John Martin (Young Irelander) - Later Life and Parliament

Later Life and Parliament

On return to Ireland Martin became a national organizer for the Tenant Right League. He began to write for The Nation in 1860. He formed the National League with others in January 1864 - it was mainly an educational organization but Fenians disrupted its meetings. He remained in contact with Mitchel in Paris through 1866. Martin opposed the Fenians support of armed violence yet together with A M Sullivan, in December 1867 he headed the symbolic funeral march honouring the Manchester Martyrs, as it followed the MacManus route to Glasnevin Cemetery Dublin. He was briefly arrested for these activities but the charges were dropped.

Martin was in the United States in December 1869 when he was nominated by Isaac Butt and his nationalists as the Irish nationalist Home Rule candidate to oppose Greville-Nugent, who was supported by the Catholic clergy, in the Longford by-election. Greville-Nugent initially won the vote but the result was nullified by Judge Fitzgerald on the grounds that voters had been illegally influenced (i.e. bribed and/or coerced) in the non-secret voting process. In the May 1870 rerun Butt's second candidate, Edward Robert King-Harman, like Martin a Protestant landlord, was also defeated but this time legally.

These contradictions and factionalism were symptomatic of the struggle for influence and leadership at the time between the waning Church of Ireland and the rising Irish Catholic Church; secular Protestant and Catholic organizations with differing social bases and attitudes to violence; between those who wished to challenge and maintain the sociopolitical status quo; constitutional reform versus revolution; elite versus grassroots movements; landowners versus tenants; Home Rule versus Repeal. Hence a secular Protestant land-owning non-violent elite reformist nationalist who desired Home Rule like Martin, could find himself both sympathetic to and at odds with a militant organization like the Fenians with their Jacobin and American influenced ideas of revolutionary republicanism and different social roots. Until Parnell, the Isaac Butt-originated Home Rule forces could not obtain the support of the Catholic Church under the anti-Fenian Cardinal Paul Cullen or manage to achieve more than short-term tactical alliances with Fenians, leading to a split and uncoordinated opposition to British rule. Protestants like Martin and John Mitchel, with their early political roots in Young Ireland, were, whatever their political ideals, not part of the majority Catholic mainstream, which were largely tenants rather than landlords.

In the January 1871 by-election Martin was elected by a margin of 2–1 to the seat of County Meath in the British parliament as the first Home Rule MP, representing first Isaac Butt's Home Government Association and from November 1873 the Home Rule League. This was unusual for a Protestant in a Catholic constituency, and is a measure of the popular esteem Martin was held in. He retained his seat in the February 1874 General Election as one of 60 Home Rule members. He was commonly known as "Honest John Martin". In parliament Martin spoke strongly for Home Rule for Ireland and opposed Coercion Bills. He died in Newry, County Down in March 1875, homeless and in relative poverty, having forgiven tenant fees during preceding years of inflation and low farm prices.

Martin's parliamentary seat of County Meath was taken up by Charles Stewart Parnell.