Patrick Joseph O’Regan 1869-1947 A Life of Advocacy

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 21, Issue 2, 1 October 1988, Page 93

Patrick Joseph O’Regan 1869-1947 A Life of Advocacy

R. M. SWEETMAN

On 13 December 1921, P. J. O’Regan began to keep a diary. It was something he had often contemplated but had found no time to pursue. A large family and a thriving legal career competed for his attention with the political causes he held dear —lrish self-determination, leftwing politics, electoral and land-value taxation reform. Though it had taken over fifty years to commence, O’Regan kept the diary faithfully, filling it in from memory whenever legal business took him away from home. Frequently he dwelt on incidents in his own life and from these often colourful entries it is possible to sketch an outline of his career. Born in Charleston on the West Coast in 1869, O’Regan spent his youth on a small bush farm in the Inangahua Valley where his Irish immigrant parents had settled. The nearest school was twenty miles away and Patrick did not set foot inside it until he was fourteen years old. His early education was conducted at home, with a brief spell in Father Rolland’s school at Ahaura. Bush-felling, fencing, milking, pitsawing and carpentering were his daily occupations. Any spare hours he had were spent reading every book that came to hand.

The first of his many contributions to the local newspapers was a defence of striking quarrymen at Cape Foulwind in 1889. The identity of the anonymous writer who called himself ‘Horny Hand’ was soon an open secret in the locality and won the young man considerable popularity. In 1891 he took on the editorship of the Reefton Guardian, moving on shortly afterwards to the Inangahua Times. The step into political life was predictable, though events conspired to hurry O’Regan’s stride. A by-election in Inangahua in 1893 saw O’Regan give Robert Stout a scare before losing by six hundred votes in a poll of about two thousand three hundred. His vigorous campaign made Stout reconsider his decision not to revisit the electorate and even to summon the persuasive power of Richard Seddon, Arthur Guinness, and E. J. O’Connor on his behalf. O’Regan’s strong showing helped him to win the seat in the general election held in November 1893, with Stout moving on to contest Wellington North. At twenty-four, O’Regan had become the youngest member of the House of Representatives. O’Regan’s Milesian fluency and his natural debating ability marked him out for parliamentary success. In its review of the session the Evening Post gave a special note of praise to its choice as the best of the parliamentary freshmen, including F. H. D. Bell, W. F. Massey, and P. J. O’Regan. 1 The twin causes of proportional representation and

the taxation of the unimproved value of land had found an able advocate in the member for Inangahua. In 1896 O’Regan prepared and introduced a proportional representation bill, the second reading of which was defeated by seven votes only. In 1899 he managed to coax it past the second reading. For the rest of his life he worked tirelessly for what he saw as this most vital of reforms. After his defeat in the 1899 elections, he was reluctant to stand again for Parliament until the first past the post system had been abolished.

Defeat allowed O’Regan to launch a new career as a barrister and solicitor. Years of financial stringency and hard work were rewarded in 1908 with his admission to the bar. His legal ability and practical experience were well attuned to cope with a growing case load under the Workers’ Compensation Act, and O’Regan quickly built a solid reputation as a ‘working man’s lawyer’. The inevitable compromises of political life had disappointed O’Regan. Moreover, he felt that his Catholicism and his advocacy of the causes of the Single Tax and of proportional representation had cost him advancement and influence in the eyes of the party politicians. Henceforth his political sympathies were with the emergent Labour Party. He defended the leaders of what became the New Zealand Labour Party on charges of sedition during the war, campaigned for its leaders, Holland, Fraser and Semple in their bids for Parliament, and was a frequent and severe critic of the Massey Government in the columns of the daily press.

His correspondence files from the period 1912-23 make fascinating reading. When the letters cease, the diaries commence. There is much of the politician manque about O’Regan in his acerbic comments on the public figures of his day. The Liberals under T. M. Wilford were ‘a scrubby lot of hypocrites’; Wellington Lawyer C. Skerrett was ‘a conceited little Jingo snob’; and of his co-religionist, Sir Joseph Ward, he wrote, ‘in connection with all things that really matter he is quite reactionary —he favours compulsory military training, he is deeply committed to the present suicidal land policy, he is up to the neck in tariff-mongering’.

O’Regan’s passion for politics leaps from the page, as does his love of his parents’ homeland. His meeting with the Labour leader and Irish M. P., Michael Davitt, on the latter’s visit to New Zealand in 1895, had encouraged an abiding interest in the cause of Irish freedom. 3 After the death of Martin Kennedy in 1916, O’Regan became the most prominent lay spokesman for Ireland’s cause in New Zealand. In August 1921 he was elected as President of the newly-founded Irish SelfDetermination League of New Zealand. From public platform and in the papers he argued the case for Ireland’s national rights. When the Catholic Coadjutor Bishop of Auckland, James Liston, was charged with sedition for his alleged remarks in connection with Irish politics, O’Regan was a natural choice as defence counsel.

The diary for 1922 gives a blow-by-blow account of the Catholic side of the Liston sedition case. When none of the prominent lawyers initially approached by Liston’s advisers would take the case on, O’Regan eagerly seized the chance to score against the bigots. He argued successfully that the Bishop had been misquoted in his reported reference to Irish people who had been ‘murdered by foreign troops’. Far from apologising for Liston’s laudatory reference to the Irish Rising in 1916, O’Regan launched into an exhaustive historical justification,

which he later had printed as a pamphlet. 4 The jury, all Protestant, was persuaded to bring in a verdict of‘Not Guilty’. On the eve of the trial he noted in his diary, ‘[l] am certain that no other counsel would take the line I contemplate —of insisting that the Bp. rightly called the Black and Tans murderers and that he was amply entitled to use the term “glorious Easter” in reference to the 1916 rising in Dublin’. 5 The case was O’Regan’s most public success and brought him great satisfaction. No apology had been offered to the enemies of Ireland and of free speech. With the Irish issue apparently solved by the AngloIrish treaty, O’Regan was content to leave the future political complexion of that country to the Irish themselves. When the Irish Self-Determination League in Wellington folded in 1922 he wrote, ‘ln one way I am pleased the rationale for the League’s existence is about to end for [the] one reason that we have enough to do with our own affairs in this ass-ridden country.’ 6

O’Regan failed in his repeated attempts from 1919-22 to bring the Liberal and Labour parties to an electoral accord. Based on the promised passage of a measure of proportional representation, the plan was to avoid vote-splitting in favour of the Reform Party. ‘Our object ... is to arrange a working understanding as between Liberal and Labour —in which Massey and his crowd of Tory crooks and mediocrities will be completely wiped off the board’. 7 He was more successful in influencing a hesitant Catholic leadership to view more kindly the emergent Labour Party. Opposition to conscription and sectarianism, and support of electoral reform and Irish selfdetermination had brought the two groups together, with O’Regan providing a crucial personal link. His letters denouncing Masseyism appeared in both the Maoriland Worker and the New Zealand Tablet. The Catholic hierarchy had been coldly unsympathetic to Labour before the war. By 1922 Archbishop O’Shea and Bishop Liston were rejoicing in the party’s advances. O’Regan and Liston exchanged telegrams of congratulations in December 1922 after the Labour Party’s success in the general elections. 8 ‘How I long to be in the political fray!’ he wrote as the news of the Reform losses arrived in December 1922. 9

The historian will appreciate the perceptive shafts which O’Regan aimed in his diary at the political personalities of his day and especially at his colleagues in the legal profession. The student of New Zealand sectarianism will also value the glimpses afforded by his papers of Catholic political turmoil beneath the surface unanimity of the hierarchy. 10 Promotion to the Supreme Court bench in 1937 as Judge of the Arbitration Court removed O’Regan from active participation in political life, but his diaries lost none of their pungency. The appointment came, appropriately, under the new Labour Government. The deposit of his papers in the Alexander Turnbull Library will surely

result in a study of the career of this eminent New Zealander. If this contributes towards illuminating the Irish-Catholic dimension of our history, which has been allowed to suffer such sad neglect, P. J. O’Regan would be more than satisfied. To use his favourite aphorism, ‘Wait and see’.

REFERENCES 1 Cited in ‘The Hon. Mr Justice O’Regan: His Interesting Career’, New Zealand Law Journal, 13 (1937), 141-43, 147. 2 Diary, 29 September, 23 August, 1 November, 1922. O’Regan, P. J. Papers. Acc. 76-165. Alexander Turnbull Library. 3 Davitt was equally impressed with the young O’Regan. See Diary, 1895-96. Davitt Papers, Trinity College, Dublin. 4 Rex v. Liston: Counsel’s Address to the Jury (Dunedin, 1922). 5 Diary, 15 May 1922. O’Regan, P. J. Papers. 6 Diary, 31 January 1922. O’Regan, P. J. Papers. 7 Diary, 24 December 1921. O’Regan, P. J. Papers. 8 See R. M. Sweetman, ‘New Zealand Catholicism and the Irish Issue’, Studies in Church History (forthcoming). 9 Diary, 11 December 1922. O’Regan, P. J. Papers. 10 See R. M. Sweetman, ‘Daniel Mannix and his Biographers’, Australian Studies, 1 (1988), 61-71.