If Mr O’Connor then wanted to prevent this, the wise and proper course for him would have been to publicly denounce the practice; and, if by doing so he lost the election, he would have gained the respect of all honourable men in the place. The excuse offered by some of the respondent’s agents was that he was not to be drowned in a flood of porter, that there was open treating by the other side – in fact, it was aptly described by counsel as ‘competitive treating.’ There was, undoubtedly, competitive and indiscriminate treating.13
‘It is no part of my duty,’ Maxwell concluded:
to deal with this case from the point of view of enforcing sobriety, or preaching a sermon to the voters, nor to persons who are present here in court. I think Father Matthew himself might be daunted by the task in Castleisland [laughter]. But I will say this. The law is very jealous of electoral purity. An election is not an election unless it is the free uninfluencing choice of the voters, and the serious question to my mind from a moral point of view about this case is the state of public opinion in this question of treating … There has been, so far as treating, both specific and general is concerned, shameful and shameless corruption in this constituency, and it is a matter for tears rather than laughter that such a thing would occur. And I would appeal to the people of Castleisland, for their own sake, for the sake of this beautiful county of Kerry, where every prospect pleases, to recollect that the purity of election is essential to the success of Local Government … it makes any man who loves his country sick and sorry to hear the evidence that has been given in this court.
The commissioner hoped that the people of Castleisland, and of Kerry generally, would ‘exercise self-control’ and would learn how to use local government for their own good and for the good of their county and country. Finally and most importantly, he found that J.K. O’Connor was guilty of ‘corruptly supplying drink to voters for the purpose of corruptly influencing such voters’. He said he would report O’Connor’s agents and those publicans who supplied drink to voters to the High Court. He added that Denis J. Reidy was himself guilty of a similar charge. The election was declared void and he ruled that the respondent and petitioner should incur their own costs in the matter. He listed the names of the many individuals who would be reported to the High Court and, as the Kerry People correspondent concluded, ‘the protracted proceedings terminated’.
***
Despite all his efforts to unseat his opponent, Denis Reidy did not take up the seat now left vacant by J.K. O’Connor. John Laurence Quinlan of Bridge Street, Tralee, previously a member of Tralee Urban District Council, who had lost his seat on that body, was co-opted to the seat. Quinlan was a member of a Castleisland family and a cousin of Patrick and William Quinlan, who were both secretaries of Kerry County Council. In November 1908, J.K. O’Connor appeared before magistrates in Tralee for the offences alleged to have been committed in and around Castleisland in the weeks before the county council election. However, by a majority of eleven to two, informations were refused and the matter would not be heard. The result ‘was received with a loud cheer’.14
***
‘A wave of porter’
There is only one known occasion on which a local authority election result in County Kerry ever troubled the members of the House of Lords at Westminster. The bacchanalian behaviour during the election campaign in the Castleisland Electoral Division in 1908 made it to the floor of the chamber a few years after the controversy. On 14 March 1912, the 7th Earl of Mayo, Dermot Robert Wyndham Bourke, rose to call the attention of the government to the position of certain magistrates in Ireland, including J.K. O’Connor of Castleisland, who, along with magistrates in other parts of the country, had been convicted in court of various charges and who, he argued, should be removed from their roles as a result. The earl described O’Connor’s misdeeds to his fellow peers:
Mr O’Connor is a justice of the peace for the county of Kerry and stood as a candidate for the county council for the division of Castleisland. That election will long be remembered, because Castleisland swam in porter, and treating and drunkenness prevailed. So bad was it that the Roman Catholic Bishop of Kerry, in the Lenten Pastoral, referred to it. He said: ‘Another matter which a sense of duty compels me to mention is the manner in which some of our local elections are conducted. The language used, instead of being informing and elevating, is grossly personal, lowering, and demoralising.’ And he concluded: ‘Worse still, some of these elections are conducted without even an appearance of public decency. They become the occasion of wholesale drunkenness, and sometimes even of violence.’ Mr O’Connor, at the Castleisland election, headed the poll. He is a most successful merchant in that town, and a wave of porter – you can describe it as nothing else – landed him safely on the county council bench. He headed the poll with a majority of thirty votes. But, alas! there was an election petition. Mr O’Connor appeared as respondent, and this was the result of the Commissioner’s finding – he found that the respondent had been guilty of corruptly supplying drink to voters for the purpose of corruptly influencing such voters, and that the respondent was also guilty of corrupt practices, and he declared the election void.15
Coverage of the case in The Kerry People, 29 August 1908.
The earl wondered why, in keeping with the law, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland had not been informed that O’Connor, as a magistrate, had not been removed from the post when he was found guilty of ‘corrupt practices at an election’. Another peer, the Earl of Desart, claimed that O’Connor had only been removed from the bench in 1911 and that he had exercised judicial functions between 1908 and 1911. Responding, the Paymaster-General, Lord Ashby St Ledgers, said that for some reason the fact was not brought to the Lord Chancellor’s attention. Subsequently, ‘in view of a decision given by Mr Justice Kenny in another case to the effect that the office of a magistrate was ipso facto vacated from the date of the making of the report, the name of Mr O’Connor was removed from the Commission’.
4
‘Struck him violently in the mouth’
The Kerry TD Who Punched a Colleague in the Dáil Dining Room
Seán Lemass rose to his feet in Dáil Éireann to present TDs with details of the Order of Business. It was 31 January 1952. The then Tánaiste outlined the various pieces of legislation to be debated that day, as well as a proposal that the House would not sit the following week. A number of deputies rose to oppose the Order of Business, among them the Fine Gael leader, General Richard Mulcahy, and the leader of Clann na Poblachta, Seán MacBride. Several others asked about various bills which were before the House. The Independent TD for Dublin South East, Dr Noël Browne – who less than a year earlier had resigned as Minister for Health over the controversial Mother and Child Scheme – was called to speak by the Leas Ceann Comhairle, Cormac Breslin: ‘Dr. Browne: I do not want to spend an unduly long time on the list mentioned by Deputy [Liam] Cosgrave but I should like to draw attention to the reference to an Adoption of Children Bill.’1
Liam Cosgrave TD, who had already spoken, interjected to say that he had not made any reference to the Adoption of Children Bill. Across the chamber from Cosgrave, on the Independent benches, the conservative firebrand TD for Laois–Offaly, Oliver J. Flanagan – then an Independent, but later a Fine Gael deputy – made an obscure comment suggesting that another member of the House would be in a better position than Dr Browne to comment on the adoption legislation: ‘Mr. O. Flanagan: Deputy Flynn would be more qualified to do that.’
Deputy Flanagan was referring to the Independent TD for Kerry South, John (Jack) Flynn, who was not in the chamber at the time. The Dáil transcripts do not record any reaction from other TDs to Flanagan’s off-the-cuff remark and they continued with the Order of Business. Within a few short hours, however, Flynn was to give his response to Flanagan – in a most unparliamentary manner.
As Flanagan dined in the busy Dáil restaurant later that evening, he was approached by Flynn and challenged about his remarks earlier that day in the chamber. The Fine Gael parliamentary leader, John A. Costello, later told the Dáil in vivid detail about what followed:
Mr. J.A. Costello: