He put down parliamentary questions about a possible Channel Tunnel linking Britain and France …. in 1882! He made a £5.00 donation to the Kilrush (Co. Clare) Brass Band and the local Land League, because they did not like him, organized a boycott of the Band for accepting it. He was bankrupt twice and his election and living expenses continued to be met by his wife’s aunt, long after his wife herself had started living with another man. He developed close links with the Fenians and fought for prisoner releases, but failed to vote for the second Home Rule Bill because it would have meant the end of Irish representation at Westminster. He was repeatedly elected to Parliament as a Home Rule MP with the support of Charles Stewart Parnell, but refused to sit on Parnell’s party benches in the House of Commons, preferring to sit with the Liberals, and refused to sign the party loyalty pledge accepted by all the other Irish party MPs.
This is the record of Captain William O’Shea, MP for Clare and later for Galway, son of a Catholic Limerick solicitor and reputedly one of the best dressed men in the House of Commons.
Myles Dungan’s book is the first ever biography of Captain O’Shea, although his wife Katherine has been the subject of three biographies, and her lover Charles Stewart Parnell of many more.
This is a scholarly work containing much new material. Myles Dungan has trawled through O’Shea’s own papers and those of many other figures of the time. He had a lot to work on. O’Shea did not live with his wife, probably because Parnell was living with her, but he continued to write many friendly letters to her, most of which survived. Interestingly his wife’s letters back to him have disappeared!
She, in turn, worked to advance his career. She importuned the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone to get him a government job. She encouraged her lover Parnell to take huge political risks to help O’Shea keep his Irish party seat in the House of Commons, even though he had an appalling voting record in support of Parnell’s party positions.
This book is also, in a sense, a new biography of Parnell incorporated in a biography of his nemesis, O’Shea. The Parnell that emerges from these pages is more complex than the figure of Nationalist hagiography who “set no boundary to the march of a nation”. Parnell was a man of his times and a landlord. He favoured special representation for landlords in County administration. Although otherwise an autocratic leader, Parnell continually allowed himself to be politically blackmailed by O’Shea.
William O’Shea himself served in the House of Commons for a total of six years. He was a moderately active as an MP. Myles Dungan has calculated that he intervened 200 times in the House in that period. But he was very busy in his constituency. Unlike many Irish party MPs, who had no links at all with their constituency other than being endorsed to represent it by Parnell, O’Shea had land in East Clare which he visited frequently. As an MP he cultivated the Catholic clergy in the county, was a promoter of the building of the West Clare railway, and obtained more Government grants to build piers in the fishing villages of West Clare, than were received by any other counties along the west coast.
His strength lay in his influence with British Administration, a characteristic that was going out of fashion with the Irish party of the time, which was turning toward a policy of parliamentary obstruction, boycotts and no rent campaigns to secure their basic demands – Home Rule and the overthrow of the Irish landlord interest.
In this sense, O’Shea was the last of his kind, a nineteenth century Irish “Whig” MP, who wanted to work with English parties to obtain modest incremental improvements for Ireland, rather than to embark on a path of confrontation to achieve longer term and more ambitious goals. Apart from his other less attractive qualities, O’Shea turned out to be on the wrong side of the history of his time.
Myles Dungan deals extensively with Parnell’s affair with O’Shea’s wife. The conclusion one reaches is that O’Shea knew of the affair. Not only did he turn a blind eye to it, but continued to have sexual relations with his wife long after the affair had started. He was, as one might put it nowadays, “sexually active”, and his wife had compiled a list of 17 different affairs he was supposed to have had when she was contemplating opposing his divorce petition on the grounds of her adultery with Parnell. She and Parnell were also set to claim that O’Shea connived in their affair, but they never did make that claim in court because it would have meant that the divorce petition would have failed. Parnell, for one, did not want that because he wanted to marry Katherine himself.
This unwillingness to defend his case and counter O’Shea’s evidence in the divorce court did Parnell a lot of damage with English public opinion. This was because of the impact of O’Shea’s testimony on the support base of the Liberal Party. The non-conformist Liberal and Protestant conscience of England, fresh from destroying the career of Charles Dilke MP because of his adulteries, was appalled by O’Shea’s presentation of Parnell’s deceptiveness in pursuing an affair with his friend’s wife under his friend’s own roof. English opinion was then, and probably still is, much less tolerant of sexual pecadillos than Irish opinion.
The Liberal Party had already suffered a major split because of Gladstone’s first unsuccessful attempt to pass Home Rule in the 1880s, and was facing considerable risks to its vote by taking up Home Rule a second time. So, as long as Parnell was leader, the Liberal Party was not inclined to stick its neck out to push Home Rule that would put Ireland under Parnell’s “adulterous” rule. The Liberal belief was that if Home Rule was to be brought forward a second time, Parnell had to go first.
That was the setting for the greatest split in Irish politics of the entire nineteenth century, a split that was only eclipsed in bitterness by the Civil War of the 1920s.
This is a serious work of history. It assembles evidence, which is often incomplete, and attempts to draw conclusions from it. In this respect, demands a high level of attention from the reader, who may find the going hard at times. But it is an original work, dealing with a fascinating subject, and deserves to be widely read.
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