Proportional Representation

That Irishman rejected Prime Minister Gladstone’s view that proportional representation was impractible and unintelligible.

It may be a pons asinorum according to the Prime Minister  but it is no more a pons asinorum than the vote by ballot was in 1874. I remember very well the difficulty which we had then in making the voter understand the secrecy of the ballot, and how to mark his voting paper, without rendering it null and void in the operation. My recollections of the pons asinorum at school is that of a passage on a scientific frontier, which having once been crossed, the way was smooth and clear ever afterwards … whatever the complications there may be in this system they are not felt by the voter ….

‘The New Reform’, J O’Connor Power, Nineteenth Century, Jan, 1885, 15-24.

Footstepping Gladstone

In 1877, William Gladstone, now in Opposition, paid a private visit to Ireland. He arrived 17th October and left 12th November. He stayed at Killruddery House, outside Bray, County Wicklow. His host, a former Liberal MP, was William Brabazon, 11th Earl of Meath.

Gladstone took time to visit the Cripples Home in Bray.

Three months earlier, 18th July, O’Connor Power had written to Gladstone, asking him to support a motion for the release of Fenian political prisoners. Power moved the motion in the House of Commons 20th July.*

A week before Christmas, 19th December, Michael Davitt was released.  Fellow prisoners were given their freedom three weeks later. They travelled to Dublin and, on 14th January, called on O’Connor Power at his lodgings and thanked him for his ‘unceasing exertions on behalf of prisoners’.

*See That Irishman, pps. 61, 62.

“My mission is to pacify Ireland” 1868

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’.