthy of Kilfadamore, County Kerry. They have two other sons and two daughters. He is apprenticed in 1830 to his elder brother, Francis Henry, who practises as a solicitor at Killarney. Once admitted as a solicitor himself in 1836, he moves to Skibbereen, County Cork, where he practises until the mid-1860s, making from his practice a large fortune. By the mid-1870s he owns 4,067 acres in Cork and Kerry valued at £1,413.

Downing is prominent locally in public affairs, supporting the repeal campaign of Daniel O’Connell and the temperance campaign of Fr. Theobald Mathew. He is the first chairman of Skibbereen town commissioners, from 1862 to 1879. He later helps James Stephens and Michael Doheny escape to France in 1849. After Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and other members of the Phoenix National and Literary Society are arrested on December 5, 1858, he acts as their solicitor. His chief clerk, Mortimer Moynahan, a member of the society, unwittingly takes on as an assistant a man who proves to be an informer.

Downing involves himself in the National Association of Ireland, the political pressure group formed by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, and succeeds in getting tenant-right added to its demands in March 1865. He is elected as one of the two MPs for County Cork on November 30, 1868, and is reelected without a contest on February 5, 1874. Nominally a liberal, he draws his main support from the Catholic bishops and most of the parish clergy and, more significantly, from the tenant farmer class. The farmers’ interests he vigorously pursues in parliament and outside.

After the passing of William Ewart Gladstone‘s first land act, Downing plays a prominent part in the formation of the Home Rule League under the leadership of Isaac Butt. He is always a moderate on the home-rule issue – he opposes the pledging of home-rule MPs always to act together and later the obstructive tactics of fellow home-rulers Joseph Gillis Biggar and Charles Stewart Parnell. He is one of the nine members of the standing committee of Butt’s Irish Parliamentary Party (1874–79) and proves a stalwart of Butt particularly in disputes with Parnell. It is he who draws to the attention of the House of Commons the condition of tenants on the Buckley estate in the foothills of the Galtee Mountains at Skeheenarinky in County Tipperary in March 1877. In Butt’s absence Downing introduces an Irish land tenure bill on February 6, 1878, which is, however, quickly defeated.

Downing dies January 10, 1879, at his residence, Prospect House, Skibbereen, a deputy lieutenant of County Cork. The cortège that follows his body to the Old Caheragh Graveyard, Skibbereen, for burial is said to be four miles long. In Emmet Larkin‘s judgement, “it was not altogether unlikely, if he had survived, that he would have eventually succeeded Butt as chairman of the Irish party.”

In 1837, Downing marries Jane, youngest daughter of Daniel McCarthy of Ave Hill, Dromore, County Cork, and with her has four sons and three daughters. His younger brother, Washington, is a parliamentary reporter and later the Rome correspondent for The Daily News of London, and husband of Mary McCarthy Downing.

(From: “Downing, Timothy McCarthy” by C.J. Woods, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Timothy Harrington, Journalist, Barrister & Politician

Timothy Charles Harrington, Irish journalist, barrister, nationalist politician and Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, dies in Dublin on March 12, 1910, following a stroke.

Harrington is born on September 20, 1851, in Castletownbere, County Cork, son of Denis Harrington and his wife, Eileen (née O’Sullivan). He is educated at the Catholic University of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), Harrington represents Westmeath from February 1883 to November 1885. In 1885 he is elected for the new constituency of Dublin Harbour, which he represents until his death. He serves as Lord Mayor of Dublin three times from 1901 to 1904.

Harrington owns two newspapers, United Ireland and the Kerry Sentinel, and is a member of the so-called Bantry band of prominent nationalist politicians from the Bantry vicinity. They are also more pejoratively known as the Pope’s brass band. Tim Healy is another prominent member of this unofficial group.

In 1884, Harrington publishes a pamphlet, “Maamtrasna Massacres – Impeachment of the Trials,” in which he dismantles the Crown Prosecution’s case against the eight men accused of the murders of the Joyce family on August 17, 1882. He provides evidence that Crown Prosecutor George Bolton had deliberately suppressed evidence that would have acquitted Maolra Seoighe (English: Myles Joyce), who was hanged, and four men who were sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude.

Harrington is secretary and chief organiser of the Irish National League (INL), a supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell and is largely responsible for devising the agrarian Plan of Campaign in 1886. He becomes a Parnellite Nationalist when the party splits in 1891, continuing as secretary of the INL. In 1897 he proclaims himself an Independent Nationalist and sides with William O’Brien‘s United Irish League (UIL) from its early days. He is briefly considered as a possible alternative to John Redmond as leader of the re-united Irish Parliamentary Party in 1900 when he stands in the 1900 United Kingdom general election Ireland as a Nationalist again.

Thereafter Harrington becomes excluded from Redmond’s closed circle of confidants, retains sympathy with O’Brien, and represents the interests of the tenant farmers at the 1902 Land Conference negotiations which lead to the enactment of the unprecedented Wyndham Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903.

On September 7, 1901, as the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Harrington kicks off at the official ceremony to open Bohemian F.C.‘s new home, Dalymount Park.

Harrington retains the party nomination for the Dublin Harbour constituency in the January 1910 United Kingdom general election, largely because of local divisions about who should succeed him and because an O’Brienite offer to pay his election expenses deters rivals from going to the polls. He decides that the finely balanced result of the general election means that every nationalist vote would be required at Westminster. He therefore travels to London, but shortly after attending the parliamentary party meeting on February 23 he suffers a stroke. After some days’ recuperation he is brought home to Dublin, but his condition deteriorates and he dies on March 12, 1910, at his home, 70 Harcourt Street. He is buried near the Parnell circle at Glasnevin Cemetery.

Harrington is celebrated by a statue erected in 2001 at the east end of Castletownbere near the Millbrook bar.


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Birth of Edmund Dwyer Gray, Journalist & Politician

Edmund William Dwyer Gray, Irish newspaper proprietor, politician and MP in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, is born on December 29, 1845, in Dublin. He is also Lord Mayor of Dublin and later Sheriff of Dublin City and becomes a strong supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell.

Gray is the second son of Sir John Gray and his wife, Anna Dwyer. He has three brothers and two sisters. After receiving his education, he joins his father in managing the Freeman’s Journal, the oldest nationalist newspaper in Ireland. When his father dies in 1875, he takes over proprietorship of the Journal, and his family’s other newspaper properties such as the Belfast Morning News and the Dublin Evening Telegraph.

In 1868, Gray saves five people from drowning in a wrecked schooner at Killiney Bay, an action for which he receives the Tayleur Fund Gold Medal for bravery from the Royal Humane Society. By coincidence, the rescue is witnessed by his future wife, Caroline Agnes Gray, whom he meets shortly afterwards. Agnes is the daughter of Caroline Chisholm, an English humanitarian renowned for her work in female immigrant welfare in Australia, and although Gray is descended from a Protestant family, he converts to Catholicism to marry her. The wedding in London on July 17, 1869, is conducted by the Bishop of Northampton, Francis Amherst. The couple has one son, Edmund Dwyer-Gray, who eventually takes over from his father as proprietor of his newspapers and goes on to become Premier of Tasmania.

From 1875 to 1883, Gray serves as a member of the Dublin Corporation, and in 1880 serves a term as Lord Mayor of Dublin. Unusual for an Irish nationalist politician, he is very much focused on urban rather than rural affairs, and like his father is heavily involved in public health and water provision for Dublin. He also promotes reform in the municipal health system.

Gray unsuccessfully runs for his father’s seat of Kilkenny City at Westminster in the 1875 by-election that follows Sir John Gray’s death. He wins a later by-election in 1877, becoming a Member of Parliament representing Tipperary for the Home Rule League. At the 1880 United Kingdom general election, he is elected for County Carlow. At the 1885 United Kingdom general election, as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), he wins representation of both County Carlow and the new constituency of Dublin St. Stephen’s Green and chooses to represent the latter.

Gray is imprisoned for six weeks in 1882 for remarks made in the Freeman’s Journal with regard to the composition of the jury in the case of a murder trial. He is actually Sheriff of Dublin City at the time of his imprisonment and, because of the conflict of office, is taken into custody by the city coroner. The defendant in the case in question is later hanged.

A heavy drinker and asthma sufferer, Gray dies at his home, Pembroke House, Upper Mount Street, Dublin, on March 27, 1888, at the age of 42 following a short illness. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.


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Birth of Richard Orpen, Architect, Painter & Illustrator

Richard Francis Caulfield Orpen, Irish architect, painter, illustrator and designer, is born on December 24, 1863.

Orpen is born to Anne (née Caulfield) and Arthur Herbert Orpen, a solicitor of Oriel, Blackrock, Dublin. His maternal grandfather is the Bishop of Nassau, Charles Caulfield. He is the eldest of four brothers and two sisters. His youngest brother is William, the painter. He attends St. Columba’s College in Whitechurch, Dublin, and graduates from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) with a BA in 1885. While attending St. Columba’s, he publishes an Irish comic alphabet for the present times in 1881, which is a mix of cartoons and verse mocking Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement.

Orpen wants to pursue painting, but “for family reasons” he becomes an architect. He spends eleven years with Thomas Drew, initially as a pupil, and later as a managing assistant from 1885 to 1892. From around 1884, he attends the annual excursions of the English Architectural Association. Around 1890, he establishes his own architectural practice in Drew’s offices at 22 Clare Street, Dublin. In 1896, he moves his office to 7 Leinster Street. In 1888 he is elected as a member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), serving as a council member from 1902 to 1910, as honorary secretary from 1903 to 1905, and as president from 1914 to 1917. He designs the institute’s official seal in 1909. In 1904, the Irish Builder describes him as the “originator of the bungalow in Ireland.”

From 1888, Orpen exhibits with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), with watercolours and architectural drawings. He continues to exhibit with them until 1936. He collaborates with Percy French on a number of projects, including illustrating Racquetry Rhymes (1888) and The First Lord Liftinant and Other Tales (1890). He provides cartoons for French’s periodical, The Jarvey. His architectural illustrations are included in H. Goldsmith Whitton’s Handbook of the Irish Parliament Houses… (1891). He is one of the original members of the Architectural Association of Ireland, serving as its first president in 1896, and as vice-president in 1910.

Orpen is appointed the architect to St. Columba’s from 1897 to 1938, following a fire at the college in 1896. He becomes a fellow of the college, and the sanatorium becomes known as the Orpen building. He is an active member of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland, serving as secretary in 1895, on the committee in 1904, and in 1917 sits on the organising committee for the fifth exhibition. In 1906, he is a founding member of the Arts Club. In 1906 he moves his architectural practice to 13 South Frederick Street, and moves into a house he designed, Coologe, Carrickmines, County Dublin.

At the 1907 Irish International Exhibition, Dublin, Orpen exhibits a number of chalk drawings. The same year he designs the cover of a satirical pamphlet, The Abbey row, not edited by W. B. Yeats, which mocks The Arrow and the riots at the first production of The Playboy of the Western World. He unveils a bust of Hugh Lane at the opening of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art on Harcourt Street in 1908. He is appointed secretary to the municipal gallery committee by Lane. In 1910, he is appointed architect to Christ Church Cathedral, as well as architect to St. Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. In 1911 he is elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy, a full member in 1912, and was the academy’s secretary from 1925 to 1937.

From 1910 to 1914, Orpen is in an architectural partnership with Page Dickinson, with the two collaborating on plans for the new Dublin municipal gallery and conversion of the Turkish Baths, Lincoln Place. Lane rejects his and Dickinson’s gallery plans, leading to him refusing to work with Lane’s choice of architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. In 1914, he is appointed a guardian of the National Gallery of Ireland, and lectures at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art on architectural history in 1914 and 1915. He is involved in the design of a number of memorials including the setting for a bronze relief by Beatrice Campbell for the members of the Royal Irish Regiment killed in the Second Boer War and the war memorial at the Rathgar Methodist church. He serves as president of the arts and crafts section of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). He is also a governor of the Royal National Hospital for Consumption for Ireland in Newcastle, County Wicklow.

Orpen marries Violet Caulfield in 1900. They are both descended from William Caulfeild, 1st Viscount Charlemont. He dies on March 27, 1938, at his home, Coologe, and is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.

Orpen features as one of the many portraits in Seán Keating‘s Homage to Sir Hugh Lane. St. Columba’s College holds a portrait of Orpen by his brother, William, as well as a memorial stained-glass window to him by Catherine O’Brien.


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Irish National Land League Outlawed by the British Government

The Irish National Land League, also known as the Land League, is outlawed by the British government on October 20, 1881. From the start, the League is a thorn in the side of the government of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.

The Irish National Land League is an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which organises tenant farmers in their resistance to exactions of landowners. Its primary aim is to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they work on. The period of the Land League’s agitation is known as the Land War.

The Irish National Land League is founded at the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar, County Mayo, on October 21, 1879. At that meeting Charles Stewart Parnell, the prominent Home Rule Member of Parliament, is elected president of the league. Andrew Kettle, Michael Davitt and Thomas Brennan are appointed as honorary secretaries. This unites practically in a single organisation all the different strands of land agitation and tenant rights movements on the nationalist side of the increasingly frozen sectarian-political divide in Ireland. 

The government had introduced the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870, the first Land Act, which proves largely ineffective. It is followed by further marginally more effective Irish Land Acts of 1880 and 1881. These establish the Irish Land Commission that starts to reduce some rents. The passage of the second Land Act in 1881 fails to mollify many of the leaders of the Land League, mainly due to the fact that close to 300,000 tenants behind in their rents are excluded from its benefits. Parnell together with all of his party lieutenants, including Father Eugene Sheehy, known as “the Land League priest,” go into a bitter verbal offensive.

William Ewart Gladstone has them arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol in October 1881 under the Irish Coercion Act for “sabotaging the Land Act,” from where the No Rent Manifesto is issued, calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike until “constitutional liberties” are restored, and the prisoners freed. It has a modest success In Ireland and mobilizes financial and political support from the Irish diaspora. Many other leaders of the League, including Michael Davitt, whose name is added to the bottom of the document by others, and other moderate elements in Ireland oppose this move.

Perhaps sensing weakness in the League organization, the government outlaws the League on October 20, 1881, but the work of the League is then continued by the Ladies’ Land League, which had been founded earlier by Parnell’s sister Anna. In 1882, Parnell is released from jail after reaching a written compact with the government, which extends the benefits of the Land Act to those excluded earlier, while Parnell pledges to help end land-agitation violence in Ireland and cooperate with Gladstone’s Liberal party.

In October 1882, Parnell forms the Irish National League, replacing the Land League. The Land League passes into history, but it has helped show Irish peasants that if they all stand together there is strength in numbers.

(Pictured: Irish land League poster dating from the 1880s)


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Death of Alexander Sullivan, Politician, Barrister & Journalist

Alexander Martin Sullivan, Irish Nationalist politician, barrister, and journalist, dies in Rathmines, Dublin, on October 17, 1884.

Sullivan, the second of six sons of Daniel Sullivan, house painter, and his wife, Catherine (née Baylor), a teacher, is born on May 15, 1829, in Bantry, County Cork. A popular date for Sullivan’s birth appears in many histories as 1830, but his gravestone reads 1829. He is educated in the local national school. One of his brothers is Timothy Daniel Sullivan, the Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1886 to 1888.

During the Great Famine of 1845 to 1847, Sullivan is employed as a clerk in connection with the relief works started by the government. Deeply influenced by the distress he witnesses, he afterward joins the Confederate Club formed in Bantry in support of the revolutionary movement of the Young Irelanders and is the organiser of the enthusiastic reception given by the town to William Smith O’Brien in July 1848 during the insurgent leader’s tour of the southern counties. Early in 1853, he goes to Dublin to seek employment as an artist. An exhibition of the arts and industries of Ireland is held in Dublin that year, and he is engaged to supply pencil sketches to the Dublin Expositor, a journal issued in connection with the exhibition. Subsequently, he obtains a post as a draughtsman in the Irish valuation office, and afterward as a reporter on the Liverpool Daily Post.

In 1855, Sullivan becomes assistant editor of The Nation, and subsequently editor and proprietor. From 1861 to 1884, in conjunction with his elder brother, T. D. Sullivan, he makes The Nation one of the most potent factors in the Irish Nationalist cause and also issues the Weekly News and Zozimus. Called to the Irish bar in 1876, he is a “special call” of the Inner Temple in 1877 and is made QC in 1881. He mainly practices at the English bar, though he acts in some political cases in Ireland.

At the 1874 United Kingdom general election Sullivan is elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for County Louth, but although he does not formally resign, he does not take his seat. At the general election in April 1880, he is again returned for County Louth, but this time formally resigns from the Commons on May 18, 1880. However, Charles Stewart Parnell is elected for both Cork City and for Meath and chooses to sit for Cork City. At the resulting by-election on May 20, 1880, Sullivan is returned unopposed to fill the vacancy in Meath. Following the development of a severe heart condition, he nearly dies after a heart attack in mid-August 1881. He holds his seat until his resignation on February 3, 1882. He then concentrates on his work at the parliamentary bar.

As a member of the Dublin Corporation, Sullivan secures a magnificent site for the Grattan Monument, toward which he donates £400, the amount of a subscription by his admirers while he is undergoing imprisonment for a political offence in 1868. The monument is formally unveiled in January 1876. Between 1878 and 1882 he is engaged in many notable trials. His last great case is on November 30, 1883, when he is a colleague of Lord Russell in the defence of Patrick O’Donnell for the murder of James Carey, an informer.

Sullivan suffers another heart attack while on holiday in Bantry in September 1884 and spends his last days with William Martin Murphy at Dartry, County Dublin. Murphy regards him as a father figure, attributing his success to Sullivan’s early advice and journalistic training. Sullivan dies on October 17, 1884, at Dartry Lodge, Rathmines, Dublin. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery. With his wife, Frances Genevieve Donovan, whom he marries on April 27, 1861, and who outlives him by nearly forty years, he has a family of three sons and five daughters. His second son and namesake, Alexander Martin Sullivan, is the last to hold the rank of Serjeant-at-law (Ireland).

In addition to his labours, Sullivan is a great temperance reformer. He also writes two notable books, The Story of Ireland and New Ireland and contributes many sketches (including some verse) to Irish Penny Readings (1879–85). Some of his correspondence is located in the Isaac Butt papers in the National Library of Ireland.


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Birth of John Redmond, Irish Nationalist Politician

John Edward Redmond, Irish nationalist politician, barrister, and Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, is born to an old prominent Catholic family in Kilrane, County Wexford on September 1, 1856. He is best known as leader of the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) from 1900 until his death. He is also leader of the paramilitary organisation the National Volunteers.

Several of Redmond’s relatives are politicians. He takes over control of the minority IPP faction loyal to Charles Stewart Parnell after Parnell dies in 1891. He is a conciliatory politician who achieves the two main objectives of his political life: party unity and, in September 1914, the passing of the Irish Home Rule Act.

The Irish Home Rule Act grants limited self-government to Ireland, within the United Kingdom. However, implementation of Home Rule is suspended by the outbreak of the World War I. Redmond calls on the National Volunteers to join Irish regiments of the New British Army and support the British and Allied war effort to restore the “freedom of small nations” on the European continent, thereby to also ensure the implementation of Home Rule after a war that is expected to be of short duration. However, after the Easter Rising of 1916, Irish public opinion shifts in favour of militant republicanism and full Irish independence, resulting in his party losing its dominance in Irish politics.

In sharp contrast to Parnell, Redmond lacks charisma. He works well in small committees but has little success in arousing large audiences. Parnell had always chosen the nominees to Parliament. Now they are selected by the local party organisations, giving Redmond numerous weak MPs over whom he has little control. He is an excellent representative of the old Ireland but grows increasingly old-fashioned because he pays little attention to the new forces attracting younger Irishmen, such as Sinn Féin in politics, the Gaelic Athletic Association in sports, and the Gaelic League in cultural affairs.

Redmond never tries to understand the unionist forces emerging in Ulster. He is further weakened in 1914 by the formation of the Irish Volunteers by Sinn Féin members. His enthusiastic support for the British war effort alienates many Irish nationalists. His party has been increasingly hollowed out, and a major crisis, notably the Easter Rising, is enough to destroy it.

Redmond is increasingly eclipsed by ill-health after 1916. An operation in March 1918 to remove an intestinal obstruction appears to progress well initially, but he then suffers heart failure. He dies a few hours later at a London nursing home on March 6, 1918.

Condolences and expressions of sympathy are widely expressed. After a funeral service in Westminster Cathedral his remains are interred, as requested in a manner characteristic of the man, in the family vault at the old Knights Templars‘ chapel yard of Saint John’s Cemetery, Wexford, amongst his own people rather than in the traditional burial place for Irish statesmen and heroes in Glasnevin Cemetery. The small, neglected cemetery near the town centre is kept locked to the public. His vault, which has been in a dilapidated state, has been only partially restored by Wexford County Council.


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Birth of John Gray, Physician, Journalist & Politician

Sir John Gray JP, Irish physician, surgeon, newspaper proprietor, journalist and politician, is born in Claremorris, County Mayo, on July 13, 1815. He is active both in municipal and national government for much of his life and has nationalist ideals, which he expresses as owner of the Freeman’s Journal, chairman of the Dublin Corporation Water Works Committee between 1863 and 1875, and Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for Kilkenny City from 1865 until his death.

Gray is the third son of John and Elizabeth Gray of Mount Street. He is educated at Trinity College Dublin and obtains the degree of M.D. and Master of Surgery at the University of Glasgow in 1839. Shortly before his marriage in the same year, he settles in Dublin and takes up a post at a hospital in North Cumberland Street. He is admitted as a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in due course.

Gray is publicly minded and contributes to periodicals and the newspaper press. In 1841, he becomes joint proprietor of the Freeman’s Journal, a nationalist paper which is then published daily and weekly. He acts as political editor of the Journal for a time, before becoming sole proprietor in 1850. As owner, he increases the newspaper’s size, reduces its price and extends its circulation.

Gray enters politics at a relatively young age and attaches himself to Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association. As a Protestant Nationalist, he supports the movement for the repeal of the Acts of Union with Britain. In October 1843, he is indicted with O’Connell and others in the Court of the Queen’s Bench in Dublin on a charge of sedition and “conspiracy against the queen.” The following February, he, together with O’Connell, is condemned to nine months imprisonment, but in early September 1844 the sentence is remitted on appeal. The trial has a strong element of farce, as the hot-tempered Attorney-General for Ireland, Sir Thomas Cusack-Smith, challenges Gray’s counsel, Gerald Fitzgibbon, to a duel, for which he is sternly reprimanded by the judges. From then on Gray is careful to distance himself from the advocacy of violence in the national cause, though he is sympathetic to the Young Ireland movement without being involved in its 1848 rebellion. Through the growing influence of the Freeman’s Journal, he becomes a significant figure in Dublin municipal politics. He is also active in national politics during an otherwise quiet period of Irish politics up until 1860. With the resurgence of nationalism after the famine, he helps to organise the Tenant’s League founding conference in 1850, standing unsuccessfully as the League’s candidate for Monaghan in the 1852 United Kingdom general election.

Later Gray originates and organises the “courts of arbitration” which O’Connell endeavours to substitute for the existing legal tribunals of the country. Following O’Connell’s death, in 1862 he inaugurates an appeal for subscriptions to build a monument to O’Connell on Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street). Independent from O’Connell, he continues to take a prominent part in Irish politics and in local affairs.

In municipal politics, Gray is elected councillor in 1852 and alderman of Dublin Corporation and takes an interest in the improvement of the city. As chairman of the committee for a new water supply to Dublin, he actively promotes what becomes the “Vartry scheme.” The Vartry Reservoir scheme involves the partial redirection and damming of the River Vartry in County Wicklow, and the building of a series of water piping and filtering systems (and related public works) to carry fresh water to the city. This work is particularly important in the improvement of conditions in the city, and to public health, as it improves sanitation and helps reduce outbreaks of cholera, typhus and other diseases associated with contaminated water. On the opening of the works on June 30, 1863, he is knighted by the Earl of Carlisle, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Partially in recognition of these efforts, he is later be nominated for the position of Lord Mayor of Dublin for the years 1868–69, but he declines to serve.

In national politics, the Liberal government at the time is keen to conciliate an influential representative of the moderate nationalists to support British Liberalism and who will resume O’Connell’s constitutional agitation. In an unusual alliance with the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, a man devoted to O’Connell’s memory, Gray’s newspaper exploits this shift in government policy. It supports the archbishop’s creation, the National Association of Ireland, established in 1864 with the intention of providing a moderate alternative to the revolutionary nationalism of the Fenians. The Freeman’s Journal adopts the aims of the Association as its own: it advocates the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland, reform of the land laws, educational aspirations of Irish Catholicism and free denominal education.

In the 1865 United Kingdom general election Gray is elected MP for Kilkenny City as a Liberal candidate. In this capacity he campaigns successfully at Westminster and in Ireland for the reforms also advocated in his paper. His newspaper’s inquiry into the anomalous wealth of the established church amidst a predominately Catholic population contributes considerably to William Ewert Gladstone‘s Irish Church Act 1869. He helps to furnish the proof that Irish demands are not to be satisfied by anything other than by radical legislation. He fights for the provision in the new Landlord & Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 for fixity of tenure, which Gladstone eventually concedes. The Act’s other weaknesses, however, result in its failure to resolve the “land question,” the accompanying coercion, the disappointment with Gladstone’s handling of the university question and national education, causing Gray to deflect from the Liberals and become mistrusted in Britain. In the 1874 United Kingdom general election he is re-elected as a Home Rule League MP for Kilkenny, joining its Home Rule majority in the House of Commons, and holds his seat until his death the following year.

Gray dies at Bath, Somerset, England, on April 9, 1875. His remains are returned to Ireland, and he is honoured with a public funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery. Almost immediately afterwards public subscriptions are sought for the erection in O’Connell Street, of a monument to Gray. The monument is completed in 1879 and is dedicated to the “appreciation of his many services to his country, and of the splendid supply of pure water which he secured for Dublin.” His legacy also includes his contributions to the passage of the Irish Church and Land Bills, his advocacy for tenant’s rights and his support of the Home Rule movement.

Gray marries Mary Anna Dwyer of Limerick in 1839, and they have five children, three sons and two daughters. One of his sons, Edmund Dwyer Gray, takes over the management of the Freeman’s Journal. Edmund also follows his father into politics, eventually becoming MP for Dublin St. Stephen’s Green, Lord Mayor of Dublin (1880–1881), and a supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell. Edmund John Chisholm Dwyer-Gray, Edmund Dwyer Gray’s son and John Gray’s grandson, becomes Premier of Tasmania.

(Pictured: Statue to Sir John Gray on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, designed by Thomas Farrell and unveiled on June 24, 1879. Photo credit: Graham Hickey)