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Tag Archives: Minister Without Portfolio


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Birth of Eamonn Duggan, Lawyer & Politician

Eamonn Seán Duggan, Irish lawyer and politician, is born in Richhill, County Armagh, on March 2, 1878. He serves as Minister for Home Affairs (Jan 1922-Sep 1922), Minister without portfolio (Sep 1922-Dec 1922), Parliamentary Secretary to the Executive Council (1922-26), Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance (1926-27) and Government Chief Whip and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Defence (1927-32). He serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) (1918-33) and a Senator (1933-36).

Duggan is the son of William Duggan, a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) officer, and Margaret Dunne. He is a cousin of revolutionaries Thomas Burke and Christopher Burke through his mother. His parents meet when his father, a native of County Wicklow, is stationed in Longwood, County Meath, where they marry on October 19, 1874. His father is transferred to County Armagh the following year as officers cannot serve in their wife’s native county.

In 1911, Duggan is living with his parents on St. Brigid’s Road Upper in Drumcondra, Dublin. After his school education, he begins work as a law clerk. During his early years, he becomes heavily involved in politics after he qualifies as a solicitor and sets up a practice at 66 Dame Street in Dublin. He marries Evelyn Kavanagh, and they have one son.

In 1916, as a keen supporter of Irish independence, Duggan is serving in the North Dublin Union in the days approaching the 1916 Easter Rising. One of his close friends, Thomas Allen, is shot while Duggan is at the Four Courts. His efforts to get medical assistance are unsuccessful at Richmond Hospital as the British officer who responds to the call declines the message and does not allow it to go through. Eventually medical assistance is received but it is too late for Allen. In Duggan’s region, the volunteers suffer very few injuries with the most violent fighting taking place on Friday night and Saturday morning.

Duggan suffers the consequences and is subject to court-martial and then sentenced to three years penal servitude. He is interned in Maidstone, Portland and Lewes prisons. Under the general amnesty of 1917, he is released after fourteen months in prison and returns to Dublin where he goes back to studying law.

Duggan is elected to the First Dáil Éireann as a Sinn Féin TD for South Meath following the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland. The Drogheda Independent reports “Never before was a successful candidate accorded such a princely reception.”

Duggan engages in the Irish War of Independence in the role of IRA Director of Intelligence, which comes to an end in November 1920 when he is imprisoned again and is not released until the Anglo-Irish Truce of July 1921. When the truce concludes, he is authorised as one out of the five envoys to discuss and finalise the treaty with the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He signs the Anglo-Irish Treaty at 22 Hans Place, London.

Duggan retains numerous ministerial posts in the Cumann na nGaedheal government. In 1921, he plays a role in the Irish delegation throughout the Anglo-Irish discussions, then playing a dominant role in liaising with British officials.

After the post-treaty government, Duggan is appointed the Minister for Home Affairs and shortly afterward he becomes the Parliamentary Secretary for the Executive Council and the Minister for Defence. He continues in various roles as a TD until 1933. These include Government Chief Whip from 1927 to 1932. Until 1933, he is a Cumann na nGaedheal TD for Meath. In 1933, he declines to go forward for the general election but is elected to Seanad in April 1933. He also is involved in local politics in Dún Laoghaire as the chairman of the borough council until his death in 1936.

Duggan writes papers which reflect on his engagement in the Easter Rising. In his letters, he writes about the tough times of imprisonment. He also writes about his participation in Sinn Féin and his triumph in being a candidate for the South Meath constituency. Most of his papers consist of letters to his fiancée and later wife, May Duggan, which are written while in prison. His time as a TD is also included. In one letter, which he writes on April 25, 1916, he references “the whole damn family” consisting of information as to how his volunteers and he are being “treated as princes” by the nuns in the nearby convent, receiving help from the children in the area and building barricades. In his letter, he also writes about morale among his comrades and hearing of rumours about a German who had landed in County Kerry. In the note, he states that the letter should be sent to May Duggan who is his fiancée at the time. At the end of the letter he refers to himself as “Edmund” by which he is also known.

Duggan dies suddenly at his home in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin, on June 6, 1936, at the age of 58, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery on the north side of Dublin.


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Birth of Sir Edward Carson, Politician, Barrister & Judge

Edward Henry Carson, Baron Carson, Irish unionist politician, barrister and judge, known as the “uncrowned king of Ulster,” is born on February 9, 1854, at 4 Harcourt Street, in Dublin. He serves as the Attorney General and Solicitor General for England, Wales and Ireland as well as the First Lord of the Admiralty for the British Royal Navy.

Although Carson is to become the champion of the northern province, he is born into a Protestant family in southern Ireland. He is educated at Portarlington School, Wesley College, Dublin, and Trinity College Dublin, where he reads law and is an active member of the College Historical Society. He graduates BA and MA.

From 1877, early in his Irish legal career, he comes to mistrust the Irish nationalists. As senior Crown prosecutor, he sternly enforces the Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act 1887, securing numerous convictions for violence against Irish estates owned by English absentee landlords. He is appointed Solicitor-General for Ireland and elected to the British House of Commons in 1892, is called to the English bar at Middle Temple on April 21, 1893, and serves as Solicitor General for England and Wales from 1900 to 1905. During these years he achieves his greatest success as a barrister. In 1895, his cross-examination of Oscar Wilde largely secures the Irish writer’s conviction for homosexuality.

On February 21, 1910, Carson accepts the parliamentary leadership of the anti-Home Rule Irish Unionists and, forfeiting his chance to lead the British Conservative Party, devotes himself entirely to the Ulster cause. His dislike of southern Irish separatism is reinforced by his belief that the heavy industry of Belfast is necessary to the economic survival of Ireland. The Liberal government (1908–16) under H. H. Asquith, which in 1912 decides to prepare a Home Rule bill, cannot overcome the effect of his extra-parliamentary opposition. The Solemn League and Covenant of resistance to Home Rule, signed by Carson and other leaders in Belfast on September 28, 1912, and afterward by thousands of Ulstermen, is followed by his establishment of a provisional government in Belfast in September 1913. Early in that year he recruits a private Ulster army, the Ulster Volunteer Force, that openly drills for fighting in the event that the Home Rule Bill is enacted. In preparation for a full-scale civil war, he successfully organizes the landing of a large supply of weapons from Germany at Larne, County Antrim, on April 24, 1914. The British government, however, begins to make concessions to Ulster unionists, and on the outbreak of World War I he agrees to a compromise whereby the Home Rule Bill is enacted but its operation suspended until the end of the war on the understanding that Ulster’s exclusion will then be reconsidered.

Appointed Attorney General for England in Asquith’s wartime coalition ministry on May 25, 1915, Carson resigns on October 19 because of his dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war. In David Lloyd George’s coalition ministry (1916–22) he is First Lord of the Admiralty from December 10, 1916, to July 17, 1917, and then a member of the war cabinet as minister without portfolio until January 21, 1918.

Disillusioned by the Government of Ireland Act 1920 that partitions Ireland and establishes what is essentially a Home Rule parliament in Belfast, Carson declines an invitation to head the Northern Ireland government and resigns as Ulster Unionist Party leader in February 1921. Accepting a life peerage, he serves from 1921 to 1929 as Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and takes the title Baron Carson of Duncairn.

Carson retires in October 1929. In July 1932, during his last visit to Northern Ireland, he witnesses the unveiling of a large statue of himself in front of Parliament Buildings at Stormont. The statue is sculpted by Leonard Stanford Merrifield, cast in bronze and placed upon a plinth. The inscription on the base reads “By the loyalists of Ulster as an expression of their love and admiration for its subject.” It is unveiled by James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon, in the presence of more than 40,000 people.

Carson lives at Cleve Court, a Queen Anne house near Minster-in-Thanet in the Isle of Thanet, Kent, bought in 1921. It is here that he dies peacefully on October 22, 1935. A warship brings his body to Belfast for the funeral. Thousands of shipworkers stop work and bow their heads as HMS Broke steams slowly up Belfast Lough, with his flag-draped coffin sitting on the quarterdeck. Britain gives him a state funeral on Saturday, October 26, 1935, which takes place in Belfast’s St. Anne’s Cathedral. He remains the only person to have been buried there. From a silver bowl, soil from each of the six counties of Northern Ireland is scattered onto his coffin, which had earlier been covered by the Union Jack. At his funeral service the choir sings his own favourite hymn, “I Vow to Thee, My Country.”


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Birth of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman and one of the leading military and political figures of the 19th century, is born at 6 Merrion Street, Dublin, on May 1, 1769.

Wellesley is born to Garret Wesley, 1st Earl of Mornington and Anne Wellesley, Countess of Mornington. Fatherless at an early age and neglected by his mother, he is a reserved, withdrawn child. He fails to shine at Eton College and instead attends private classes in Brussels, followed by a military school in Angers, France. Ironically, he has no desire for a military career. Instead, he wishes to pursue his love of music. Following his mother’s wishes, however, he joins a Highland regiment.

Wellesley fights at Flanders in Belgium in 1794, and directs the campaign in India in 1796, where his elder brother Richard is Governor-General. Knighted for his efforts, he returns to England in 1805.

In 1806 Wellesley is elected Member of Parliament for Rye, East Sussex, and within a year he is appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland under Charles Lennox, 4th Duke of Richmond. He continues with his military career despite his parliamentary duties, fighting campaigns in Portugal and France, and being made commander of the British Army in the Peninsular War. He is given the title Duke of Wellington in 1814 and goes on to command his most celebrated campaigns in the Napoleonic Wars, with final victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. When he returns to Britain he is treated as a hero, formally honoured, and presented with both an estate in Hampshire and a fortune of £400,000.

After the Battle of Waterloo, Wellesley becomes Commander in Chief of the army in occupied France until November 1818. He then returns to England and Parliament, and joins Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool’s government in 1819 as Master-General of the Ordnance. He undertakes a number of diplomatic visits overseas, including a trip to Russia.

In 1828, after twice being overlooked in favour of George Canning and F. J. Robinson, 1st Viscount Goderich, Wellesley is finally invited by King George IV to form his own government and set about forming his Cabinet. As Prime Minister, he is very conservative; known for his measures to repress reform, his popularity sinks a little during his time in office. Yet one of his first achievements is overseeing Catholic emancipation in 1829, the granting of almost full civil rights to Catholics in the United Kingdom. Feelings run very high on the issue. George Finch-Hatton, 10th Earl of Winchilsea, an opponent of the bill, claims that by granting freedoms to Catholics Wellesley “treacherously plotted the destruction of the Protestant constitution.”

Wellesley has a much less enlightened position on parliamentary reform. He defends rule by the elite and refuses to expand the political franchise. His fear of mob rule is enhanced by the riots and sabotage that follow rising rural unemployment. His opposition to reform causes his popularity to plummet to such an extent that crowds gathered to throw missiles at his London home.

The government is defeated in the House of Commons and Wellesley resigns on November 16, 1830, to be replaced by Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey. Wellesley, however, continues to fight reform in opposition, though he finally consents to the Great Reform Act in 1832.

Two years later Wellesley refuses a second invitation to form a government because he believes membership in the House of Commons has become essential. The king reluctantly approves Robert Peel, who is in Italy at the time. Hence, Wellesley acts as interim leader for three weeks in November and December 1834, taking the responsibilities of Prime Minister and most of the other ministries. In Peel’s first cabinet (1834–1835), he becomes Foreign Secretary, while in the second (1841–1846) he is a Minister without portfolio and Leader of the House of Lords. Upon Peel’s resignation in 1846, he retires from politics.

In 1848 Wellesley organises a military force to protect London against possible Chartist violence at the large meeting at Kennington Common.

Arthur Wellesley dies at Walmer Castle, Kent, England on September 14, 1852, after a series of seizures. After lying in state in London, he is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Wellington Arch in London’s Hyde Park is named in his honor.

(From: “Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington,” GOV.UK (wwww.gov.uk) | Pictured: “Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)” by Thomas Lawrence, oil on canvas)