In the shouting that ensued, the chairman was heard to say, ‘yerra, let him at it’. And O’Shea obliged, suggesting that his opponent was not an honourable man. O’Connor responded, ‘Now Jamesy, take it as well as you gave it,’ and drew attention to a number of other matters. O’Shea tried to get in a response, but the chairman moved to the election of the vice-chairman, which went to Jack McKenna, who was elected unopposed. As the Listowel man rose to accept the position, Healy and O’Donnell asked that O’Shea be allowed to speak and O’Connor asked O’Shea if he would withdraw and allow McKenna to be heard. He declined and, in the hubbub that followed, was heard to say, ‘your vote in this room was never a vote for fair play. You were always an advocate for the poor man’s son, but when it came to a question of the poor man’s son, you voted against him’. Eventually order was restored and the meeting continued.
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We move to the 1920s and the formative years of the Irish Free State. Eugene O’Sullivan reclaimed his position as chairman of Killarney Urban District Council in 1926 and continued to be re-elected until his death at the Imperial Hotel in Killarney on 29 May 1942. The month before he passed away, it emerged that six of the ten members of Killarney Urban District Council were disqualified from holding their seats because they had not paid their rates and the chairman had also made himself ineligible to sit in the chamber as he had not attended a meeting for over six months. He was, however, not in good health and attendance at meetings of the council was very low at this point in any event. The month after O’Sullivan died, the urban council was suspended and a commissioner was appointed and remained in place for three years.
O’Sullivan became the chairman of the Board of Killarney Mineral Waters and a member of Killarney Race Company. He also headed the first united farming association in Kerry in 1929 (Kerry Farmers’ Union and Marketing Association) and chaired the committee that organised the National Ploughing Championships in Killarney in 1939. But he also made one further attempt to advance his political career, standing as an Independent candidate in the first general election of 1927 (June). His cousin John Marcus O’Sullivan was a candidate too, but Eugene came in ninth in the poll, with 2,405 votes and was only eliminated on the ninth count. Perhaps he should have pursued this ambition by formally joining the government party, for when the electors were summoned to vote again the following September, Cumann na nGaedheal had one of its most successful elections in Kerry: Fionán Lynch and John Marcus were at the head of the poll and the party took 39.9 per cent of the vote, which would never happen again.
John Murphy did adopt a political alliance, joining Fianna Fáil shortly after the party came into being. There was a particularly troubled Fianna Fáil meeting in Knocknagoshel on 12 September 1927, which resulted in him being charged with ‘falsely accusing a person of a crime punishable by law’, along with Patrick J. Tuohy of Dublin, the Fianna Fáil organiser for Kerry. Also charged was Eamon Horan, the former Brigadier-General of the National Army and Clann Éireann candidate in the general election, who was charged under the Treason Clause of the Public Safety Act. He was present as Clann Éireann had entered into an agreement to support Fianna Fáil in the Dáil. All three were remanded to Limerick Prison, but when the case came before the District Court in Tralee later that month, the state entered a nolle prosequi against the two Fianna Fáil men.8 John Murphy died at his home in High Street – the Park Place Hotel – on 17 April 1930, in relatively reduced circumstances, his grandnephew, Seán, said.
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There was an expression years ago used to describe a person given to fractious behaviour: ‘a thorny wire’. The story of the antagonism between Murphy and O’Sullivan, not to mention a number of the other people mentioned here, makes it clear that there were quite a number of thorny wires engaged in politics in Killarney during this period. Whatever provoked their intense dislike for one another, Murphy and O’Sullivan were both responsible for exacerbating the tension, seemingly rarely missing the opportunity to seek to put each other down. They were both able to generate considerable loyalty among their supporters and they certainly made the Kerry political scene a colourful one for many years. The rivalry even persists to this day, to some degree, in that hallowed arena of Gaelic football. While Eugene O’Sullivan joined Dr Croke’s when he came to town and certainly contributed much to the club’s early triumphs, the Murphys are a committed Legion family and Seán’s bar on College Street celebrates this in vivid green and white. Other political rivalries have developed in Kerry over the years, some stretching over generations, some between members of the same parties, but none of them has ever reached the extremes that Murphy and O’Sullivan achieved, either on their own or through their followers.
From Buckingham Palace to Caherdaniel
The aristocrat nurse who became the first woman councillor in Kerry
Albinia Brodrick, the first woman elected to Kerry County Council, in 1920.
The first woman to become a member of Kerry County Council came from a prominent British aristocratic family, was the sister of the Secretary of State for War and wined and dined in her youth at Buckingham Palace. Born at 23 Chester Square, Belgrave, London, on 17 December 1861, the Honourable Lady Albinia Lucy Brodrick was the fifth daughter of William Brodrick, 8th Viscount Midleton, and his wife, Augusta Freemantle. She spent her early years in London and at the family estate in Surrey. Privately educated, she travelled widely in Europe and was fluent in several languages. She regularly visited the House of Lords with her father. Her brother, St John, the 1st Earl of Midleton, was MP for Surrey and later a cabinet minister at the War Office and Foreign Affairs (1900–3). Like his father, he was a staunch unionist and was leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance from 1910 to 1918. He was involved in negotiations on Home Rule with John Redmond. Brodrick and her family were regulars at concert and balls in Buckingham Palace. Up until 1904, she was listed on the The Times Court Circular and attended events hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.1
In 1904, Brodrick qualified as a certified nurse, training at the district infirmary in Ashton-under-Lyne and qualifying as a midwife in 1909. Her father had a large estate in County Cork, which she visited in her youth. She became familiar with the country and its quest for independence. She became interested in the Gaelic revival and grew increasingly sympathetic towards Irish nationalism. Visits to the Gaeltacht prompted her to learn the Irish language and she developed a revulsion towards the poverty and social conditions in rural Ireland. Writing in the St James Gazette in 1902, she spoke of the need to promote indigenous Irish industry. Increasingly politicised, in 1903, she wrote of Ireland as ‘not the Ireland of Westminster … not the English Ireland in Ireland, which is not Ireland at all, but the bastard product of a conquest miscalled civilising’.2 To the chagrin of her family, she began to use an Irish version of her name, Gobnait Ní Bhruadair.
The death of her father in 1907 gave her financial independence. Brodrick invested in a site at West Cove, Caherdaniel, in south Kerry, which would become her home until her death. She set up the Kilcrohane agricultural co-operative, through which members could share resources and profits with the aim of stymieing emigration and rural deprivation. She hosted classes for locals and she encouraged vegetarianism and new farming practices. The area was one of those blighted by endemic poverty and fell under the remit of the Congested Districts Board, which oversaw overpopulated areas where hunger and poverty were rife. Moved by the inadequate health services, Brodrick set about developing a hospital using her own resources. She wrote to the British Journal of Nursing, appealing for financial support:
A Hospital for Kerry, for one corner of Kerry, because of the children haunted by tuberculosis, the women tortured in childbirth, the men struck low before their time … Did you ever need to be driven eighteen miles with a fractured thigh? Has your wife bled to death in childbirth for want of help? Is it your child that goes lame for life for want of treatment?3
Brodrick