T.M. Healy.

1996. Cork, Cork University Press, 1996. 25 cm. xxvii, 754 pages : illustrations. Original Hardcover with original dustjacket in protective collector's mylar. Excellent, as new condition with only minor signs of external wear. Timothy Michael Healy was one of the most brilliant and controversial politicians of the Irish Parliamentary Party era. A politician of savage fluency, he more than any other shaped the idiom of modern Irish nationalism. The great drama of his life was his role in the rise and fall of Parnell, as the most skilled propagandist of Parnellism, and ultimately as his former mentor's most savage assailant. This is the first study to re-assess the career of one of the most controversial and neglected figures in Irish history. Timothy Michael Healy, KC (17 May 1855 – 26 March 1931) was an Irish nationalist politician, journalist, author, barrister and one of the most controversial Irish Members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. His political career began in the 1880s under Charles Stewart Parnell's leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), and continued into the 1920s, when he was the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State. He was born in Bantry, County Cork, the second son of Maurice Healy, clerk of the Bantry Poor Law Union, and Eliza Healy (née Sullivan). His elder brother Thomas Healy (1854–1924) was a solicitor and Member of Parliament (MP) for North Wexford and his younger brother Maurice Healy (1859–1923), with whom he held a lifelong close relationship, was a solicitor and MP for Cork City. His father was descended from a family line which in holding to their Catholic faith, lost their lands, which he compensated by being a scholarly gentleman. His father was transferred in 1862 to a similar position in Lismore, County Waterford, holding the post until his death in 1906. Timothy was educated at the Christian Brothers school in Fermoy, and was otherwise largely self-educated, in 1869 at the age of fourteen going to live with his uncle Timothy Daniel Sullivan MP in Dublin. He then moved to England finding employment in 1871 with the North Eastern Railway Company in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There he became deeply involved in the Irish Home Rule politics of the local Irish community. After leaving for London in 1878 Healy worked as a confidential clerk in a factory owned by his relative, then worked as a parliamentary correspondent for The Nation newspaper owned by his uncle, writing numerous articles in support of Parnell, the newly emergent and more militant home rule leader, and his policy of parliamentary obstructionism. Parnell admired Healy's intelligence and energy after Healy had established himself as part of Parnell's broader political circle. He became Parnell's secretary but was denied contact to Parnell's small inner circle of political colleagues. Parnell, however, brought Healy into the Irish Party (IPP) and supported him as a nationalist candidate when elected MP for Wexford Borough in 1880–83 against the aspiring John Redmond whose father, William Archer Redmond, was its recently deceased MP. Healy was returned unopposed to parliament, aided by the fact that Redmond stood aside and that he had survived an agrarian court case which alleging intimidation. In parliament, Healy did not physically cut an imposing figure but impressed by the application of sheer intelligence, diligence and volatile use of speech when he achieved the Healy Clause in the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 which provided that no further rent should in future be charged on tenant's improvements. By the mid-1880s Healy had already acquired a reputation for a scurrilousness of tone. He married his cousin Eliza Sullivan in 1882, they had three daughters and three sons and he enjoyed a happy and intense family life, closely interlinked both by friendship and intermarriage with the Sullivans of west Cork. Through his reputation as a friend of the farmers, after having been imprisoned for four months following an agrarian case, and backed by Parnell, he was elected in a Monaghan by-election in June 1883–5, deemed to be the climax in the Healy-Parnell relationship. In 1884 he was called to the Irish bar as a barrister (in 1889 to the inner bar as K.C., in London in 1910). His reputation allowed him to build an extensive legal practice, particularly in land cases. Parnell chose him unwisely for South Londonderry in 1885, which Ulster seat he only held for a year. He was then elected in 1886–92 for North Longford. Prompted by the depression in the prices of dairy products and cattle in the mid-1880 as well as bad weather for a number of years, many tenant farmers unable to pay their rents were left under the threat of eviction. Healy devised a strategy to secure a reduction in rent from the landlords which became known as the Plan of Campaign, organised in 1886 amongst others by Timothy Harrington. In his novel The Man Who Was Thursday G.K. Chesterton describes one of his characters as a "... little man, with a black beard and glasses — a man somewhat of the type of Mr Tim Healy ...". (Wikipedia)