Tim Healy (politician)
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Tim Healy | |
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1st Governor-General of the Irish Free State | |
In office 6 December 1922 – 31 January 1928 | |
Monarch | George V |
Preceded by | New office |
Succeeded by | James McNeill |
Member of Parliament | |
In office 1880–1918 | |
Personal details | |
Born | Bantry, County Cork, Ireland | 17 May 1855
Died | 26 March 1931 Chapelizod, County Dublin, Ireland | (aged 75)
Spouse | Erina Sullivan (m. 1882, d. 1927) |
Profession | Politician |
Timothy Michael Healy,
Family background
He was born in
His father was descended from a family line which in holding to their
Timothy Michael Healy was educated at the Christian Brothers school in Fermoy, and was otherwise largely self-educated, in 1869 at the age of fourteen going to live with his uncle, Timothy Daniel Sullivan MP, in Dublin.[citation needed]
Early life
He then moved to England finding employment in 1871 with the
Parnell admired Healy's intelligence and energy after Healy had established himself as part of Parnell's broader political circle. He became Parnell's secretary but was denied contact to Parnell's small inner circle of political colleagues.[citation needed]
Parnell, however, brought Healy into the
Political career
In parliament, Healy did not physically cut an imposing figure but impressed by the application of sheer intelligence, diligence and volatile use of speech when he achieved the Healy Clause in the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 which provided that no further rent should in future be charged on tenant's improvements. By the mid-1880s Healy had already acquired a reputation for a scurrilousness of tone. He married his cousin Eliza Sullivan in 1882, they had three daughters and three sons and he enjoyed a happy and intense family life, closely interlinked both by friendship and intermarriage with the Sullivans of west Cork.[1]
Through his reputation as a friend of the farmers, after having been imprisoned for four months following an agrarian case, and backed by Parnell, he was elected in a
Prompted by the depression in the prices of dairy products and cattle in the mid-1880 as well as bad weather for a number of years, many tenant farmers unable to pay their rents were left under the threat of eviction. Healy devised a strategy to secure a reduction in rent from the landlords which became known as the Plan of Campaign, organised in 1886 amongst others by Timothy Harrington.
Invective rift
Initially a passionate supporter of Parnell, he became disenchanted with his leader after Healy opposed Parnell's nomination of Captain William O'Shea to stand for a by-election in Galway city. At the time O'Shea was separated from his wife, Katharine O'Shea, with whom Parnell was secretly living. Healy objected to this, as the party had not been consulted and he believed Parnell was putting his personal relationship before the national interest. When Parnell travelled to Galway to support O’Shea, Healy was forced to back down.
In 1890, O'Shea sued his wife for divorce, citing Parnell as co-respondent. Healy and most of Parnell's associates rejected Parnell's continuing leadership of the party, believing it was recklessly endangering the party's alliance with Gladstonian Liberalism. Healy became Parnell's most outspoken critic. When Parnell asked his colleagues at one party meeting "Who is the master of the party?", Healy famously retorted with another question "Aye, but who is the mistress of the party?" – a comment that almost led to the men coming to blows. His savage onslaught in public reflected his conservative Catholic origin. A substantial minority of the Irish people never forgave him for his role during the divorce crisis, permanently damaging his own standing in public life. The rift prompted nine-year-old Dublin schoolboy James Joyce to write a poem called Et Tu, Healy?, which Joyce's father had printed and circulated.[3] Only three lines remain:[4]
His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time
Where the rude din of this century
Can trouble him no more.
Estrangement
Following Parnell's death in 1891, the IPP's anti-Parnellite majority group broke away forming the Irish National Federation (INF) under John Dillon. Healy was at first its most outspoken member, when in 1892 he won North Louth as an anti-Parnellites, who in all won seventy-one seats. But finding it impossible to work with or under any post-Parnell leadership, especially Dillon's, he was expelled in 1895 from the INF executive committee, having previously been expelled from the Irish party's minor nine-member pro-Parnellite Irish National League (INL) under John Redmond.[1]
In the following decades, largely due to his expanding legal practice, he became a part-time politician and estranged from the national movement, setting up his own personal 'Healyite' organisation, called the "People's Rights Association", based on his position as MP for North Louth (a seat he held until the December 1910 election when defeated by Richard Hazleton).[citation needed] He waged war during the 1890s with Dillon and his National Federation (INF) and then intrigued with Redmond's smaller Parnellite group to play a substantial role behind the scenes in helping the rival party factions to reunite under Redmond in 1900.[citation needed]
Healy was extremely embittered by the fact that both his brothers and his followers were purged from the IPP list in the 1900 general election, and that his support for Redmond in the re-united party went unrewarded; on the contrary, Redmond soon found it wiser to conciliate Dillon.[
Coalition of a kind
However, at least after 1903, Healy was joined in his estrangement from the party leadership by
By the 1910s, it looked as though Healy was to remain a maverick on the fringes of Irish nationalism. However, he came into notoriety once more when returned in the
Realignment
Redmond's and the IPP's powerful position of holding the balance of power at
Having done much to damage the popular image and authority of constitutional nationalism, Healy after the
During this time, Healy also represented
Governor-General
He returned to considerable prominence in 1922 when, on the urging of the soon-to-be
Initially, the
Healy officially entered office as Governor-General on 6 December 1922. He never wore, certainly not in public in Ireland, the official ceremonial uniform of a
Healy proved an able Governor-General, possessing a degree of political skill, deep political insight and contacts in Britain that the new
Much of the contact between governments in London and Dublin went through Healy. He had access to all sensitive state papers, and received instructions from the British Government on the use of his powers to grant, withhold or refuse the
Healy seemed to believe that he had been awarded the Governor-Generalship for life. However, the Executive Council of the Irish Free State decided in 1927 that the term of office of Governors-General would be five years. As a result, he retired from the office and public life in January 1928. His wife had died the previous year. He published his extensive two-volume memoirs in 1928. Throughout his life he was formidable because he was ferociously quick-witted, because he was unworried by social or political convention, and because he knew no party discipline. Towards the end of his life he mellowed and became otherwise more diplomatic.
He died on 26 March 1931, aged 75, in Chapelizod, County Dublin, where he lived at his home in Glenaulin, and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Cultural depictions
In his novel
References
Sources
- Bew, Paul: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
- Cadogan, Tim & Falvey, Jeremiah: A Biographical Dictionary of Cork (2006)
- George Abbott Colburn, "T.M. Healy and the Irish Home Rule Movement, 1877–1886" (PhD Dissertation, 2 vols., Michigan State University, 1971).
- Sir Dunbar Plunket Barton, P.C., Timothy Healy: Memories and Anecdotes. (Dublin: Talbot Press Limited, and London: Faber & Faber, Limited, 1933).
- ISBN 978-0393082791.
- Callanan, Frank (1996). T. M. Healy. Cork University Press. ISBN 1-85918-172-4.
- Chesterton, GK: "The Man Who Was Thursday" (1908)
- Foxton, David (2008). Revolutionary Lawyers, Sinn Féin and Crown Courts. Four Courts Press. ISBN 978-1-84682-068-7.
- Jackson, Alvin (2003). Home Rule 1800–2000. pp. 100–103.
- Kidd, Janet Aitken (1988). The Beaverbrook Girl: An Autobiography. London.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Maume, Patrick: The long Gestation, Irish Nationalist life 1881–1918 (1999)
Citations
- ^ a b c d e Callanan 1996.
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press (2004–05) Vl.27 p.142: quote:
His daughter wrote: One branch of the Healy’s, who turned protestant, [claimed] the land of a Catholic cousin ... From the Catholic cousin who kept his faith and lost his lands was descended the family of whom Timothy Michael Healy was the second son. (Source: M. Sullivan No man’s man pg. 3 (1943) - ^ Lyons, F. S. L. (1977). Charles Stewart Parnell.
- ^ Gekoski, Rick. "A Ghost Story". The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 2 February 2016. Retrieved 10 May 2016.
- ISBN 0-7171-0645-4.
- ^ Kidd 1988
- ^ "Healy speech in the Commons §919, endorses war efforts". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). 15 September 1914. Archived from the original on 9 March 2017. Retrieved 10 September 2017.
- doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/74933. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ISBN 9780717168163.
Works
- Why is there an Irish Question and an Irish Land League? (1881)
- A Word for Ireland (1886)
- Why Ireland is not Free, a study of twenty years in Politics (1898)
- The Great Fraud of Ulster (1917)
- Stolen Waters (1923)
- The Planter's Progress (1923)
- Letters and Leaders of My Day memoirs, 2 vols. (1928) (vol 1, vol 2)
External links
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Timothy Healy
- Governor-General Tim Healy's first Speech to the Dáil (12 December 1922)
- Governor-General Tim Healy's second Speech to the Dáil (3 October 1923)
- Alexander Thom and Son Ltd. 1923. p. – via Wikisource. . . Dublin:
- Parliamentary Archives, Papers of Timothy Michael Healy, KC