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.
Was it because he seemed to move away from violence – for reasons of pragmatism more than of principle – in his unremitting fight for Irish independence? Or because he was frozen out of the Land League and, although a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, fell out with Parnell, leaving the party in 1883 and losing his seat in parliament in 1885?
Jane Stanford's recently published biography of O'Connor Power, That Irishman, attempts to answer these questions. Her fascinating account of the life of a man whose actions influenced the course of Irish history makes you wonder who of this century's political players will be remembered 100 years from now.
Born in the winter of 1846 in the townland of Ballygill, Creagh, Ballinasloe, Co Galway, O’Connor Power was the youngest of three sons orphaned when their parents, small farmer Patrick Power and his wife Mary, an O’Connor from Roscommon, died, possibly from typhus, in the epidemic that came with the Famine. Although the brothers knew poverty, and possibly spent some time in the workhouse, their extended family did not abandon them and they received a thorough elementary education.
One brother went to the US, where he fought with the Confederate army; another joined the British army. The youngest, John, emigrated to Rochdale, Lancashire, at the age of 15 to live with relatives. Working as a house painter and in a mill, the young O’Connor Power studied at the Mechanics Institute, along with Irish and English workingmen getting a chance at education as adults.
Stanford paints a vivid picture of the turmoil of England’s industrial north in the 1860s, where Irish immigrants, many bitter at the terrible events of the Famine years, often met with hostility from locals who believed they were taking their jobs. It was a good recruiting ground for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB)/Fenians, founded in 1858 to fight for Irish independence by taking up arms.
O’Connor Power became an IRB organiser, recruiting amongst others 19-year-old Michael Davitt. He was Davitt’s commanding officer when the IRB organised a plot to seize Chester Castle, where there was a military arsenal. It was, to say the least, ambitious: in March 1867, about 1,000 Irishmen marched on Chester where they planned to seize arms from the castle, commandeer the mail train to Holyhead and then the boat to Ireland, where they would start an insurrection. This rising was called off when the rebels learnt that they had been betrayed by an informer.
O’Connor Power went on the run to New York to regroup with American Fenians, coming to Dublin later that year, where he was arrested. After release from Mountjoy he got back to organising: it was a trip to Mayo on IRB business later that year, and a meeting with George Henry Moore that led eventually to O’Connor Power’s move towards constitutional politics. He formed a close bond with Moore, a nationalist Catholic landlord and MP for Mayo. Moore died in 1871. In 1874, O’Connor, now a champion of the Home Rule movement, stood for election in Mayo and won.
O’Connor Power made his mark as soon as he got to Westminster, impressing all with his debating skills. He launched an amnesty campaign for Irish political prisoners. (Michael Davitt was released from Dartmoor in 1877, largely due to this campaign). With another Irish MP, JG Biggar, he devised the obstructionist parliamentary tactics aimed at forcing the Tory government to address the Irish question and early gained a reputation as a great orator. Back in Mayo, he helped to form the Land League.
But he and Parnell, elected an MP in 1875, had a mutual disregard. Meanwhile many Fenians regarded O’Connor Power as a sellout, although it is not clear when – or if – he ceased being a member of the IRB. The Land League under Parnell – and Davitt – turned against him. Impatient, he was vulnerable to opponents in an Irish party rent by divisions in the early 1880s over land legislation. In 1883, he left it. In 1885, he stood for election – and lost – in Kennington, London (rather than in Mayo, where the constituency had been split) and in spite of several other attempts, never became an MP again.
John O’Connor Power’s public life wasn’t over, but Stanford suggests that he became an important influence working behind the scenes: he had become a barrister in England while still an MP and supported himself by his legal work, journalism (now friends again with Davitt, he wrote for the latter’s publication, Labour World) and public lectures. He continued to campaign vigorously for Home Rule – in 1888 he toured the US and Canada, lecturing on the topic.
A gregarious man, he was welcome in London high society and was a member of the Johnson Club, whose members included prime ministers and senior civil servants. Stanford suggests that he was actively pushing the case for Irish Home Rule behind the scenes until well into the 20th century.
In 1913, in reply to a letter from William O’Brien, he wrote “ . . . an (X) MP is not listened to in public; but I see a good many people, and my views are pretty well known to those who have influence”. In 1914, he warned of the dangers of suspending Home Rule’s introduction.
He died of heart failure in 1919 in London, with his wife by his side.
Author Jane Stanford is a descendant of O’Connor Power, and her book is written with evident affection and a determination to win wider recognition for his role in Irish history.
That Irishman, The Life and Times of John O’Connor Power
is published by The History Press ( €18.99)