Timothy Michael Healy, Politician and First Governor-General of the Irish Free State

 

Although he was often to be found in the background, the nationalist politician Timothy Healy played a central role in the development of modern Irish politics. He was born in Bantry on 20 May 1855, the son of a Poor Law Union clerk. He subsequently attended the national school in Bantry and then spent a number of years at the Christian Brothers’ school in Fermoy. In 1869, at the age of 13, Healy moved to Dublin to stay with his uncle, T.D. Sullivan, who was the brother of A.M. Sullivan, the owner of the “Nation” newspaper. In its pages, the Sullivans carried on a constant agitation for a constitutional national political party, and there is no doubt that Healy received a great amount of political instruction from his uncles during this period.

  In 1871, at the age of sixteen, Healy emigrated to England. He spent some time in Manchester, where he came under the influence of the Fenian activist John Barry, before moving to Newcastle-on-Tyne the following year. There, Healy worked as a clerk in the offices of the superintendent of the North Eastern Railway. But he soon found himself engaged in political activity among the Irish immigrants in the city. He served as the secretary of the Irish Literary Institute, which was heavily involved in Irish politics, and he became the secretary of the Home Rule Association in Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1873.

  In 1878, Tim Healy went to London to work as a confidential clerk in the firm of a distant relative, John Barry, who was also the MP for Wexford. At the same time, he started to contribute a weekly column to the “Nation.” Healy began frequenting the House of Commons in order to gather material for his political articles, and he soon became acquainted with Charles Stewart Parnell, who had been elected the MP for Meath in 1875. It was Healy who first drew national attention in Ireland to Parnell and his policy of obstructionism in the British parliament. At the same time, Healy’s intelligence and hard work impressed the Irish MPs at Westminster.

  In the late 1870s, a series of bad harvests in Ireland led to an agricultural crisis that not only threatened famine, but also saw thousands of tenants unable to pay their rent and facing eviction on a scale not seen since the Famine. In response, the Irish National Land League was founded in October 1879 with Parnell as president. The new organization was dedicated to preventing tenants from being evicted. On 21 December 1879, Parnell went to America to raise money for the Land League and highlight the problems facing Irish tenants. Shortly after he arrived, Parnell cabled Healy and asked him to come out and serve as his secretary. As soon as he received the cable, Tim Healy resigned his situation as clerk and took the next boat to America to join his hero. Parnell’s subsequent tour of the United States and Canada was a great success, largely due to the great organizing ability of Healy. It was at an enormous meeting in Montreal that Healy first referred to Parnell as the “uncrowned king of Ireland,” and the title was soon in common use among Irish nationalists. After a few weeks, Parnell was called back to Ireland by the sudden dissolution of Parliament. During the general election campaign of 1880, Healy’s flair for organization was once again of enormous help, and in the election the Home Rule Party gained sixty seats. It was Healy who also engineered Parnell’s election as leader of the party.

  During the Land War, Healy took an active part in organizing resistance. An incident occurred around this time that gained him national recognition and a seat in Parliament. On his way through the south he espoused the cause of an evicted tenant named McGrath who lived near Glengariffe. The local landlord had raised McGrath’s annual rent from 45 pounds to 105 pounds. When he could not pay, McGrath was evicted from the house he himself had built. Another farmer named Mangan grabbed the farm. Tim Healy went to ‘interview’ Mangan and was promptly arrested. He was charged under one of the Whiteboy Acts and despite every effort by the judge and prosecution was acquitted. Following this incident, Healy was nominated for a vacant parliamentary seat in Wexford and returned without opposition. Healy’s radical actions were well known in Britain and Ireland, and when he first entered the House of Commons in 1880, the British MPs would sneeringly refer to him as the “Bantry corner boy.”

  Tim Healy took no notice of them and instead threw himself into his work. When a new Land Bill was introduced in 1881, he soon mastered all of its intricacies with the skill of a born lawyer. His finest moment came when he succeeded in getting a very important clause concerning rent arrears incorporated in the bill, which is now known as the “Healy Clause.” During this period, the British government regarded Healy as being to all intents and purposes a Fenian. In 1881, he was suspended with other members of the Home Rule party from the House of Commons because of their vocal opposition to the Coercion Act of that year. Tim Healy was also known to consult regularly with Fenians, and there is no doubt the Fenians respected him as well.

  In October 1881, the growing unrest led to Parnell’s arrest and imprisonment in Kilmainham gaol. Healy would have been arrested at the same time except that he was under orders from Parnell to stay in England and carry on the fight. The following month, he was sent on a Land League mission to the United States. Speaking in Boston, Healy stated: “I say the that the property of the Irish landlords deserves to be abolished more than the property of slaveholders deserved to be wiped out by…Abraham Lincoln. We believe that landlordism is the prop of British rule, and we mean to take that prop away…”

  In 1882 the agrarian war in Ireland reached its greatest height owing to the British government’s coercive measures. There were boycotts, riots, intimidation of landgrabbers, and attacks on landlords, their agents, and their livestock. In February, Tim Healy was convicted for making a seditious speech at St. Mullins, Co. Carlow and was imprisoned for three months. In an earlier speech he was reported as saying: “You will get nothing out of the British Government unless you go to them with the head of a landlord in one hand and a cow’s tail in the other.”  The conflict continued until May, when the “Kilmainham Treaty” between Parnell and the British government effectively brought the Land War to an end.

  In October 1882, Parnell founded the Irish National League to replace the Land League, which had been suppressed. Parnell needed a new organization to keep Irish tenant farmers mobilized and use their support to achieve Home Rule. Tim Healy was chiefly responsible for the drafting of its constitution together with Timothy Harrington of Castletownbere.  By this time, Healy was considered to be the best fighter in Parnell’s forces, and when a parliamentary seat in County Monaghan became available in 1883, he stood for the seat and won. Part of the reason for his success was that many Protestant tenant farmers actually supported the Land League’s objectives. Two years later, Healy similarly stood and won a seat for South Derry. In 1884, he was called to the Irish Bar and rapidly built up a practice in land law.

  It was while he was engaged in Land League activities in Paris in 1881 that Healy and other members of the party became aware of Parnell’s involvement with Kitty O’Shea, the wife of a Home Rule MP, Captain William O’Shea. On his return to London, Healy resigned his position as secretary to Parnell, and it is likely that Parnell’s deteriorating relations with Healy and other members of the Home Rule party dated from this time. Healy was also extremely distrustful of William O’Shea, and in February 1886, when Parnell proposed O’Shea for a vacant parliamentary seat in Galway. Healy and other MPs actually went down to Galway to fight Parnell’s candidate. Their resistance collapsed however, when Parnell himself showed up in the city.

  In 1889, O’Shea decided to divorce his wife on the grounds that she was having an affair with Parnell. On 17 November 1890, the divorce was granted, and although public opinion in both Britain and Ireland was scandalized, most Home Rule supporters did not waver in their support for their leader. On the following day a meeting of the National League was held in Dublin, where a resolution was passed pledging the meeting to stand by Parnell. There was, however, one important dissenter.  T. D. Sullivan, Tim Healy’s uncle, stood up at the meeting and publicly opposed Parnell’s leadership on ‘moral grounds.” At this point Healy was still a supporter of Parnell, and although he was not at the meeting he later commented: “We’ll teach these damn Nonconformists to mind their own business.” He reiterated this view at another meeting on November 20, when he said: “If the Irish people for whom he (Parnell) has done so much, for whom he had braved so much, suffered so much, if they were so frivolous and light-hearted as to permit themselves at the first sound of this wretched and unfortunate case to be dragged away from the support they have hitherto accorded Mr. Parnell, all I can say is that the Irish nation would be my nation no more.”

  On 24 November, however, Gladstone announced that because of his close ties with Parnell, he would be unable to continue as leader of the Liberal party if Parnell did not resign. This changed everything. Overnight, most of the Home Rule MPs, including Tim Healy, came to the conclusion that Gladstone’ support was more important to the home rule cause than Parnell’s continuance as leader. But Parnell refused to step down, and a vicious battle for control of the party ensued. In the week of 1-6 December, the party’s MPs debated in a committee room in the House of Commons whether or not to depose Parnell. Opposition to Parnell coalesced around a group led by Tim Healy that came to be known as the Bantry Band. In addition to Tim Healy, this group consisted of John Barry, T.D. Sullivan, Donal Sullivan, Maurice Healy, William Martin Murphy, and James Gilhooly. With the exception of Gilhooly, they were all related either by blood or by marriage. Healy seems to have been one of those people who are very intelligent, but who are also convinced that they are always right and take it as a personal insult if people disagree with them. He now took the lead in attacking Parnell and his supporters, and the debates often degenerated into vicious personal abuse. When one delegate claimed the anti-Parnellites were making Gladstone the master of the Home Rule Party, Healy hissed back: “Who [then] is the mistress of the party?” The end came when Parnell seceded from the party with 44 of his followers, in order to make a direct appeal to the people of Ireland. At that point, it looked as if Parnell might still be able to prevail.

  Both Parnell and Healy arrived in Dublin on December 10. But whereas Parnell was greeted with a rapturous welcome, Healy was publicly assaulted in the street. The next day, Parnell and some friends went to the offices of the party newspaper, the “United Ireland.” The newspaper had declared against him, so Parnell and his companions simply evicted the editor and took possession. That evening, while Parnell was addressing a great meeting at the Rotunda, Healy organized a gang, and marching to the offices of the newspaper, carried it by assault. Next morning, Parnell, accompanied by a large crowd, once again attacked the offices of the United Ireland and retook possession.

  The conflict now spread to the hustings. A bye-election was being held in Kilkenny, and both sides treated it as a trial of strength. Healy now had the open backing of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and despite Parnell’s best efforts, the anti-Parnellite forces to get their candidate elected. The rest of the year was spent in an exhausting series of electoral campaigns. Wherever he went, Parnell was dogged by the indefatigable Healy and his clerical supporters. In April, Parnell was defeated at a bye-election in Sligo. This was followed by another electoral defeat in Carlow in July. By now, the constant campaigning, as well as the constant abuse he suffered from Healy’s supporters, was starting to affect his health, and Parnell died on October 6, 1891. A ballad of the day was clear about who was responsible for Parnell’s death:

 

                         “Who was it killed the Chief?

                           Says the Shan Van Vocht,

                           Who was it cried Stop Thief?

                           Says the Shan Van Vocht,

                           Twas Tim Healy’s poisoned tongue

                           Our chieftain dead that stung,

                           Better men than him were hung,

                           Says the Shan Van Vocht.”

 

  Parnell’s death did not curb Healy’s tongue. Three weeks after Parnell’s funeral in Glasnevin, he made a violent attack on his former leader during a speech at Longford, and referred to Kitty O’Shea (now Mrs. Parnell) in savage terms. On November 3, two days after he had delivered this speech, he was publicly horse-whipped for it in Dublin by a relative of Parnell’s. Relations with another anti-Parnellite, John Dillon, also became strained. Dillon vehemently protested against the brutality with which Healy assailed the memory of Parnell. Dillon had often been highly critical of clerical interference in Irish politics, and he also attacked Healy for his close relationship with the Catholic Church.

   In February and June 1892 Dillon made two attempts at union with the Parnellites. Both attempts were unsuccessful, largely because of Healy’s opposition. In July 1892 a general election was held. The Irish Nationalists were now divided into three factions: Dillonites, Healyites, and Parnellites. Meath had been the first constituency in Ireland to elect Parnell to the British Parliament, and for that reason Tim Healy and his supporters made a special attack upon it. They succeeded in getting two candidates elected, but the methods used were so outrageous that both candidates were unseated on appeal. During the appeal, extracts were read from a pastoral letter, which the local bishop had ordered to be read in every church. In one passage that was quoted, the bishop had written:  “He would approach the death-bed of a profligate or drunkard with greater confidence in his salvation than that of a Parnellite.”

  From 1890 onwards, Healy’s political career was marked by frequent quarrels with other Home Rule MPs. Nevertheless, with the support of the Catholic Church and William Martin Murphy, the owner of the Irish Independent, Healy was able to hold on to a parliamentary seat in County Louth from 1891 to 1910, when he managed to obtain the seat for Northeast Cork with the help of William O’Brien. During this period, Healy’s activities in the English Parliament were as constructive as his activities in Ireland were destructive. During the debates concerning the Land Bill of 1896, as well as the Land Purchase Bill of 1903, he distinguished himself considerably.

  During the debates on the Home Rule Bill of 1912, Healy was extremely critical of the concept of partition and of John Redmond’s leadership of the Home Rule Party. Nevertheless, when World War I broke out in 1914, Healy played a major role in recruiting men for the British army. His attitude began to change as the war went on, and he became extremely critical of the shabby way in which Irish soldiers were treated by the British army and government. Following the Easter Rising of 1916, Healy started to become more and more friendly towards Sinn Fein, at least in part because they were also attacking the Redmondites. In early 1918, he was engaged as counsel by Sinn Fein leaders at the inquest on Thomas Ashe, who had died as a result of a hunger strike. In December 1918, a general election was held, which in Ireland was dominated by the conflict between the Home Rule Party and Sinn Fein. Healy stood aside to allow a Sinn Fein prisoner to be elected for his constituency, and during the election campaign he openly supported the Sinn Fein party.

  During the War of Independence, which broke out in 1919, Sinn Fein leaders often went to Healy for political advice. At the same time, Tim Healy’s nephew, Kevin O’Higgins, was coming into prominence in the Sinn Fein movement, and through this medium he was able to keep in touch with events. When Sir Alfred Cope, a senior British government official, started making efforts to bring about a truce in 1920-21, he had numerous interviews with Healy. Healy may have also acted as an intermediary between the two sides by visiting some of the Sinn Fein leaders to sound out their views on a settlement. During the subsequent Treaty negotiations, Healy was regularly consulted by members of the Irish delegation, and he appears to have helped the delegation in drafting the terms of the settlement.

  In 1922, after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the British government appointed him the Governor-General of the new Irish Free State. Healy was nominated for the position by a number of people, including Kevin O’Higgins, who was then Minister for Justice in the new Free State government. The Irish government apparently wanted a strong nationalist in the position, while the British government wanted a strong parliamentarian. Naturally enough, both Parnellites and Republicans criticized the choice. Nevertheless, neither Healy nor the Free State government appear to have taken the office of Governor-General particularly seriously. When a journalist questioned Healy about his civic duties, his reply was: “I hope I won’t have to kiss babies!” Healy retired as governor-general in 1928 and died three years later at his home in Dublin.