Pierce Charles de Lacy O'Mahony

Pierce [Some sources give ‘Peirce’. This seems definitely to be incorrect, perhaps resulting from a confusion with his father who was Peirce.] Charles de Lacy O'Mahony (June 9, 1850 – October 31, 1930), known up to 1901 as Pierce Mahony, and from 1912 also as The O'Mahony of Kerry, [This article follows the practice of the "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" in referring to O’Mahony by the name he was using at the time referred to.] was an Irish Protestant nationalist philanthropist, politician and MP, in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as member of the Irish Parliamentary Party. He practised as a barrister from 1898 to 1900. He was remarkable in having had successively three names, three wives and three religions. He should not be confused with his grandfather Pierce Mahony (1792-1853), a close associate of Daniel O’Connell, who was elected as MP for Kinsale in 1837 but unseated on petition; or with his son Pierce Gun Mahony (1878-1914).

Early life

Born in Dublin to a Church of Ireland family, Mahony was the only surviving son of Peirce Kenifeck Mahony of Kilmorna, Duagh, Co. Kerry, and of Jane, daughter of Robert Gun Cuninghame, D.L., of Mount Kennedy, Co. Wicklow. His father died shortly after he was born. When he was six his mother married Col. William Henry Vicars, and the family moved to Leamington, Warwickshire. Mahony was educated at Rugby School and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he did not take a degree, but established an Irish Home Rule club and formed a friendship with his later Parliamentary colleague J. G. Swift MacNeill. Mahony went on to the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, where he won the Haygarth Gold Medal in 1875. In 1877 he married Helen Louise, only daughter of Maurice Collis, a member of the Royal Irish Academy. She died in 1899 and in 1901 he married a first cousin, Alice Johnstone, who died in her turn in 1906. In 1913, his son Dermot O’Mahony married Grace Hill.

Mahony was an Assistant Land Commissioner 1881-84, a magistrate in Co. Kerry and Co. Limerick, Poor Law Guardian at Listowel, a member of the Roads and Piers Commission under the Relief of Distress Act 1886, and a member of the Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls.

Irish nationalism

He was elected unopposed as Member of Parliament for North Meath in the July 1886 general election. When the Irish Parliamentary Party split over Parnell’s leadership in 1890, Mahony was one of the four Protestant MPs who supported Parnell. He remained close to Parnell, entertaining him in Kerry shortly before he died. [Lyons (1977), p.597] At the general election of 1892, he was defeated in North Meath by the prominent land campaigner Michael Davitt, who had taken a particularly strong and clericalist line against Parnell from early in the crisis, by 54% to 46%. This general election was characterised by ferocious hostility to the Parnellites on the part of the Catholic Church. Mahony successfully petitioned the courts to set aside the result on the basis of clerical intimidation of the voters. In the re-run election in February 1893, Davitt did not stand, having been elected unopposed to a vacancy at Cork North East. However clerical Anti-Parnellite influence continued to be strong. The Times reported that ‘the priests…swarmed at all the polling stations, and kept the voters constantly in view’. [The Times, 23 February 1893.] Mahony again lost, by the fractionally smaller margin of 53% to 47%.

Mahony remained active in the Nationalist movement, and made three further unsuccessful attempts to return to Parliament. He stood as Parnellite candidate for Dublin St Stephen’s Green at a by-election in September 1895 but failed to unseat the Liberal Unionist member, William Kenny. He contested another by-election, for Dublin Harbour, in 1915 but came well short of election with 24% of the vote. In the general election of 1918 he fought West Wicklow for the Irish Parliamentary Party but lost to the Sinn Féin candidate Robert Barton by the particularly wide margin of more than four to one.

Later career

In 1898 Mahony was called to the Irish bar, and subsequently practised as a barrister. In 1900 he inherited an estate from an uncle and thereafter did not need paid work, instead devoting himself to philanthropy. In 1903 O’Mahony travelled to Bulgaria to undertake relief work among orphans who had fled from Turkish massacres, and in 1904 opened St Patrick’s Orphanage in Sofia. On the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he unsuccessfully tried to prevent Bulgaria entering alliance with Germany, and after the war argued for Bulgaria to be exempted from war reparations. On Jan 20, 1915, he was awarded the Order of Civil Merit by Ferdinand I of Bulgaria.

In 1913, O’Mahony supported the workers led by James Larkin in the Dublin Lockout. During the First World War he served as a member of the Irish Recruiting Council for Irish regiments. For this work he was awarded a C.B.E. in 1920, but declined it. Later in the year and resigned as Deputy Lieutenant of County Wicklow and as a magistrate in protest against British policy in the Irish War of Independence then in progress.

While in Bulgaria, O’Mahony had joined the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, but he remained also a member of the Church of Ireland until 1927 when a new Rector forced him to choose between the religions. He then became a Catholic, in 1929, the year before his death. His son Dermot O’Mahony (1881-1960) was a Cumann na nGaedhael member of the Dáil of the Irish Free State for County Wicklow in 1927-38.

References

Publications

Pierce Mahony and J. J. Clancy, "The Irish Land Crisis", The Irish Question No.4, London, Irish Press Agency, 1886

Pierce Mahony, "The Truth about Glenbeigh", The Irish Question No.15, London, Irish Press Agency, 1887

Pierce O’Mahony, Bulgaria and the Powers: Being a Series of Letters on the Balkans written from Sofia, Dublin, Sealy, 1915Seamus Shortall and Maria Spassova Sofia, 2000: "Pierce O'Mahony, an Irishman in Bulgaria"

ources

"Irish Independent", 1 November 1930

F. S. L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, London, William Collins, 1977

"Oxford Dictionary of National Biography", O’Mahony ["formerly" Mahony] , Pierce Charles de Lacy (1850-1930), "politician and philanthropist", by Alan O’Day, October 2005

"The Times", 5 July and 16-24 December 1892, 23 February 1893, 2 November 1898

Brian M. Walker (ed.), "Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1801-1922", Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 1978

"Who Was Who" 1929-1940

External links

* [http://www.rootsweb.com/~irlker/glenevict.html Transcript of text of Mahony’s tract ‘The Truth about Glenbeigh’ (1887) Note: It is not known whether this transcription is accurate]