Coincidentally, the six Kerry deputies who have served in cabinet are connected by their involvement in political relations with our nearest neighbour. Austin Stack – the first minister from Kerry – was responsible for Home Affairs and the Dáil courts from 1919 to 1922. He accompanied Éamon de Valera to the talks with David Lloyd George which led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations, the Irish delegation to which included Fionán Lynch. Their successors in cabinet, Dick Spring and John O’Donoghue, would both play their own roles in further sensitive Anglo-Irish agreements in 1985 and 1998. From 2011, Kerry had a seat in cabinet again: former Kerry football captain, Jimmy Deenihan, who set in train the commemorations of the 1916 rebellion and the subsequent revolutionary period.
The story of the century from a political-party perspective is very much the dominance of the two main parties after the foundation of Fianna Fáil in 1926 and Fine Gael in 1933. Over the course of the century, these two parties dominated and it wasn’t until the Fianna Fáil meltdown of 2011 that the party was without a seat in Kerry. Fine Gael’s record varied, with major decreases in support and the depletion of its organisation on the ground in the middle part of the century, but the party continued to retain a foothold. Labour’s strength owed as much to the dominance of the Moynihan and Spring dynasties as it did to party allegiances, while Sinn Féin has only been a resilient feature of the political landscape in recent years, especially in Kerry North. While Clann na Poblachta and Clann na Talmhan gained council and Oireachtas representation in the 1940s and 1950s, none of the other smaller parties has ever made a breakthrough. With some notable exceptions, Independents have only succeeded in recent years, but many of those who have succeeded had previously split from Fianna Fáil. Independents have found it hard to break the dominance of the major parties; one-term Independent county councillor and former Kerry GAA great, Mick O’Connell, observed in a damning critique that if he’d known how wedded voters were to the main parties, ‘I wouldn’t have chanced it … Clinics and clientelism and bending the rules is not for me.’5
Serious matters of state aside, politics in Kerry has often been a source of good old-fashioned entertainment for voters and the press. The history of Kerry politics over the past century is full of fascinating stories of bitterness, rivalries, campaign shenanigans and personal and political rows which have fuelled pub talk and the column inches far more than the minutiae of policies and legislation. The century is also replete with remarkable electoral battles, results of national significance, several national political firsts and a steady supply of parliamentarians who have made a significant impression on the national political stage. Apart from ministers who have impacted on their various government departments, many other TDs and senators have made an impression on Irish political history – among them Dan Kiely, whose Supreme Court challenge of 2015 changed the way votes are counted in Ireland. John O’Donoghue’s fall from grace in 2009 was a seminal moment in Irish politics, as was the night in 1987 when Tánaiste Dick Spring held his Dáil seat by just four votes. Two of the four Kerry women who have sat in the Dáil won history-making by-elections – one of them, Kathleen O’Connor, was so young when elected that she wasn’t on the electoral register.
And there are plenty of similar stories which we have enjoyed bringing to light – many of them for the first time. Remarkable tales, like the councillor who was unseated for plying voters with drink, the north Kerry woman who became a politician in Pakistan, the aristocrat who was invited to Buckingham Palace as a child and went on to become the first woman elected to Kerry County Council, the ‘hanging judge’ who represented Tralee in parliament, the Kerry senator who received an apology from the BBC, the councillor who took his own council to court, the night the gardaí were called to a meeting of a Fianna Fáil cumann in north Kerry, and the Dáil candidate deselected because he wasn’t popular enough, all feature in these pages.
We hope that we have captured the excitement and tension, the rivalries and resentments, the seminal debates and discussions, and the good old-fashioned fun and games that have characterised the political cauldron in the county over the last century.
Owen O’Shea and Gordon Revington
1
‘Ireland must be governed by Irishmen for Ireland’s benefit’
Kerry’s First Teachtaí Dála
At 3.30pm on the afternoon of 21 January 1919, a group of twenty-seven men gathered in the Round Room of the Mansion House in Dublin. Just a month previously, each of them had been elected to the British parliament at Westminster. As candidates of the Sinn Féin party, however, they had pledged not to take their seats if elected, in protest at a delay in introducing Home Rule in Ireland and amid demands for an independent republic. The new MPs were meeting to establish their own independent parliament, Dáil Éireann, in complete defiance of British rule in Ireland. Sinn Féin had won seventy-three of the 105 Westminster parliament seats available across the island of Ireland. The result represented an overwhelming rout of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which, for a generation or more, had – under the leadership of Isaac Butt, Charles Stewart Parnell and later John Redmond – commanded majority support among the Irish nationalist electorate. In about a quarter of constituencies, including all four constituencies in Kerry, Sinn Féin candidates were returned unopposed as Irish Parliamentary Party MPs stood aside in the face of anticipated defeat and a hugely successful campaign by Sinn Féin against the conscription of Irishmen to Britain’s world war effort and a clear and vociferous demand for Irish sovereignty. Most of those elected were in prison at the time for offences against the realm and just twenty-seven members – each calling themselves a Teachta Dála (TD) – of the new parliament assembled at the appointed time.
As those present were called to order, Cathal Brugha, following his appointment as Ceann Comhairle, read the roll of those returned at the 1918 election who now sat in a self-declared independent parliament. Brugha’s list included those representing the four parliamentary constituencies of Kerry:
| Co. Chiarraidhe (thoir) | Piaras Béaslaí | I láthair |
| Co. Chiarraidhe (thuaidh) | An Dr S. Ó Cruadhlaoich | Fé ghlas ag Gallaibh |
| Co. Chiarraidhe (theas) | Fionán Ó Loingsigh | Fé ghlas ag Gallaibh |
| Co. Chiarraidhe (thiar) | Aibhistín de Staic | Fé ghlas ag Gallaibh1 |
The only Kerry representative i láthair or present was the new TD for East Kerry, Piaras Béaslaí.2 His colleagues Dr James Crowley (North Kerry), Fionán Lynch (South Kerry) and Austin Stack (West Kerry) were each fé ghlas ag Gallaibh or ‘imprisoned by the foreigners’. The Dáil asserted the exclusive right of the elected representatives of the Irish people to legislate for the country and adopted a Provisional Constitution and approved a Declaration of Independence. It also approved a Democratic Programme, based on the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, and read and adopted a Message to the Free Nations of the World. Following the reading of the Declaration of Independence, the Ceann Comhairle called on the East Kerry representative to speak the first words ever spoken by a Kerry deputy in Dáil Éireann:
PIARAS BÉASLAOI (ó Oirthear Chiarraighe): Is mór an onóir damhsa gur iarradh orm cur leis an ndearbhú ar Fhaisnéis Shaorstáit Éireann. Bhí sé d’amhantar agamsa is ag cuid agaibhse a bheith láithreach nuair do bunuigheadh an Saorstát Seachtmhain na Cásca, 1916, agus bhí laochraidhe cródha ann an uair sin – na daoine do rinn gníomh do réir a dtuairme. Ní mhairid na tréinfhir sin indiu: an namhaid do mhairbh iad. Acht na tréinfhir úd b’iad Fé ndear sgéal an lae indiu. Acht bíodh gur mór an truagh ná fuilid na laochraidhe sin in ár measc anseo is deimhin dúinn go bhfuil spioraid gach n-aon aca