Frank Hugh O'Donnell - Politics

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.