TP MP - the Irish Nationalist MP for Liverpool

Thomas Power O'Connor's election to the House of Commons as an Irish Parliamentary Party MP in 1885 was not unusual. He was one of 86 Irish nationalists elected that year, a strong result that built on the 63 Home Rulers elected in 1880. What was unusual was that O'Connor represented a constituency in England. He had also been voted in by the electors in an Irish constituency. And, to add to the confusion, his seat in England was the Merseyside constituency of Liverpool Scotland (so called as it was centred on Scotland Road).

T P O'Connor (also known by his initials as Tay Pay) had been elected as an MP for Galway in Ireland on a Home Rule platform in 1880. In 1885 he stood for both Galway and Liverpool Scotland, and was returned by both. He opted to take his seat as the representative for Liverpool Scotland, and Galway was then represented by a succession of Irish Parliamentary Party MPs. 

Most notable of these was his immediate successor, Captain William O'Shea, whose divorce proceedings in 1890 (on grounds of his wife's adultorous affair with the Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stuart Parnell) would divide the loyalties of the Irish block sitting in the House of Commons and taint Parnell's reputation in Ireland.

T P O'Connor would remain as the only Irish Nationalist MP in Great Britain, and retained his seat long after Ireland secured independence in 1921. His seat only became vacant on his death in 1929, when it was taken up by David Logan. Logan was heavily involved in the Irish Nationalist movement, and had represented the party on Liverpool City Council. By the time of his 1929 election he, however, joined the Labour Party and therefore left his mentor O'Connor his position in the history books as the only Irish Nationalist MP in Britain.

Take down "that murdering bastard"

In his book following Oliver Cromwell's murderous rampage through Ireland (God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland), Micheál Ó Siochrú relates the following anecdote to highlight the Great Protector's 'poisonous' legacy.

Robin Cook had recently assumed the position of Foreign Secretary, and decided that a physical manifestation of his ethical foreign policy would be the removal of a monumental portrait of portrait of Maharaja Sir Bir Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana that hung in his private office. As this gentleman had served as Prime Minister of Nepal at the time of the Raj, it was felt to convey an overly imperial impression. In its place was hung solid, sensible and republican Oliver Cromwell.

Unfortunately, one of the first visitors following the replacement was the Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach (the prime minister of Ireland). Straightaway, he noticed the painting of Oliver Cromwell. His reaction was instant and explosive - he walked out and refused to return until the portrait of “that murdering bastard” had been removed.

Or did he? This was too good an anecdote not to be repeated in newspapers, magazines and across the internet. But it may never have happened. Bertie Ahern strongly denied the story, telling the Irish Times that: "I can honestly say there was no walkout." Still, the Taoiseach was not best pleased, and left Robin Cook in no doubt as to his opinion on the 'great Englishman', and leaving the Foreign Secretary somewhat surpised by the strength of feeling.

A sort of moral Coventry - the first boycott

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Towards the end of the 1870s the Irish Party in the UK and Clan na Gael in the USA agreed on a campaign for land reform and tenant farmer protection. The Irish National Land League was formed in October 1879, just as a succession of poor harvests, the reappearance of potato blight and harsh weather brought many subsistence farmers once more to the brink of starvation.

Charles Parnell MP, leader of the Irish Party and president of the Land League set out his stall for non-violent action (or, perhaps more properly, inaction) at a rally in front of 12,000 on 19 September 1880 in Ennis, Co. Clare. His own words are far more eloquent than mine, and this extract from his speech that day clearly outlines the Land League’s plan

“Now, what are you going to do with a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted? Now I think I heard somebody say, “Shoot him”, but I wish to point out to you a very much better way, a more Christian, a more charitable way which will give the lost sinner an opportunity of repenting.

When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and at the market place and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him in a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.”

The first person to be subjected to this treatment was a land agent for the Earl of Erne who took over a farm in Co. Mayo. His name was Captain Charles Boycott.

His name, transformed into a noun and verb, was widely used in newspaper reporting around the world (even being rendered as boikotto in Japanese) and soon entered the dictionary. 

Guns versus butter

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The Great Famine in Ireland of 1845 - 1852 (An Gorta Mór) saw the island's population fall by between 20 - 25%. One million would perish of starvation or the related epidemics that swept the country. A further one million emigrated, enlarging the already significant Irish diaspora. 

A striking fact is that approximately £7 million was spent on famine relief by the British authorities. This, according to Peter Gray in the Irish Famine, represented less than half of one percent of British gross national product over the five years (under 0.1% of GNP per annum). Just one year later, with the outbreak of the Crimean War, over £70 million would be spent fighting Russia between 1853 and 1856.

The population of Ireland has still not fully recovered over 150 years later. The island's population  peaked at c. 8,175,000 (as recorded in the census of 1841), had fallen to c. 5,800,000 by 1861 and reached its lowest ebb of 4,230,000 in 1926. By 2011 it had recovered to 6,250,000, although recent gains may be reversed in the wake of the financial crisis and a rise in emigration. 

Ireland was not the only country affected by the potato blight. The highlands of Scotland also experienced a blight which saw up to 1.7m leave the highlands and crops across northern Europe were wiped out in the European Potato Failure. But a tragic combination of ideology, bigotry, climatic, social and economic factors ensured Ireland's particular suffering. 

Land of winter

 

Hibernia, the classical Latin name for Ireland, can be loosely translated as the Land of Winter. More poetically, it has been rendered as the island of the eternal winter. And anyone who has stood in a face of a driving Atlantic storm in the far west of the island will understand that description.

Hibernia is a geographical term that is today consigned to the descriptive or poetic. The island of Ireland is rarely referred to by its Latin name and the term is now used in the same way that ‘Anglo’ describes something that is English (e.g. Hiberno-English, Hibernophile).

Greek geographer had labelled it Iouernia (written Ἰουερνία), adapting the old Celtic name Īweriū. The Romans took this root, and noticed its useful similarity to the Latin word hibernus (wintry). Possessing a cooler and wetter climate than that enjoyed to the south, and being a murky, misty and unconquered island the name obviously chimed with the Romans and stuck as Ireland’s Latin name.


And, although sounding entirely dissimilar, this etymology shows the shared roots with the present Irish name for the island - Éire (via the old Irish Ériu). And, far from meaning wintry, this proto-Celtic word is likely to mean the abundant land. One man's winter is another's feast.