William O'Brien
- William O'Brien (Irish Parliamentary Party) should not be confused with his contemporary William X. O'Brien (ITGWU) or with William Smith O'Brien (Young Irelanders). For other people of the same name, see William O'Brien (disambiguation).
William O'Brien (2 October 1852–25 February 1928) was an Irish nationalist, journalist, newspaper publisher, author, politician and minority party leader. He was particularly associated with the campaigns for land reform in Ireland during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Family, education
O'Brien was born at Bank Place in Mallow, County Cork, as second son of James O'Brien, a solicitor's clerk, and his wife Kate, the daughter of James Nagle, a local shopkeeper. His mother's side was decended from an old distinguished local family of which Edmund Burke's mother had been a member, though they no longer had the status or prosperity they once held. O'Brien shared his primary education with a townsman he was later to have a close political connection with, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile. He enjoyed his secondary education at the local Anglican school, Cloyne Diocesan College, which resulted in him 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 for the need of 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 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 began 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 inseperable from any attempt at seperation 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, which 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 Home Rule movement.
United Ireland Editor
In 1878 he met Charles Stewart Parnell 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 Land League's journal, The United Irishman. His association with Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party led to his arrest and imprisonment with Parnell and other nationalist leaders in Kilmainham Gaol that October. During his imprisonment until April 1882 he drafted the famous No Rent Manifesto, escalating the conflict between the Land League and Gladstone's government.
Land War M.P.
In 1883 O'Brien was elected MP for Mallow. He later represented Cork City and North Cork in the House of Commons, but 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.
In 1887 O'Brien helped to organise a rent strike at the estate of Lady Kingston near Mitchelstown, County Cork. On 9 September, after an 8,000-strong demonstration led by John Dillon, three estate tenants were shot dead, and others wounded, by police at the town's courthouse where O'Brien had been brought for trial on charges of incitement. This event became known as the Mitchelstown Massacre.
Even in prison, O'Brien continued his protests, refusing to wear prison uniform in 1887, for example. 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, eventually serving four months in Clonmel and Galway gaols.
While in prison in 1889, O'Brien wrote a novel, a Fenian romance with a land reform theme set in 1860: When We Were Boys, which was published in 1890 and acclaimed by Bram Stoker, among others.
Marriage; Party split
In 1890 he married Sophie Raffalovich, sister of Marc André Sebastian Raffalovich and daughter of the Russian Jewish banker, Hermann Raffalowich, domiciled in Paris. It was to mark a major turning point in O'Brien's personal and political life. His wife brought considerable wealth into the marriage, enabling him to act with political independence and providing finances to establish his own newspapers. His wife survived him by alomost 30 years.
By 1891 he had become disillusioned with Parnell's political leadership, although emotionally loyal to him. After Parnell's death that year and the ensuing split within the IPP, he remained aloof from aligning himself with either side of the Party, although he saw the weight of strength in John Dillon's anti-Parnellite group. O'Brien worked hard in the negotiations leading to Gladstone's 1893 Home Rule Bill, which the Lords rejected.
Distancing himself from the party turmoils, he retired from parliament in 1895, settling for a while with his wife near Westport, co. Mayo. He strongly believed that agitational politics combined with constitutional pressures were the best means of achieving objectives. In 1898 he established the United Irish League, a new agrarian and political organisation based on achieving national unity, which proved very popular, extending its branches over most of the country.
Land Act architect
Around 1900 O'Brien was the most influential figure within the nationalist movement, although not formally its leader. As MP for Cork City (first elected in 1902), O'Brien campaigned strongly for the Wyndham Land Purchase Act (1903), which effectively ended landlordism.
After his masterful strategy of bringing about agreement on land purchase between tenants and landlords under the Land Act, which he largely orchestrated through Parliament, he left the IPP in November 1903 for five years, mainly due to differences with its leaders John Redmond and John Dillon over his aliance in 1904 with D.D. Sheehan's Irish Land and Labour Association (ILLA), and the implementation and workings of the Land Purchase Act, then later the Labourers (Ireland) Act of 1906, both of which he had played a principle role in attaining. He published an influential newspaper, The Irish People, from 1905 to 1909.
All-for-Ireland League
In 1909 O'Brien joined with D.D. Sheehan MP, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile and other leading figures, especially prominent landlords, to found the All-for-Ireland League (AfIL). Its political goal was the attainment of a United Ireland parliament with the consent rather than by the compulsion of the Protestant minority in Ulster. The AfIL returned eight independent nationalist MPs (O'Brienites) to the Commons in the general election of December 1910, and Tim Healy joined them after a by-election in 1911. O'Brien reached a cooperative understanding with Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin movement and published the League's official organ, The Cork Free Press, from 1910 to 1916.
O'Brien and the AfIL remained resolutely opposed to the partition of Ireland, its MPs abstaining from voting for the Third Home Rule Act 1914, denouncing it as a "partition deal", after Sir Edward Carson leader of the Ulster Unionist Party forced through an amendment mandating partition. In 1911 the League proposed Dominion Home Rule (on the model of Canada or Australia) as the only viable way to achieve All-Ireland self-government.
Changing Tides
At the outbreak of World War I O'Brien declared himself on the side of the Allies, and stood on recruiting platforms. He stated that, if Home Rule was to have a future, it would depend upon the extent to which the National Volunteers, in combination with the Ulster Volunteers, did their part in the firing line on the fields of France. He also encouraged the formation of an Irish Brigade.
In the political climate after the 1916 Easter Rising, however, O'Brien felt unable to continue as a MP and neither he nor the other members of the AfIL contested the general elections in 1918. Instead the AfIL put its seats at the disposal of Sinn Fein.
O'Brien later opposed the establishment of a southern Irish Free State, stil believing that partition was too high a price to pay for partial independence. He subsequently contented himself with writing, dying on a visit to London in 1928 at the age of 75.
O'Brien's books, many of which are collections of his journalistic writings and political speeches, include:
- Irish Ideas (1893)
- A Queen of Men, Grace O'Malley (1898)
- An Olive Branch in Ireland (1910)
- The Downfall of Parliamentarianism (1918)
- Evening Memories (1920)
- The Responsibility for Partition (1921)
- The Irish Revolution (1921)
- Edmund Burke as an Irishman (1924)