At the meeting in 1911, O’Sullivan duly accepted the position of chairman, a position he held until 1918, when the Sinn Féin surge resulted in Sinn Féin representatives gaining control of all the local authorities for a period. O’Sullivan was re-elected to the chair in 1926 and remained in the post until his death in 1942. He won the bulk of his legal battles with the Maher-Loughnan family and fared better than Murphy in the eventual analysis.
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But this is all running ahead of events as they happened, for, fresh from their battles during the 1906 general election, Murphy and O’Sullivan again fought for the parliamentary seat in East Kerry at the general election of 1910. Before this could occur, however, there was another contest to win the party nomination. The party convention was scheduled for 5 January and the two protagonists held a series of political meetings around the constituency in preparation. The Kerry People, operated by the Ryle family, was one of the newspapers circulating in the county and it covered the events of the time in great detail. In December 1909, Eugene O’Sullivan sought to address the ordinary meeting of the Tralee Board of Guardians and Rural District Council and was afforded the opportunity to make what was an extraordinary contribution. It was an unusual forum and an unlikely vehicle for his comments.3 He had developed his nationalism, he said, ‘not in the bye-ways in Killarney’, although in the following edition of the Kerry People he insisted that he had actually said was ‘the byways of a Solicitor’s office in Killarney’. Either way, two of the members of the board asked him to withdraw, but O’Sullivan continued: ‘I have stated a bold fact. I got my patriotism among the moonlighters of Firies (hear, hear). I am proud of the fact. I have the blood, the bone and the sinew of moonlighters, and if any individual man here wishes to test the material of that blood, and bone and sinew, I am here (hear, hear).’
This clearly referred to one of the most controversial incidents of the Land War in Kerry, which occurred in Molahiffe, Firies, in November 1885. The practice of paying late-night visits to individuals regarded as having taken possession of land from which others had been evicted had developed in the nineteenth century, initially through organisations such as the Whiteboys, but by this time, the use of the term ‘moonlighter’ had become more prevalent. On the night in question, twenty-five years earlier, a group of moonlighters entered the home of a vice-president of the local Land League, John O’Connell Curtin, in search of guns. Castle Farm was a substantial holding of around 250 acres and Curtin was a man in his sixties. Two of his daughters were also in the house. The entire family responded with fury to this invasion of their home. In the dark, shots were discharged and the elderly farmer and one of the raiders were shot dead. Two men convicted of taking part in the attack on the house were sentenced to penal servitude for life and the matter caused a huge division in the mid-Kerry area, which lingered for a considerable time. The two young Curtin women were boycotted – when they arrived to attend Mass, people got up and left – and the farm was eventually sold in February 1887. The 1909 report in the Kerry People demonstrates O’Sullivan’s dramatic attempts to outdo Murphy’s record of supporting tenants.
On a more humorous note, O’Sullivan’s capacity to declare the breadth and extent of his kin in Kerry (the Emporium O’Sullivans, Dr Billy O’Sullivan from Batterfield and the nationalist figure and first Leas Cheann Comhairle of the Dáil, J.J. O’Kelly (Sceilg) were definitely relatives) afforded Murphy a chance to create mirth at his opponent’s expense. At some point O’Sullivan claimed that the poet Eoghan Rua Ó Suilleabháin was among his forebears. John Murphy’s riposte was that it was well known that the eighteenth-century Sliabh Luachra man had never married. But O’Sullivan’s claim regarding his connection to the Firies incident that had occurred a quarter of a century earlier certainly contributed to raising the stakes in the electoral contest.
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It was clear that the 1910 general election convention was going to be a fraught affair and so 150 policemen were rostered for duty in the environs of the town hall. Despite this, several ‘little skirmishes’ broke out. At midday, a prominent member of the United Irish Party (the parliamentary wing of the organisation), James Timothy O’Connor, approached O’Sullivan and asked him if he was prepared to abide by the decision of the convention. Not if Mr O’Connor was involved, O’Sullivan replied, since he was a Murphy supporter. O’Connor then convened the election in the yard at the back of the town hall and J.K. O’Connor, the Castleisland businessman and county councillor, proposed John Murphy. James J. O’Shea, also a county councillor, seconded and Murphy was ratified unanimously and commenced his speech of acceptance. J.K. O’Connor also suffered the ignominy of being disqualified from his seat in the Castleisland Electoral Division. Following the county council elections in 1908, he was found guilty of providing drink and other inducements to voters, a matter that earned him mention in debates in Westminster (see Chapter 3).
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,