style="font-size:15px;"> In the meantime, another meeting had commenced in front of the town hall, where Jeremiah Crowley, a rural district councillor from Scartaglin, proposed Florence O’Sullivan from Ballyfinane to chair the meeting; he had chaired Killarney Rural Council for many years. This also afforded Crowley a seat on the county council to supervise proceedings and another county councillor, Cornelius Kelliher from Headford, proposed Eugene O’Sullivan as the candidate. At the national level, the party appears to have decided again to simply let the two men fight it out in their own theatre, so both men went on the ballot paper again for the right to represent East Kerry. At the conclusion of the count, O’Sullivan was declared the victor by 489 votes, 2,643 to 2,154. Murphy, whose wife had been unwell during the campaign, now submitted his petition to unseat the winning candidate because of alleged vote rigging and intimidation. This was not an unusual step for defeated candidates, but it cost £1,000 to lodge a petition, a substantial sum of money at the time. Murphy alleged thirty-nine instances of voter personation, including one in which O’Sullivan had persuaded a young man named O’Shea to vote in place of his late father and one in which O’Sullivan had actually personated another man. All of these charges were dismissed.
However, Judges Madden and Kenny both referred to the expression ‘the blood, bone and sinew of the moonlighters’ in the respondent’s address to the Tralee Board of Guardians in determining that Patrick Daly, one of O’Sullivan’s supporters, had subjected people to intimidation. Evidence of stone-throwing, kicking voters and the discharge of a revolver were not considered to have been proven and the judges found against any corrupt practice by either O’Sullivan or his supporters on the majority of the charges.. They did, however, hold that O’Sullivan and his agents had engaged in the corrupt practice of intimidation and undue influence in one instance. The election was thus declared void and the result was set aside. Seven men were named along with O’Sullivan as having been involved in the affair and all of them were disqualified from holding public office for seven years. This obviously meant that Eugene O’Sullivan was barred from public office (although he was subsequently able to defeat this sanction and was elected to Killarney Urban Council and became chairman in 1911).
At the Killarney Petty Sessions in August 1910, Eugene O’Sullivan, John Ulick O’Sullivan and Patrick Daly were charged with using excessive influence upon eleven men in the election. The magistrates directed that they were unable to agree on the case against O’Sullivan and they refused to send any of the cases forward for trial. However, Headford farmer Cornelius Kelliher was convicted of corrupt practice in September and disqualified from holding the seat he had won on the county council. Murphy subsequently took the matter further and attempted to have O’Sullivan’s name removed from the register of electors. In October 1910, at Killarney courthouse, Judge Browne held against the appellant and allowed O’Sullivan to remain on the list of voters.
With O’Sullivan disqualified, the East Kerry seat at Westminster remained empty and the writ to conduct the poll again had not been moved by the time a second election of the year was called for 8 December 1910. Eugene’s cousin, Tim M. O’Sullivan, standing as an Independent nationalist, won the seat, defeating Patrick Guiney from Kanturk, who represented the All-For-Ireland League. Tim and his brother Professor John Marcus (later a government minister) married two Crotty sisters, Luisa and Agnes respectively, from Lismore in Waterford. Tim was a director of R. Hilliard & Sons and played a part in the first Irish full-length film, The Dawn, made in Killarney by Tom Cooper in 1936.
But the sparring between Murphy and O’Sullivan continued. The Killarney Echo and South Kerry Chronicle, owned by the Quinnell family, gave John Murphy a column on the front page of the paper in September 1913 and continued to run it until 1919. In January 1914, following the Urban Council election, the opinion piece entitled ‘Murphy on Places, Persons and Public Affairs’ stated:
People in Killarney are surprised how Messrs James T. O’Connor, Eugene O’Sullivan, Cornelius Collins and Cornelius Counihan got at the head of the list. Of course, these elections, it is to be regretted, are never a test of anything, as there is practically no opposition, and certainly in Killarney there never was less public interest manifested in them. The strange thing, however, is that four gentlemen who in all matters were supposed to be as far apart as North, South, East and West, came out on top.4
Later in the piece, there is a more direct reference to O’Sullivan: ‘There are already rumours about the qualifications of Urban Councillors being tested in Killarney. I think I will test Mr Eugene O’Sullivan’s right to remain in the Urban Council myself.’ He goes on to suggest that his erstwhile opponent should have been disqualified as he had been a paid officer of the county council and as recently as early January 1914 had acted as a member of the County Kerry Technical Committee, ‘which of course he was disqualified from doing’. Whether he did test this or not, O’Sullivan remained in situ. The Cork Constitution newspaper made a mischevious comment on the outcome of the petition: ‘The two unseated English Ministerialists have been raised in the peerage, and we shall probably hear Mr Craig one of these days asking the Prime Minister whether he intends to follow this precedent in the case of Mr Eugene O’Sullivan, who is also a pledged Ministerial supporter.’ Charles Craig was a unionist MP and father of the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Viscount Craigavon.
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There was a setback for Eugene O’Sullivan, however, when the Irish Volunteers in Killarney decided to hold a fresh election of officers following an upsurge of membership in September 1914. O’Sullivan was identified as being more closely aligned with the authorities than the segment that was drilling with the intention of fighting for Irish freedom and was regarded with suspicion by many of the newer Volunteers. He did seem to misjudge the situation and Killarney Volunteers leaders Michael O’Sullivan and Michael Spillane give a colourful account of his bid to become the chairman in their joint contribution to the Military Archives. One needs to take a jaundiced view of the recollections of those speaking thirty-four years after the events described and, besides, Eugene was not, at this point, in a position to respond to their version of events, having died eighteen years previously, but it does at least paint an outline of what occurred. It is stated that O’Sullivan had canvassed the existing officers to ask them to withdraw in favour of his nomination for the chair beforehand. He arrived at the meeting ‘at the head of from 30 to 40 men, and more or less took the hall by storm’. But things did not transpire as he had hoped:
Michael Spillane was then proposed and seconded and he then took the chair. Eugene O’Sullivan protested and claimed it as his right, as Chairman of the Urban Council, to be appointed Captain of the Volunteers. Spillane replied, ‘I do not want the job but if the men want me, I will act.’ O’Sullivan replied, ‘I know that, and you would be surprised how much I know’ … Spillane then asked all who wanted him as Captain to go to the right of the hall. There were very few left for O’Sullivan and he left the hall, after pouring abuse at An Seabhac, with a good deal less followers than came with him.5
‘An Seabhac’ was Pádraig Ó Siochfradha from Dingle, a teacher who was giving classes in Irish in Killarney and who was elected chairman of the county council in 1920 after Sinn Féin won the election. He wrote under the name ‘An Seabhac’ (The Hawk), Jimín Máire Thaidhg and An Baile Seo Gainne being his best-known works, and he later served in the Seanad from 1944 to 1948. John Murphy clearly identified with the republican element and in early 1918 Spillane and O’Sullivan refer to him chairing an anti-conscription meeting in Killarney.
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Tensions between the principal protagonists eased for a substantial period in the second decade of the twentieth century. Eugene O’Sullivan was settling into a spell of being routinely re-elected chairman of Killarney UDC, although he confronted a challenge of a rather unusual nature on 23 January 1917.6 At 11am, Councillor O’Sullivan and his supporters arrived at the chamber for the election. Denis J. Courtney proposed and David Hurley seconded O’Sullivan for the chair and he was duly re-elected. William Ahern proposed and Mr Courtney seconded Con Counihan for the vice-chair and
