IN 1867, he helped to organise a raid on an arsenal in the north of England to get arms to start a rebellion in Ireland. By the 1870s, he had moved toward constitutional politics and became MP for Mayo in the House of Commons. He was at the first meeting of the Mayo Tenants’ Defence League, precursor of the Land League, in 1876 and he, not Michael Davitt, may have coined the phrase “the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland”.
He was a brilliant orator, whose recently republished book The Making of an Orator , can be bought online from Amazon today.
And yet John O’Connor Power, a contemporary of Davitt and Parnell who was once a force in Irish and British public life as both politician and journalist, has largely been forgotten by history. Indeed, he had pretty much been forgotten by 1919, when he died in London.