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North America and Home Rule

At the end of 1887, O’Connor Power sailed to New York to promote Home Rule. He spent a year touring North America.

The Evening Telegram, St John’s,  March 31, 1888

 A Friend of Confederation.

O’Connor Power pays a tribute to Canada.

His plan of settling the Irish question.

The paper reports that William O’Brien highly approved of the Dominion’s system of Government, but the editor of United Ireland is not the only prominent Irish leader and patriot who entertains a very high opinion of the Canadian system.

[O’Connor Power has written] ‘a lengthy letter on the Irish question in the New York Herald of February 18, which exactly coincides with what has been advanced by Mr O’Brien.  O’Connor Power argues strongly in favour of the adoption of Home Rule on the Confederation plan. He quotes instances where this has succeeded in creating great empires without destroying small nationalities. He refers to the success of the Federal plan in Germany, Switzerland, the United States and Canada.  In the course of the letter he says: – ‘Some of the most experienced politicians in Canada prophesied all manner of civil strife in the working of the act of Confederation before its adoption in 1867. Their speeches are contained in a volume of more than a thousand pages .’ These sentiments from the pen of one of Ireland’s most devoted patriots strangely contrast with the utterances of those pale green sons of the Emerald Isle who moved that resolution at St Patrick’s Hall* on the 17th instant.

*The Benevolent Irish Society, St John’s, Newfoundland, was founded in 1806.  Membership was open to Irish born men and those of Irish descent.

See That Irishman, Part Four, Taking a Stand, pp. 162-166.

That Irishman-at-the-Bar

Power, John O’Connor, MP, co. Mayo since 1874, a member of the South-eastern circuit, a student of the Middle Temple 14 Feb 1878, called to the bar 17 Nov 1881. (3rd son of the late Patrick Power of Ballinasloe, co. Galway, gent. dec.) Born 1846.

5 King’s Bench Walk, Temple E.C. [1882-1887]

Men-at-the Bar:  Biographical list of the Members of the Various Inns of Court … 1885.

The Irish in England

In 1880 O’Connor Power’s article on the Irish in England appeared in the Fortnightly Review.  

He believed ‘the battle for Irish rights must be fought in England’.  An organised Irish vote brought the Liberals back into Government.  Disraeli, the outgoing Premier, put the blame for his defeat on his party’s hardline stance on Home Rule.

O’Connor Power praised the Irish electorate in England:

They are the most active workers in the national cause and have taken part in every national struggle since the days of O’Connell … The [Fenian] spirit  which animated them in those trying times, when all that was chivalrous, brave and unselfish in the national ranks seemed determined to sacrifice itself in one desperate struggle for liberty, has survived among the Irish in England down to the present day, and although it works now in the more peaceful courses of constitutional action it is not the less earnest, determined, courageous and self-sacrificing.

‘The Irish in England’ is available to download at Post Selected Writings, pp.107-114.

St Patrick

Ireland’s distinguishing mark in history is her love of God and love of country, ‘her unconquerable, her unpurchasable devotion to faith and freedom’.

The conversion of Ireland by St. Patrick and her admission into the Christian republic stand out for all time as the greatest event in Irish history … I believe all the historians unite in testifying that the ancient Church of Ireland was the university of the world.

‘The Philosophy of Irish History’, text of O’Connor Power’s lecture in the Round Room of the Rotundo, 26th April 1880.

13 February 1878.

On his 32nd birthday, 13th February 1878, O’Connor Power invited the newly released Fenian prisoners to ‘a private room in Parliament House’. Here Michael Davitt wrote an account of his prison treatment, which was published in a pamphlet with a selection of O’Connor Power’s speeches on Amnesty in the House of Commons.  It is available to download at Post, Selected Writings, pp.21-64.

 

Dr Johnson’s Dining Chair

In 1888, the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street was refurbished and Dr Johnson’s Dining Chair found a new home with T Fisher Unwin, publisher and  co-founder of the Johnson Club.  His widow donated the chair to Dr Johnson’s House.

13 December 1887, O’Connor Power was elected Prior of the Johnson Club.

In 1920, Fisher Unwin published Michael MacDonagh’s The Home Rule Movement, partly based on O’Connor Power’s papers.

The Library of Congress holds the menu for the 1888 anniversary dinner.

13 December 2006

The John O’Connor Power page on Wikipedia was set up by Rcbutcher on 13 December 2006.

Coincidentally 13 December, the anniversary of the death of Dr Johnson, was a significant date for That Irishman and for The Johnson Club.

St Nicotine

Cope Bros & Co Ltd, based in Liverpool, manufactured tobacco products – snuff, cigars, cigarettes, tobacco.

The firm’s publicity material included Cope’s Tobacco Plant and Smoke Room booklets and Cope Bros cigarette cards.

In 1878, an illustration, Peerless Pilgrimage to Saint Nicotine of the Holy Herb, promoting ‘the soothing weed’, drew a great deal of attention. A signpost indicates the route ‘To Ye Shrine of St Nicotine’.  There are cartoons of over sixty contemporary literary and political figures.

Cope’s Modern Pilgrims had Cope’s Key, a decoding card. In the bottom left corner, on the grassy roadside, a blighted potato is depicted.  There are three colorado beetles with the heads of Irish obstructionists. Joseph Biggar (32) sits astride the potato, which is flanked by O’Connor Power (31) and Parnell (33).

Note the simian features of the potato head.

 

Were they all smokers?

Mr Phillips, Davitt and That Irishman

At the end of 1887, the Tory government’s ‘grim savagery … the policy of repression’ provoked a decisive counter-attack from Irish nationalists.

Mr William Phillips, Liberal, humanitarian, author of The Irish Home Rule Catechism for the English People (1886) and vice-chairman of Gladstone Candidates Election Fund, took up residence in the West of Ireland, ‘I am determined, in 1887, to go over and see and judge for myself …’.

At the end of the year, the Manchester Guardian‘s Irish correspondent wrote of a ‘very remarkable letter written by Mr Davitt to Mr Phillips … I should not wonder if new methods were soon to be taken up on lines less likely to suit Mr Balfour’s calculations than those with which he has had hitherto to deal’.

The Irish Liberal alliance, determined to topple the Tory government and bring in Home Rule, was preparing for a confrontation. O’Connor Power travelled to North America to promote the Home Rule agenda and organise its supporters.

See That Irishman, Part Four, Taking a Stand.

In April 1896, William Phillips retired from active political life.  His colleagues in the National Liberal Club presented him with a life size portrait of himself. O’Connor Power gave a vote of thanks. Bristol Mercury, 20 April 1896.

Black Power

In March 1879, O’Connor Power advised Disraeli’s Government that the war in South Africa was unprovoked and unpatriotic.  He deplored the ‘evil effects of aggressive imperialism’.

… if they wanted to be on good terms with the black population of South Africa, they must treat them as if they were a white population … [I am] expressing the true feeling of the Irish people on the subject, as well as the views of a large portion of the English nation.

Hansard 26 March 1879, Manchester Guardian, 30 March 1879.

With the decisive support of an organised Irish vote, Disraeli’ s government fell the following Spring.

[O’Connor Power claimed victory] for the first time in the political history of this country an English Minister has appealed in vain to the anti-Irish prejudices  of his countrymen: and his discomfiture affords incontestable proof of the growth of Irish political power and the advance of Irish opinion in England.

Hansard 20 May 1880.  See also That Irishman, pp. 98-99, 131.