in East Kerry took place on 8 January at Killarney Town Hall. It was a fractious meeting, with Murphy and O’Sullivan claiming that branches and individuals had not been accredited; it broke up in confusion after Murphy and his supporters marched out. A second convention also ended without any decision being arrived at. At the end of January, the party leader John Redmond sent a telegram declaring that, as the two conventions had ‘failed through irregularities and disorder’ to select a candidate, the party ‘must decline to further interfere in the present election’, demonstrating a certain amount of frustration with the two warring factions.2 The row must have been a considerable embarrassment for John Redmond as John Murphy served as Redmond’s secretary for a period. However, whichever candidate was elected would presumably support the Irish Party in parliament in any event. Both men contested the election and commenced extensive canvasses of the constituency. When the result of the election was declared, Murphy had polled 2,185 and O’Sullivan 2,131, giving the incumbent the seat by the close margin of fifty-four votes. The scene was already set for the dramatic rematch.
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Five years later, in 1911, Eugene O’Sullivan won his seat on Killarney Urban District Council after the outgoing member, Tim O’Sullivan – Michael’s son – decided not to put his name forward. At the first meeting the following week, O’Sullivan was nominated to take the position of chairman by Councillor Charlie Foley, the New Street publican, and seconded by James O’Shea. John Hilliard was also nominated. O’Sullivan won by 6–5, but Hilliard declared that O’Sullivan was a disqualified individual, for reasons that will be explained later. O’Sullivan certainly had a way of locating political enemies. John Hilliard was the head of a family that owned substantial businesses in Killarney and Tralee. A member of the Church of Ireland community, he also bred Kerry cattle on the extensive Hilliard lands, but despite the pre-eminence of the family name in Killarney, he never succeeded in being elected (legitimately) as chairman of the town council.
John Maher-Loughnan, the proprietor of the Royal Victoria Hotel, whom O’Sullivan replaced as chairman after a three-year spell, was another firm and constant opponent. He had also declined the opportunity to run for re-election in 1911, but he and O’Sullivan would have several encounters in courtrooms over property issues in the coming years. The Loughnan family had developed the hotel on the Kenmare Estate in the nineteenth century and the first telephone exchange in Killarney was located at the hotel in 1907, before transferring to New Street. However, the Maher-Loughnans were regarded as being fond of the good things in life and in October 1915, John was obliged to seek the protection of the Court of Bankruptcy. He obtained his discharges in July 1916, but he had to put the three farms up for auction in order to re-establish the hotel business. By October 1918, Lord Kenmare was seeking possession of the hotel premises over non-payment of rent.
In April 1920, the Master of the Rolls granted Eugene O’Sullivan the authority to sell land at Gortroe and other lands, having become the owner of the mortgage of the properties. John Maher-Loughnan’s case was that he had fought in the war and been badly wounded and this had damaged his finances. But the tide was already turning on the family. There are pitiful accounts of the remaining members of the family departing from their home at Gortroe House in January 1931. In 1960, Beatrice Grosvenor built the Castlerosse Hotel on the site where the Royal Victoria had stood.
At the meeting in 1911, O’Sullivan duly accepted the position of chairman, a position he held until 1918, when the Sinn Féin surge resulted in Sinn Féin representatives gaining control of all the local authorities for a period. O’Sullivan was re-elected to the chair in 1926 and remained in the post until his death in 1942. He won the bulk of his legal battles with the Maher-Loughnan family and fared better than Murphy in the eventual analysis.
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But this is all running ahead of events as they happened, for, fresh from their battles during the 1906 general election, Murphy and O’Sullivan again fought for the parliamentary seat in East Kerry at the general election of 1910. Before this could occur, however, there was another contest to win the party nomination. The party convention was scheduled for 5 January and the two protagonists held a series of political meetings around the constituency in preparation. The Kerry People, operated by the Ryle family, was one of the newspapers circulating in the county and it covered the events of the time in great detail. In December 1909, Eugene O’Sullivan sought to address the ordinary meeting of the Tralee Board of Guardians and Rural District Council and was afforded the opportunity to make what was an extraordinary contribution. It was an unusual forum and an unlikely vehicle for his comments.3 He had developed his nationalism, he said, ‘not in the bye-ways in Killarney’, although in the following edition of the Kerry People he insisted that he had actually said was ‘the byways of a Solicitor’s office in Killarney’. Either way, two of the members of the board asked him to withdraw, but O’Sullivan continued: ‘I have stated a bold fact. I got my patriotism among the moonlighters of Firies (hear, hear). I am proud of the fact. I have the blood, the bone and the sinew of moonlighters, and if any individual man here wishes to test the material of that blood, and bone and sinew, I am here (hear, hear).’
This clearly referred to one of the most controversial incidents of the Land War in Kerry, which occurred in Molahiffe, Firies, in November 1885. The practice of paying late-night visits to individuals regarded as having taken possession of land from which others had been evicted had developed in the nineteenth century, initially through organisations such as the Whiteboys, but by this time, the use of the term ‘moonlighter’ had become more prevalent. On the night in question, twenty-five years earlier, a group of moonlighters entered the home of a vice-president of the local Land League, John O’Connell Curtin, in search of guns. Castle Farm was a substantial holding of around 250 acres and Curtin was a man in his sixties. Two of his daughters were also in the house. The entire family responded with fury to this invasion of their home. In the dark, shots were discharged and the elderly farmer and one of the raiders were shot dead. Two men convicted of taking part in the attack on the house were sentenced to penal servitude for life and the matter caused a huge division in the mid-Kerry area, which lingered for a considerable time. The two young Curtin women were boycotted – when they arrived to attend Mass, people got up and left – and the farm was eventually sold in February 1887. The 1909 report in the Kerry People demonstrates O’Sullivan’s dramatic attempts to outdo Murphy’s record of supporting tenants.
On a more humorous note, O’Sullivan’s capacity to declare the breadth and extent of his kin in Kerry (the Emporium O’Sullivans, Dr Billy O’Sullivan from Batterfield and the nationalist figure and first Leas Cheann Comhairle of the Dáil, J.J. O’Kelly (Sceilg) were definitely relatives) afforded Murphy a chance to create mirth at his opponent’s expense. At some point O’Sullivan claimed that the poet Eoghan Rua Ó Suilleabháin was among his forebears. John Murphy’s riposte was that it was well known that the eighteenth-century Sliabh Luachra man had never married. But O’Sullivan’s claim regarding his connection to the Firies incident that had occurred a quarter of a century earlier certainly contributed to raising the stakes in the electoral contest.
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It was clear that the 1910 general election convention was going to be a fraught affair and so 150 policemen were rostered for duty in the environs of the town hall. Despite this, several ‘little skirmishes’ broke out. At midday, a prominent member of the United Irish Party (the parliamentary wing of the organisation), James Timothy O’Connor, approached O’Sullivan and asked him if he was prepared to abide by the decision of the convention. Not if Mr O’Connor was involved, O’Sullivan replied, since he was a Murphy supporter. O’Connor then convened the election in the yard at the back of the town hall and J.K. O’Connor, the Castleisland businessman and county councillor, proposed John Murphy. James J. O’Shea, also a county councillor, seconded and Murphy was ratified unanimously and commenced his speech of acceptance. J.K. O’Connor also suffered the ignominy of being disqualified from his seat in the Castleisland Electoral Division. Following the county council elections in 1908, he was found guilty of providing drink and other inducements to voters, a matter that earned him mention in debates
