Blog – Page 4 – That Irishman

The Childhood Years

I received a facebook message from Paula Lynch Keogh, an Irish American. She has the Vanity Fair Spy print of O’Connor Power on her sitting room wall – and a family connection.

Paula’s father, Joseph Lynch, shared a story with his children. Her great- great- grandmother, Catherine O’Connor (1822-1866), married Ayre Duffield in Ballinasloe 11 January 1849. They lived in 60 Society Street, with an office and yard in Bolgers Lane.* Their daughter, Jane Duffield Lynch (1852-1915) was Paula’s great-grandmother. Jane talked of her ‘half-brother’, John O’Connor Power, who lived with her family when she was a child. They stayed in touch and, on his visits to the United States, O’Connor Power visited her in Andover, Massachusetts.

Ayre Duffield (born in England) was a 31 year old baker from Banagher when he married Catherine Carthy in Ballinasloe Registrar’s Office. His father, William Duffield, was also a baker.** Catherine Carthy, formerly O’Connor, a shopkeeper, was a twenty-eight year old widow. Her father, Pat O’Connor, was a farmer. The witnesses were Peter Dunne and Michael Cogan.

The Valuation Office holds records of Society Street. In 1860, Catherine Duffield was living at 60 Society Street. In 1861, the Valuation Book, ‘revised April 1861’, has the name Catherine Duffield crossed out and replaced by a Charles Nangle. Catherine’s death certificate is dated 17 January 1866. She was forty-four years of age and a widow. She was still living in Society Street and her daughter, Jane Duffield, was present at her death.

There was an economic depression in Ireland in the early sixties and many emigrated to find a new life. O’Connor Power went to Lancashire and took up a trade in house painting, while recruiting for the Irish Republican Brotherhood. His brother, Thomas, three years older, joined the British army. Catherine Duffield’s daughter, Jane, moved to the United States and is listed in the 1870 census as a lodger in the home of Robert Power, a 28 year old painter. She is working in a local textile mill in Chelmsford, Lowell, Massachusetts. She was later married locally by a Justice of the Peace.

In his biography of Father Patrick Lavelle, Mayo historian Gerard Moran describes O’Connor Power as ‘middle class’.

*Griffith’s Valuation. The house was valued at £13, the office and yard at 5 shillings. Andrew Banfield, an attorney, was the landlord. In the 1901 census, John Nangle, baker, is living in 30.1 Society Street. He has a sixteen year old son, Charley.

** William Duffield, Baker, Main Street, Banagher, is listed in the 1823 Commercial Directory and the 1846 Slater’s Directory. Banagher was a thriving market town, twenty miles from Ballinasloe. It was on the mail car route and on the Grand Canal line to Dublin.

Paula visited Ballinasloe with her husband last year. She has sent me some photographs of Society Street and Bolgars Lane.

Society Street, June 2015.

Bolgers Lane. Site of Duffield bakery on the right.

Site of Mary O’Connor Duffield’s shop and home to That Irishman in the 1850s.

That Irishman and India

Irish and Indian Nationalists made common cause. In 1875, together with Ganendra Mohan Tagore and Frank Hugh O’Donnell*, O’Connor Power founded the Constitutional Society of India, a group promoting political autonomy for India – Indian Home Rule. The Prince of Wales was to travel to India and O’Connor Power questioned the benefit of his visit ‘either for the people of England or the people of India’. India had no representation at Westminster and there was a proposal to run an Indian candidate for the British Parliament.

During the debate on the Army Discipline Bill in 1879, O’Connor Power asked that flogging be abolished in the armed forces ‘with the object of bringing native soldiers in India under the operation of the Bill’.

In 1885, O’Connor Power was elected a member of the administrative council of the Indian National Congress. In 1892, with the help of the Irish vote, an Indian Nationalist, Dadabhai Naoroji, was elected, as member for Finsbury Central, to the House of Commons.

The close relationship between India and Ireland is reflected in similarities in their constitutions and their flags. On Friday 2 June 2017, Leo Varadkar, the son of an Indian father and an Irish mother, was elected as leader of the Fine Gael party. He will be the first openly gay Prime Minister of Ireland. The opening line of his acceptance speech: Prejudice has no hold on this Republic.

* Home Rule for India. Mr O’Donnell’s grand passion in politics was a confederation of all the discontented races of the Empire under the lead of the Irish party. He once brought down some scores of dusky students of the races and creeds of Hindustan to the House of Commons.

William O’Brien, Recollections, 1905.

That Irishman at the Aras

On Friday 8 May, Mrs Sabina Higgins, the wife of the President of Ireland, hosted a tea party for members of the Irish Foreign Affairs Family Association. The occasion was to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the organisation. The committee chairwoman presented a copy of That Irishman to Mrs Higgins to thank her for her generous and gracious hospitality.

The Greening of Dublin Castle

I have a library copy of The Greening of Dublin Castle by Lawrence W McBride. Published in 1991, it is a study of ‘the transformation of bureaucratic and judicial personnel in Ireland 1892-1922.’

In 1892, the administration of Ireland was dominated by Protestants and Unionists. Thirty years later, in 1922, the administration was largely controlled by Nationalists and Catholics. The British were preparing to withdraw.

In 1922, the Provisional Government ministers, had no experience of civil administration. The one exception was W T Cosgrave, the Minister for Local Government, who had been a Sinn Fein member of Dublin County Council.

Portraits en vitriol

One of the few [Irish M.P.s] who stood out from the ruck of Irish placehunters. Whose profound knowledge, his temper … his profound contempt for the ignorance and, as he thought, at the same time, the insanity of Parnell … made him a source of division.

… a powerful but very ugly face, the ugliness accentuated by the severe attack in childhood of smallpox.

T.P. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, 1928

Reeking of the common clay

Parnell’s aristocratic sensitiveness recoiled in his presence.

T.M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day, 1928.

You may have often heard the question put – Who is this Mr. O’Connor Power? I often did but never could get an answer. I am, however, now in a position to tell you that he is the bastard son of a policeman named Fleming from County Cavan.

Father Patrick Lavelle, in a letter to Isaac Butt, 1874

“My mission is to pacify Ireland” 1868

imgres — Gladstone commemorative stamp, 2014.

In February 1882 Gladstone asked the Irish party to produce a plan for self-government. O’Connor Power pointed out that the ‘open invitation was without precedent in parliamentary history’.

In 1886 Gladstone introduced the First Home Rule Bill. In June the second reading of the Bill was defeated in a full House by 343 votes to 313.

February 13, 1893, he introduced the Second Home Rule Bill which passed three readings in the British House of Commons. The Bill was rejected by the House of Lords in September.

William O’Brien indicated that the principle of self-government was accepted:

… there remains the supreme fact that a proposal for an Irish legislature completely satisfactory to Irish patriotism has been drawn up in black and white by the greatest British statesman of the century, and passed through all its stages by a British House of Commons in a hundred deliberate votes on principle and details. That is a fact which can no more be blotted out of the constitutional history of England than the Petition of Rights.

See That Irishman, pp 178-180.

References to correspondence between Gladstone and O’Connor Power appear in Gladstone’s Diaries. 20/7/77, 14/6/80, 7/4/83c, 10/4/83n. The letters have not survived. O’Connor Power made a copy of a letter to Gladstone dated July 18 1877. See That Irishman, Part Two, Confessors of Irish Nationality, pp. 61,62.

In June 1887, members of the Cork GAA travelled to Wales to present Gladstone. now in Opposition, with a miniature gold hurley, a shield with the Cork coat of arms, and a hurley, match ball and copy of the GAA rules.

Celtic Times, 11 June, 1887. See Paul Rouse, ‘The IRB and the Founding of the GAA’.

Daily Chronicle, October 8, 9, 1891.

The Daily Chronicle, the Liberal newspaper of record, gave extensive coverage to the death of Parnell. In the October 8 edition, page five, an obituary, attributed to O’Connor Power,* described his last days. On Thursday Parnell returned from Ireland. He had caught a severe chill and died in intense pain on the following Tuesday. He had ‘not enjoyed robust health for more than ten years’.

Parnell had a scientific bent and a great interest in metallurgy, geology and astronomy. He had mines and quarries on his land in Avondale, County Wicklow and believed in the importance of developing the mineral resources of Ireland.

Other contributers added personal reminiscences and details

At a recent speaking engagement in Creggs, County Galway, Parnell had a severe pain in his left arm and wore a sling. A smoker and a drinker for many years, he had suffered from chronic dyspepsia and cancer of the stomach. He was prone to ‘extreme nervous depression and melancholy.’ He was a medicine-taker. In the last twelve months he had become ‘perceptibly thinner’.

The Chronicle provided memoirs, sketches and reports from Ireland, Rome, Paris, Berlin and the major cities of North America.

Parnell’s mother held Michael Davitt responsible for his death: ‘It is Davitt and the Irish World‘s persecution …’

‘His political course has been one of slow suicide.’

*See That Irishman, Part Five, Daily Chronicle, p. 179

Parliamentary Sittings

The House of Commons is notorious for long sittings, and I am sure that no advantage is gained by the present system, which enables a few members to protract the proceedings of the House to most unconscionable hours. When I first entered Parliament in 1874 nothing surprised me so much as the long hours which members reconciled themselves to endure, and under circumstances where, as I have indicated, the work done bore no comparison at all to the length of time occupied in doing it. When I went back to Dublin after my first Session in Parliament, a very kind medical friend of mine said to me, ‘You know, you must be careful about those late hours, the night air is very injurious,’ but I calmed my friend by saying he need not be so careful about the night air – it was always morning when I went home.

Bath Herald, 19 November, 1884

In 1875, his first birthday at Westminster, [O’Connor Power] asked the first Lord of the Treasury the advisability of adoption of a rule fixing beyond which no sitting should be continued.

That Irishman, p.233.

On recruitment and the suspension of Home Rule

I have read speeches of members of Parliament calling upon the young men of Ireland to go to the front because of the Home Rule Act. The brave young fellows rushed to the recruiting offices in tens of thousands: most of whom now sleep their last sleep in the blood-stained fields of Europe. They did not offer up their lives for a mutilated Ireland but for one united from sea to sea, and they did so with the promise of their leaders that national unity would never be given away. I ask is faith not to be kept with the dead? If so, the infamy of the broken Treaty of Limerick will be outdone by the betrayal of today.

Irish Independent, 19 June, 1916

That Irishman, A Broken Treaty, pp. 220-222.

O’Connor Power goes to Washington

Ireland’s Congratulations

John O’Connor Power, a member of the British Parliament for Mayo, arrived in New York on Saturday with the Irish congratulatory address on the Centennial. It is in a handsome frame, the penmanship finely executed, and surrounded by a gold band entwined with shamrocks; the corners are shields bearing the arms of the four Irish provinces, Leinster, Ulster, Munster and Connaught.

Chester Daily Times, Pennsylvania, October 5, 1876, p.3