Thomas Power O’Connor, PC, Irish nationalist politician and journalist known as T. P. O’Connor and occasionally as Tay Pay (mimicking his own pronunciation of the initials T. P.), is born in Athlone, County Westmeath, on October 5, 1848. He serves as a Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for nearly fifty years.

O’Connor is the eldest son of Thomas O’Connor, an Athlone shopkeeper, and his wife Teresa (née Power), the daughter of a non-commissioned officer in the Connaught Rangers. He is educated at The College of the Immaculate Conception in Athlone, and Queen’s College Galway, where he wins scholarships in history and modern languages and builds up a reputation as an orator, serving as auditor of the college’s Literary and Debating Society.

O’Connor enters journalism as a junior reporter on Saunders’ Newsletter, a Dublin journal, in 1867. In 1870, he moves to London and is appointed a sub-editor on The Daily Telegraph, principally on account of the utility of his mastery of French and German in reportage of the Franco-Prussian War. He later becomes London correspondent for the New York Herald. He compiles the society magazine Mainly About People (M.A.P.) from 1898 to 1911.

O’Connor is elected Member of Parliament for Galway Borough in the 1880 United Kingdom general election, as a representative of the Home Rule League, which is under the leadership of William Shaw, though virtually led by Charles Stewart Parnell, who wins the party’s leadership a short time later. At the next general election in 1885, he is returned both for Galway Borough and for the Liverpool Scotland constituencies, which has a large Irish population. He chooses to sit for Liverpool and represents that constituency in the House of Commons from 1885 until his death in 1929. He remains the only British MP from an Irish nationalist party ever to be elected to a constituency outside of the island of Ireland. He continues to be re-elected in Liverpool under this label unopposed in the 1918, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1929 general elections, despite the declaration of a de facto Irish Republic in early 1919, and the establishment by the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty of a quasi-independent Irish Free State in late 1922.

From 1905, O’Connor belongs to the central leadership of the United Irish League. During much of his time in parliament, he writes a nightly sketch of proceedings there for The Pall Mall Gazette. He becomes “Father of the House,” with unbroken service of 49 years, 215 days. The Irish Nationalist Party ceases to exist effectively after the Sinn Féin landslide of 1918, and thereafter he effectively sits as an independent. On April 13, 1920, he warns the House of Commons that the death on hunger strike of Thomas Ashe will galvanise opinion in Ireland and unite all Irishmen in opposition to British rule.

O’Connor founds and is the first editor of several newspapers and journals: The Star, the Weekly Sun (1891), The Sun (1893), M.A.P. and T.P.’s Weekly (1902). In August 1906, he is instrumental in the passing by Parliament of the Musical Copyright Act 1906, also known as the T.P. O’Connor Bill, following many of the popular music writers at the time dying in poverty due to extensive piracy by gangs during the piracy crisis of sheet music in the early 20th century. The gangs often buy a copy of the music at full price, copy it, and resell it, often at half the price of the original. The film I’ll Be Your Sweetheart (1945), commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, is based on the events of the day.

O’Connor is appointed as the second president of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in 1916 and appears in front of the Cinema Commission of Inquiry (1916), set up by the National Council of Public Morals where he outlines the BBFC’s position on protecting public morals by listing forty-three infractions, from the BBFC 1913–1915 reports, on why scenes in a film may be cut. He is appointed to the Privy Council by the first Labour government in 1924. He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, the world’s oldest journalists’ organisation. It continues to honour him by having a T.P. O’Connor charity fund.

In 1885, O’Connor marries Elizabeth Paschal, the daughter of a judge of the Supreme Court of Texas.

O’Connor dies in London on November 18, 1929, and is buried at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, in north-west London. He is the last Father of the House to die as a sitting MP until Sir Gerald Kaufman in 2017.