Patrick Glynn

Patrick McMahon Glynn

Patrick McMahon Glynn , KC (born August 25, 1855 in Gort , County Galway , † October 28, 1931 in Adelaide ) was an Australian politician and, among other things, foreign minister of the country.

Early life

Patrick Glynn was born in Gort, Ireland in 1855 and attended French College in Dublin . He was an award-winning speaker at the Law students Debating Society of Ireland in 1880 - the year he emigrated to Australia.

Political career

He moved to Victoria , but his time there was not very successful, so that in 1882 he moved to Kapunda in South Australia to open a branch of a law firm based in Adelaide. Things went much better for him there, so that he now had the financial means to open his own law firm and enter political life. He was also the editor of the Kapunda Herald , the local newspaper.

Glynn henceforth served as President of the Irish National League in South Australia and was a co-founder of the South Australian Land Nationalization Society . In 1887 he was elected to the House of Representatives of South Australia for the Light District. His previous political commitment helped him. He was generally considered a conservative, but many of his conservative fellow campaigners distanced themselves from him because of his progressive ideas regarding the country's land policy and women's suffrage.

Glynn was defeated in the 1890 election and was unsuccessful in his 1893 election campaign. It was not until 1895 that he returned to the colonial politics of South Australia for the electoral district of North Adelaide. When he was re-elected in 1897, he was the first Australian to be elected under adult suffrage.

Glynn was one of the members of the assembly that passed the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1897 and 1898 and was a co-founder of the Free Trade Party , one of the most influential parties in the country in the early 1920s. In the first independent nationwide election in 1901, Glynn took care of his party's election campaigns in South Australia and Western Australia , while party leader George Reid oversaw the rest of the country. As a reward for his work, he was elected to the Australian Parliament and, together with Reid, is considered the founder of the first all-Australian political campaign.

He won his seat in 1903 for the Angas district, as well as in the federal elections in 1910, 1913 and 1914, before losing his seat in the 1919 elections. In Parliament, he was mainly Australia's Advocate General, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary .

Later life and death

Glynn retired from active politics in 1919 and died in North Adelaide in 1931. He married Abigail Dynon, who died before him, and had two sons and four daughters. As a good student of Shakespeare, some of his literary works have been published. He also wrote political letters.

Individual evidence

• McGinn, WG (1989). George Reid. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. ISBN 0-522-84373-5 .
• Simms (ed.), M. (2001). 1901: The forgotton election. University of Queensland Press, Brisbane. ISBN 0-7022-3302-1 .
• O'Collins, G. (1983). "Glynn, Patrick McMahon (1855-1931)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 9. MUP, pp 30-32. ISSN  1833-7538 .
• Serle, Percival (1949). "Glynn, Patrick". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
• This article contains excerpts from the 1949 edition of the Dictionary of Australian Biography of Project Gutenberg of Australia, which is publicly owned by Australia and the United States.