Michael MacDonagh

Author and Journalist Michael MacDonagh now has his site on Wikipedia.  Thank you, Coningsby.

MacDonagh prefaces his The Home Rule Movement, 1920, with a salute to John O’Connor Power:

My friend, John O’Connor Power, once famous as The Member for Mayo, gave me shortly before his death in February, 1919, the papers he had collected in the course of his unique political career – commencing as an Irish Fenian and ending as a British Liberal. ‘Make what use you like of them,’ he says in his letter to me, ‘subject to one condition – they must not be made a basis of an attack on any Irishman.’

In the National Library of Ireland, there is a letter, dated 17 August, 1920, from Richard E Morrin of Hollymount, County Mayo,  congratulating MacDonagh on The Home Rule Movement.   Morrin suggests that he write a biography of John O’Connor Power.

[It was Labour] which supplied the driving force of the country, socially and politically, which had given the backbone, the muscle and the grit to every Nationalist movement, revolutionary and constitutional.

The Home Rule Movement, 1920.

“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’.

 

December 13th 1887

In December 1887, O’Connor Power took office as Prior of The Johnson Club ‘in that noted hostelry, the Old Cheshire Cheese’.   He proposed the customary toast – ‘The Memory of Dr Johnson’.

The ‘Eighty’ Club dined the same evening.  Lord Granville spoke on ‘The Attitude of the Opposition’. He said all leading Liberals had opposed the Act of Union and the next Liberal government would bring in Home Rule. The present administration had ‘suspended the Constitution in Ireland’. Lord Spencer declared the Irish people ‘will not give up their aspirations’.

Four days later, O’Connor Power left Liverpool on board the Gallia Cunard.  He arrived in New York 27 December and stayed at the Albermarle Hotel on Broadway.