Politics
In the 1874 general election, he was elected Member of Parliament for Galway, but was unseated by the courts in what appears to have been a politically-inspired judgment which used certain unsavoury campaigning tactics in which O'Donnell had indulged as its basis. He was succeeded in the seat by his election agent, Dr Michael Francis Ward, who was himself succeeded in 1880 by T.P. O'Connor - in an unusual succession, all three had been either auditor or vice-auditor of the Queen's College Literary and Debating Society in the same era.
In 1877, O'Donnell secured a more permanent election to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom as MP for Dungarvan, County Waterford; he held the seat until 1885, when the constituency was abolished. He struck a colourful and controversial figure in parliament and became renowned for his declamatory speech-making. He was a prominent obstructionist and claimed credit for inventing the tactic of obstructionism which was to yield such results for the Home Rule League under Charles Stewart Parnell. Indeed, O'Donnell saw himself as a natural leader and became disillusioned when Parnell was selected in May 1880 to succeed William Shaw as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
He abandoned the Irish Parliamentary Party and conventional politics, but not its general aims of promoting home rule and tenant farmers' rights. His last and perhaps most important contribution to the fortunes of the party was the libel case he launched against the Times in 1888 over the series "Parnellism and Crime"; though the case was lost, it resulted in the establishment of the Parnell Commission which exonerated Parnell from condoning the Phoenix Park Murders, and exposed the Piggott Forgeries.
Read more about this topic: Frank Hugh O'Donnell
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.”
—J.B.S. (John Burdon Sanderson)
“If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there’s something wrong with American politics.”
—Edna Ferber (1887–1968)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)