William O'Brien (Irish nationalist politician)

William O'Brien (2 October 1852 – 25 February 1928) was an Irish nationalist, journalist, agrarian agitator, social revolutionary, politician, party leader, newspaper publisher, author and Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was particularly associated with the campaigns for land reform in Ireland during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as his conciliatory approach to attaining Irish Home Rule.

Family, education

right|thumb|Birthplace plaque, Thomas Davis Street, Mallow, County Cork

William O'Brien was born at Bank Place in Mallow, County Cork, as the second son of James O'Brien, a solicitor's clerk, and his wife Kate, the daughter of James Nagle, a local shopkeeper. On his mother's side, he was descended from the distinguished Norman family of Nagles, long settled in the vicinity of Mallow giving their name to the nearby Nagle Mountains. He was also linked through his mother with the statesman Edmund Burke's mother's family, as well as with the poet Edmund Spenser's family. The Nagles however, no longer held the status or prosperity they once had. In the same month thirty-eight years earlier Thomas Davis was born in Mallow. O'Brien's advocacy of the cause of Irish Independence was to be in the same true tradition of his esteemed fellow townsman. Following in his footsteps he acknowledged the existence of many strands of Irishness.

O'Brien shared his primary education with a townsman with whom he was later to have a close political connection, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile. He enjoyed his secondary education at the Cloyne diocesan college, which resulted in his being brought up in an environment noted for its religious tolerance. He greatly valued having had this experience from an early age, which strongly influenced his later views on the need for such tolerance in Irish national life.

Early journalism

Financial misfortune in 1868 caused the O'Brien family to move to Cork City. A year later his father died, and the illness of his elder and younger brother and his sister resulted in him having to support his mother and siblings. Always a prolific writer, it quickly earned him a job as a newspaper reporter, first for the Cork Daily Herald. This was to be the primary career which first attracted attention to him as a public figure. He had begun legal studies at Queen's College, later University College Cork, but although he never graduated, he held a lifelong attachment to the institution, to which he bequeathed his private papers.

Political origins

From an early age O'Brien's political ideas, like most of his contemporaries, were shaped by the Fenian movement and the plight of the Irish tenant farmers, his elder brother having participated in the rebellion of 1867. It resulted in O'Brien himself becoming actively involved with the Fenian brotherhood, resigning in the mid-1870s, because of what he described in 'Evening Memories' (p. 443–4) as "the gloom of inevitable failure and horrible punishment inseparable from any attempt at separation by force of arms".

As a journalist, his attention was attracted in the first place to the suffering of the tenant farmers. Now on the staff of the Freeman's Journal, after touring the Galtee Mountains around Christmas 1877 he published articles describing their conditions. They are generally acknowledged as the earliest example of investigative journalism in Ireland. They later appeared in pamphlet form. With this action, he first displayed his belief that only through parliamentary reform and with the new power of the press that public opinion could be influenced to pursue Irish issues constitutionally through open political activity and the ballot box. Not least of all, responding to the hopes of the new Irish Home Rule movement.

United Ireland Editor

thumb|right|Land War manifesto

In 1878 he met Charles Stewart Parnell MP at a Home Rule meeting. Parnell recognised his exceptional talents as a journalist and writer, influencing his rise to becoming a leading politician of the new generation. He subsequently appointed him in 1881 as editor of the Irish National Land League's journal, United Ireland. His association with Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) led to his arrest and imprisonment with Parnell, Dillon, William Redmond and other nationalist leaders in Kilmainham Gaol that October.

During his imprisonment until April 1882 he drafted the Land War No Rent Manifesto – a rent-withholding scheme personally led by O'Brien, escalating the conflict between the Land League and Gladstone's government.

Agitator and MP

From 1883 to 1885 O'Brien was elected MP for Mallow. Following the abolition of that constituency he represented Tyrone South from 1885 to 1886, North East Cork from 1887 to 1892, and Cork City from 1892 to 1895 and from 1901 to 1918, in the House of Commons. There were three periods of absence: 1886–87, from 1895 to 1900, and eight months in 1904. Amid the turmoil of Irish politics in the late 19th century he was frequently arrested and imprisoned for his support for various Land League protests. With John Dillon and Timothy Harrington, he was a member of League's "the de facto military council".

In 1884, through the newspaper United Ireland he incited a sensational homosexual scandal involving officers at Dublin Castle.

In 1887 O'Brien, author, in 1882, of the No Rent Manifesto helped to organise a rent strike with John Mandeville during the Plan of Campaign at the estate of Lady Kingston near Mitchelstown, County Cork. On 9 September, after an 8,000-strong demonstration led by John Dillon MP, three estate tenants were shot dead, and others wounded, by police at the town's courthouse where O'Brien had been brought for trial with Mandeville on charges of incitement under a new Coercion Act. This event became known as the Mitchelstown Massacre. Later that year, thousands of demonstrators marched in London to demand his release from prison and clashed with police at Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday (13 November).

thumb|left|Bloody Sunday (1887)

Even in prison, O'Brien continued his protests, refusing to wear prison uniform in 1887. Being left without clothes, a Blarney tweed suit was smuggled in. He occasionally wore this much-publicised suit in the Commons when confronting his incarcerator, Arthur Balfour. His imprisonment also inspired protests – notably the 1887 'Bloody Sunday' riots in London. In 1889 he escaped from a courtroom but was sentenced in absentia for conspiracy. He fled to America accompanied by Dillon who was on bail, then to France where both held negotiations with Parnell at Boulogne-sur-Mer over the leadership of the party. When these broke down, both returned to Folkestone giving themselves up, subsequently serving four months in Clonmel and Galway gaols. Here O'Brien began to reconsider his political future, having already been prosecuted nine times over the years, using the time to write an acclaimed novel, a Fenian romance with a land reform theme set in 1860: When We Were Boys, which was published in 1890.

Marriage, reorientation

In 1890 he married Sophie Raffalovich, sister of the poet Marc André Sebastian Raffalovich and the economist Arthur Raffalovich,

Sources

External links

Maume, Patrick: History Ireland article feature: A nursery of editors: the Cork Free Press, 1910–16
William O'Brien and the United-Irish-League-in-Cork-1900-1910