'Timothy Michael Healy,
KC' (
17 May,
1855 –
26 March,
1931)
was an
Irish nationalist politician, journalist, author, barrister and one of the most controversial Irish
MPs in the
Parliament of the United Kingdom, with a career that spanned the period from
Charles Stewart Parnell's leadership of the
Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in the 1880s until the foundation of the
Irish Free State in 1922. He served as first
Governor-General of the Irish Free State.
Family background
He was born in
Bantry,
co. Cork as the second son of Maurice Healy, clerk of the Bantry Poor Law Union, and Eliza Healy (neé Sullivan). His elder brother Thomas Healy (1854-1924) was a solicitor and MP. for North Wexford, his younger brother
Maurice Healy (1859-1923) a solicitor and MP. for Cork city with whom he held a life long close relationship.
His father was descended from a family line which in holding to their
Roman Catholic faith, lost their lands which he compensated by being a scholarly gentleman. His father was transferred in 1862 to a similar position in
Lismore co. Waterford, holding the post until his death in 1906. Timothy 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.
Early life
He then moved to England finding employment in 1871 with the North Eastern Railway Company in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There he became deeply involved in the
Home-Rule politics of the local Irish community. After leaving for London in 1878 Healy worked as a confidential clerk in a factory owned by his relative, then worked as a parliamentary correspondent for ''
The Nation'' newspaper owned by his uncle, writing numerous articles in support of Parnell, the newly emergent and more militant home rule leader, and his policy of parliamentary ''
obstructionism'' .
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. Parnell however brought Healy into the Irish Party (IPP) and supported him as a nationalist candidate for
Wexford in 1880-83 against the aspiring
John Redmond whose father was its recently deceased MP.. Healy was returned unopposed to parliament, aided by the fact that Redmond stood aside.and surviving an agrarian court case which alleged that he had been guilty of intimidation.
Political career
In parliament Healy did not optically 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
1881 Land Act 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 scurriliousness 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.
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
Monaghan by-election in June 1883-5, deemed to be the climax in the Healy-Parnell relationship. In 1884 he was called to the
Irish law bar as barrister (in 1889 to the inner bar as
K.C., in London in 1910) . His reputation allowed him to build an extensive practise particularly in land cases. Parnell choose him unwisely for
Londonderry south in 1885, which
Ulster seat he only held for a year. He was then elected in 1886-92 for north
Longford .
Invective rift
Initially a passionate supporter of Parnell, he became disenchanted with his leader after the first clash occurred in 1886 when Healy opposed Parnell’s party nominee to stand for
Galway city, a Captain William O’Shea. At the time O’Shea was separated from his wife, with whom Parnell was living in relationship. Only when Parnell unexpectedly turned up in Galway to back O’Shea, did Healy on this occasion give way for O’Shea to be elected.
Following the ensuing
O'Shea divorce controversy which revealed that the party leader had had a lengthy relationship with the wife of a fellow MP., whom he later married and was the father of three of her children, did Healy feel unable to again give way to Parnell. His hostility had in one respect a rational basis, Parnell was recklessly endangering the Irish party’s all-important alliance with
Gladstonian Liberalism.
Healy became his sternest and most sharp-spoken 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 which almost led him to come to blows with Parnell. His savage onslaught in public reflected his conservative catholic origins and the relative immaturity of his mid-thirties, as he revengefully destroyed a wealthy protestant squire. He was additionally vulgar and abusive towards Mrs. O’Shea. A substantial minority of the Irish people never forgave him for this role during the divorce crisis, permanently damaging his own standing in Irish public life. The rift prompted a nine-year old
Dublin schoolboy,
James Joyce, to pen a poem called 'Et Tu, Healy?'.
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 at first its most outspoken member, when in 1892 he captured north
Louth for the anti-Parnellites, who in all won seventy-one seats. But finding it impossible to work with or under any post-Parnell leadership especially Dillon, 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.
In the following decades, largely due to his expanding legal practise, he became a part-time politician and estranged from the national movement, setting up his own personal ''Healyite'' organisation with base as MP. for north Louth (which seat he held until December 1910). 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 re-unite under Redmond in 1900.
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 with Dillon. But Healy’s talent for disruption was soon recognised when two years later he was again expelled. He remained "the enemy within", recruiting malcontentent MPs. to harass the party and survived politically by dint of his assiduous constituency work, as well as through the influence of his clerical ally
Cardinal Michael Logue . Healy remained rooted in the extended ''Bantry Gang'' a highly influential political and commercial nexus based originally in West Cork, which included his key patron, the catholic business magnate and owner of the ''
Irish Independent'',
William Martin Murphy, who provided a platform for Healy and other critics of the IPP..
Coalition of a kind
However, at least after 1903 Healy was joined in his estrangement from the party leadership by
William O'Brien. O’Brien had been for years one of Healy’s strongest critics, but now he too felt annoyed both by his own alienation from the party and by Redmond’s subservience to Dillon. From 1905 they entered a loose coalition, which lasted throughout the life of the IPP.. They were in agreement that agrarian radicalism brought little returns, and with Healy practically becoming a Parnellite, they preferred to pursue a policy of conciliation with the protestant class in order to further the acceptance of Home Rule. Redmond was sympathetic to this policy, but was inhibited by Dillon. Redmond in an act of ''rapprochement'' , briefly re-united them with the party in 1908. Fiercely independent both split off again in 1909, responding to real changes in the social basis of Irish politics.
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
January 1910 general election in alliance with William O'Brien’s newly founded
All-for-Ireland Party (AFIL), their alliance based largely on common opposition to the Irish party. He lost his seat in the following
December 1910 election, but soon afterwards rejoined the O'Brienites, O’Brien providing the 1911 north-east Cork by-election vacancy. His reputation was not enhanced when he represented as counsel his associate William Martin Murphy, the industrialist who sparked the 1913 ''
Dublin Lockout''.
Redmond’s and the IPP.’s powerful position of holding the balance of power at
Westminster and with the
Third Home Rule Act assured, left the AFIL critics in a weakened position. With the outbreak of
World War I in August 1914 the Healy brothers supported the
Allied and British war effort, two had a son enlist in one of the
Irish divisions, Timothy’s eldest son, Joe, fought with distinction at
Gallipoli.
Having done much to damage the popular image and authority of constitutional nationalism, Healy after the
Easter Rising was convinced that the IPP and Redmond were doomed and slowly withdrew from the forefront of politics, making it clear in 1917 that he was in general sympathy with
Arthur Griffith’s
Sinn Féin movement, but not with physical force methods. In September that year he acted as counsel for the family of the dead Sinn Féin hunger striker
Thomas Ashe. Before the December
1918 general election he was the first of the AFIL members to resign his seat in favour of the Sinn Féin party’s candidate and spoke in support of
P. J. Little, the Sinn Féin candidate for
Rathmines in Dublin.
Governor-General
Remarkably he returned to considerable prominence when, on the urging of the
Irish Free State’s Provisional Government of
W.T. Cosgrave, the British government recommended to King
George V that Healy be appointed the first '
Governor-General of the Irish Free State', a new office of representative of the Crown created in the 1921
Anglo-Irish Treaty and introduced by a combination of the 'Irish Free State Constitution and Letters Patent from the King'.
Initially the Irish government under Cosgrave wished for Healy to reside in a new small residence, but when facing death threats from the
IRA, he was moved as a temporary measure into the
Viceregal Lodge, the former 'out of season' residence of the
Lord Lieutenant, the former representative of the Crown before 1922.
Healy proved an able Governor-General, possessing a degree of political skill, deep political insight and contacts in Britain that the new Irish government initially lacked, and had long recommended himself to the Catholic hierarchy, all-round good credentials for this key symbolic and reconciling position at the centre of public life. He joked once that the government didn't advise him, he advised the government: a comment at a dinner for the
Duke of York, Prince Albert (the future King George VI) that led to public criticism. However the waspish Healy still could not help courting further controversy, most notably in a public attack on the new
Fianna Fáil and its leader,
Eamon de Valera, which led to republican calls for his resignation. Unlike his successors, Healy possessed a three-fold role as Governor-General. He was simultaneously
★ representative of the King;
★ representative of the British Government;
★ native head of the Irish executive.
As a result, much of the contact between His Majesty's governments in London and Dublin went through him. 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
Royal Assent to legislation enacted by the
Oireachtas. However no Bills that he would have been required by these secret instructions to block, were introduced during his time as governor-general. That role of being the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’s government's representative, and acting on its advice, was abandoned throughout the
British Commonwealth in the mid-1920s as a result of a Commonwealth Conference decision, leaving him and his successors exclusively as the King's representative and nominal head of the Irish executive.
Healy seemed to believe that he had been awarded the governor-generalship for life, 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 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 became more mellowed and otherwise more diplomatic.
He died in
Chapelizod co. Dublin where he lived at his home, on 26 March 1931, aged 75 and was buried in
Glasnevin Cemetery.
References
★ Patrick Maume ''The long Gestation, Irish Nationalist life 1881-1918'' (1999)
★ Alwin Jackson ''Home Rule 1800-2000'' (2003), pp. 100-103
★ Paul Bew ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (2004)
★ Tim Cadogan & Jeremiah Falvey ''A Biographical Dictionary of Cork'' (2006)
Reading
★ Frank Callanan, ''T. M Healy'' (Cork University Press, 1996) (ISBN 1-85918-172-4)
Works
★ ''Why is there an Irish Question and an Irish Land League?'' (1881)
★ ''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)
Political career
External links
★
Governor-General Tim Healy's first Speech to the Dáil (12th December 1922)
★
Governor-General Tim Healy's second Speech to the Dáil (3rd October 1923)
★
Letters and Leaders of my Day by T. M. Healy, KC
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