Pierce Charles de Lacy O'Mahony

Pierce Charles de Lacy O'Mahony

Pierce Charles de Lacy O'Mahony (born June 9, 1850 in Dublin , † October 31, 1930 in Grange, County Wicklow ), until 1901 known as Pierce Mahony , from 1912 also as The O'Mahony of Kerry , was an Irish lawyer , Protestant nationalist, philanthropist , politician and member of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons . He is not to be confused with his grandfather Pierce Mahony (1792-1853), a close friend of Daniel O'Connell , who was also elected to the House of Commons in 1837, and with his son Pierce Gun Mahony (1878-1914).

O'Mahony had three names, had two wives, and belonged to three different religions. He was also awarded two kings, the opponents in the First World War were.

Family and past life

Born in Dublin in 1850 into a Church of Ireland family, O'Mahony was the only surviving son of Peirce Kenifeck Mahony of Kilmorna of Duagh , County Kerry , and Jane Cuninghame of Mount Kennedy, County Wicklow. His father died shortly after he was born. When he was six years old, his mother married Colonel William Henry Vicars and the family moved to Leamington , Warwickshire , England . O'Mahony attended the prestigious boarding school in Rugby and then studied at Magdalen College of Oxford University , where he earned while no conclusion, but a Home Rule founded -Club and his friend and later colleagues in the House of John Gordon Swift MacNeill met. He then attended the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester , where he won the Haygarth Gold Medal in 1875. In 1875 he married Helen Louise Collis, the only daughter of Maurice Collis', a member of the Royal Irish Academy . She died in 1899, after which O'Mahony married Alice Johnstone in 1901, who in turn died in 1906.

O'Mahony held the post of Assistant Land Commissioner for Kerry and Limerick Counties from 1881 to 1884 , was the Poor Law Guardian in Listowel and a member of the Roads and Piers Commission and the Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls .

Political career

O'Mahony in traditional Irish costume shortly before his death

O'Mahony was elected unopposed for the Irish Parliamentary Party as MP for North Meath in the general election of July 1886 . When the party split in 1890 as a result of the dispute over the presidency of Charles Parnell , O'Mahony was one of the four Protestant MPs who sided with Parnell. In the elections of 1892 he was defeated by the founder of the Irish Land League , Michael Davitt , with 46% to 54% of the vote. Davitt was one of Parnell's harshest clerical critics during the 1890 crisis. The election campaign was marked by an intense campaign by the Catholic Church against Charles Parnell's supporters, whose affair with the married Katharine O'Shea was scandalous for the time.

O'Mahony successfully sued for the result to be canceled after the elections because the voters were intimidated by the clergy . In the subsequent by-elections of February 1893, Davitt no longer ran in North Meath, since he had been elected in the meantime without opposition in a replacement election as MP for North Cork East . Even so, the clergy's influence on voters was still great. The Times reported on the election: "The priests ... rushed to all the polling stations and never let the voters out of their sight." O'Mahony lost the election again, this time with 47% to 53% of the vote.

Even after his electoral defeat, O'Mahony remained active in the Irish nationalist movement and subsequently ran three more unsuccessfully for a seat in the House of Commons: he lost the elections in Dublin's St. Stephen's Green district in 1895 against the incumbent of the Liberal Unionists , William Kenny. In 1915 he ran for the Dublin Harbor district , but received only 24% of the votes. In 1918 he ran for West Wicklow County , but lost to Sinn Féin's candidate , Robert Childers Barton .

In 1913, O'Mahony supported the workers in the Dublin Lockout under the leadership of James Larkin . During the First World War he supported John Redmond as a member of the recruiting committee for Irish regiments within the British Army (see also National Volunteers ). For his work within this commission he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1920 , which he rejected out of political conviction. Later that year he resigned from his post as Deputy Lieutenant of County Wicklow and all other public offices in protest of British policy in the Irish War of Independence . Disappointed by the British, he acted emphatically Irish from that point until his death and preferred to dress in traditional Irish costumes.

His son Dermot O'Mahony (1881-1960) was from 1927 to 1930 for the Cumann na nGaedheal member of the Dáil Éireann .

Later career

O'Mahony (center) with orphans from St. Patrick's Orphanage

In 1898 O'Mahony was appointed to the King's Inns and subsequently practiced as a barrister . In 1900 he inherited his uncle's fortune and thereby became financially independent; he gave up his employment and devoted himself to philanthropic projects. In 1903 he traveled to Bulgaria and took care of orphans , in the course of the Ilinden Uprising Preobraschenie had fled from the Turks, and opened in 1904 in Sofia , the orphanage St. Patrick's Orphanage . When the First World War broke out in 1914, he tried unsuccessfully to prevent Bulgaria from entering the war on the side of the Central Powers , and after the war he campaigned for the country to be exempted from reparation payments . On January 20, 1915, Tsar Ferdinand I awarded him the Bulgarian Order of Civil Merit . Today a street in the Bulgarian capital Sofia is named after him.

During his stay in Bulgaria, O'Mahony became a member of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church , but remained a member of the Church of Ireland until 1927, when its new rector asked him to choose between the two religions. In 1929, a year before his death, he converted to Catholicism . He died on October 31, 1930 on his estate in Grange, County Wicklow.

Fonts

• with John Joseph Clancy: The Irish Land Crisis , The Irish Question, No. 4, Irish Press Agency, London 1886.
• The Truth about Glenbeigh , The Irish Question, No. 15, Irish Press Agency, London 1887.
• Bulgaria and the Powers: Being a Series of Letters on the Balkans written from Sofia . Sealy, Dublin 1915.

swell

• Irish Independent , November 1, 1930.
• The Times , July 5th and May 16–24 December 1892, February 23, 1893, November 2, 1898.
• Who Was Who , 1929-1940.

literature

• Seamus Shortall, Maria Spassova: Pierce O'Mahony, to Irishman in Bulgaria . Sofia 2000.
• Francis Stewart Leland Lyons: Charles Stewart Parnell . William Collins, London 1977.
• Alan O'Day: Art. O'Mahony [ formerly Mahony], Pierce Charles de Lacy (1850-1930), politician and philanthropist . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , 2005.
• Brian M. Walker (ed.): Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1801-1922 . Royal Irish Academy, Dublin 1978.

Web links

Commons : Pierce O'Mahony  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• The O'Mahony in Navan on Irishidentity.com
• Pierce O'Mahony, at Irishman in Bulgaria
• Article on Pierce O'Mahony of Kerry at The Irish Emigrant
• Article on O'Mahony on the Irish Times website
• Pierce Mahony at Hansard (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ The Times, February 23, 1893.
2. ↑ O'Mahony during World War I.
3. ^ Pierce O'Mahony, to Irishman in Bulgaria. ( Memento of the original from March 12, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Obituary in Time Magazine .