REMINISCENCES OF MR T. P. O’CONNOR, M.P.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20706, 2 May 1929, Page 3

REMINISCENCES OF MR T. P. O’CONNOR, M.P.

[COPTBIGHT.]

MEMORIES OF “ THE FATHER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.” Rights of Publication Secured by the Otago Daily Times. VOLUME I. CHAPTER VII (continued). When we mot in the House of Commons in 1880, there was one distinguished figure absent from the benches. Mr John Dillon had accompanied Parnell on the historic trip to America, and had delayed his return. In his absence; and at the expense of half a crown for some telegrams, he was returned unopposed for the county of Tipperary. When he did take his seat, he was a very striking addition to the figures on our benches, and for a time stood out almost from every other member of tbe House of Commons. Very tall, very thin, with a long, thin face, coal black hair and eyes he was another who looked rather like a Spanish than an Irish figure. Painters and sculptors and men of letters raved about the beauty of his face, and especi ally of his eyes. Henry Holloway, tin great artist in mosaics, chose him for one of the saintly figures in a window he had to make for a church. George Meredith glows over his eyes in one of his letters. But under this apparently fragile form there was a burning passion. Though he looked usually impassive and tranquil, the fires of this temper were always there. He represented almost the extremist opinion in the party, and, fearless and indefatigable, he never hesitated to express these opinions in the dearest and sometimes in violent language. Seated, ho seemed the most tranquil of men; on hia legs he could become the most fervent and even most violent. He differed from any of the members of the party, and especially from me and also from Parnell, in his views of the demands of the situation. He looked to the revolution in Ireland as certain to be ultimately victorious, and he ■ was against all compromise that might interfere with its, as he thought, certain triumph. To the majority of us ho was as the men of the mountain in the French Revolutionary Convention to the men of the Gironde. Like Sexton, his industry was phenomenal. Every morning of his life ho read innumerable journals; every one of them was marked with a pencil on the pages that he thought might be useful in debate. He was extraordinarily well read, and had a line library of his own. For a certain time his activities were in Ireland rather than in the House of Commons; nearly every revolt had him as one of its leading figures. Again and again he had to face prosecution for his acts and speeches, again and again he had to go to gaol, and in some exciting scenes even to risk his life. He looked always the same deadly calm man when he was not speaking, but faced all these as the necessary incidents of an Irish politician’s life. William O’Brien came, from a family at once of rebels and of almost permanent invalids. On the very day an elder brother jvas born the police had a warrant to search his father’s house for arms. , This elder brother afterwards became one of the most active members of the Fenian movement. He took part in raids for arms, in raids on police barracks; he was sent to gaol under the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act; this imprisonment helped to kill him. Another of William O’Brien’s brothers and a sister were attacked by the same disohsc—consumption. The brothers died ou the. one day; a fortnight after the sistjer died.

William O’Brien himself was threatened with the same fate in his early days, and it was only a trip to Egypt which saved him. He entered into journalism and migrated from Cork to Dublin. He had given, from his earliest articles, the proof of a brilliant and, when needs be, a vitriolic pen. When Parnell thought it necessary that a paper should bo founded as the organ of the great organisation which had come into existence, he naturally chose /William O’Brien as its editor; and thus was founded United Ireland, a newspaper which perhaps was more influential than any other paper in Ireland. It was a paper which revealed the character of its editor—ruthless, eloquent, inspiring. On it devolved more than perhaps any other Irish paper the conflict between coercion and Lord Spencer. The state of Ireland at the/time was desperate; on the one side there was the Lord Lieutenant, with all the powers of coercion which the Legislature had bestowed upon him, with the power io arrest, to try by his paid and dependent resident magistrates, and of appeal by partisan County Court Judges, every member of the popular party. There came thus one of the conflicts which were frequent in Irish history, and are inevitable and have occurred in every oppressed country fighting against a stronger alien power, and the resort to criminal acts. On the one hand there were murders, and on the othei; executions; it was a regime of the revolver and the rope.

This deadly conflict was practically symbolised and to a large extent carried on by the two figures of Lord Spencer on the one side and Mr O’Brien on the other. Lord Spencer struck with his Coercion Act and Mr O’Brien with his pen, and thus Mr' O’Brien advanced to be one of chc most powerful and popular figures in the country. Every word of his articles was read with feverish interest and with an immediate response. For a time he wielded almost ns much power as Parnell himself. There was no enterprise however absurd, there was no risk however great, that ho was not willing to face. I always think that one of the paradoxes I have seen of Irish life is the spectacle of this omnipotent journalist in his hours of work. He had a small salary—about a quarter of what he might claim—something like £4 q week. He lived in a single room in a popular and not very dear hotel. It was in this room that he wrote most of the brilliant articles which were setting al 1 Ireland aflame. Many an evening I have seen him sitting at the table in this small room, with the light of a single candle by his side, with his nose almost in the paper—he had always very short sight—and amid these homely, not to say squalid, surroundings issuing the articles that were like hundcrbolts on the listening Irish world. The conflict wont on for years with varying fortunes, but it ended in a victory lor O’Brien; for, as will be seen, Lord Spencer became a convert to Home Rule, and was one of its most faithful and effective supporters. Mr O’Brien, of course, like most strong characters, had the defects of Iris qualities. Ho was self-willed and intolerant; to him might be applied the famous phrase of an American journalist about a great American politician, Senator Conkling; like Senator Conkling, Mr O’Brien divided mankind into his slaves and his enemies. In a later period this defect made him a source not of union but of disruption; but nobody could, in his worst aberrations, suspect him of any motive except that of honest though narrow conviction.

This, then, was this party in its infancy which was to produce such gigantic results. It did not look in the least like a party capable of such achievements. It consisted almost entirely of young men and of poor men. In those days there was no parliamentary salary,

and the leaders of the revolutionary movement in America had imposed on Parnell that none of the money which had streamed in in such a Niagara-tide as I have already described should be given to parliamentary purposes. They had no time, even if they had had the money, for self-indulgence; their lives were spent in the House of Commons until the vacation, and then in addressing the multitudinous meetings that were taking place not only in Ireland, but in England and Scotland. Most of them at the time were teetotalers. I remember T. D. Sullivan, a veteran Irish Nationalist, when wo sat at a dinner table in a hotel in Liverpool, remarking that so many tumblers of cold water were the only drink by the side of many of these young men, andhe uttered the prophecy, which turned out to be true, that landlordism in Ireland had now against it a more formidable body of opponents than ever in the history of Ireland before. It was perhaps not unnatural that men who at the. moment were trampling underfoot the most sacred of English institutions, and practically defying and destroying the ancient House of Commons, should be disliked and misrepresented, and for some years vituperation was poured upon them by almost every journalist of the period. Apart from the favourite charge—believed by a good many people, and perhaps not unnaturally—of being enemies of the Empire, the comrades and the subsidised servants of revolutionaries and assassins, wc were reproached with our poverty; we were not only criminal, but low-born and vulgar.