Early Life
Born in Dublin to a Church of Ireland family, Mahony was the only surviving son of Peirce Kenifeck Mahony of Kilmorna, Duagh, Co. Kerry, and of Jane, daughter of Robert Gun Cuninghame, D.L., of Mount Kennedy, Co. Wicklow. His father died shortly after he was born. When he was six his mother married Col. William Henry Vicars, and the family moved to Leamington, Warwickshire. Mahony was educated at Rugby School and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he did not take a degree, but established an Irish Home Rule club and formed a friendship with his later Parliamentary colleague J. G. Swift MacNeill. Mahony went on to the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, where he won the Haygarth Gold Medal in 1875. In 1877 he married Helen Louise, only daughter of Maurice Collis, a member of the Royal Irish Academy. She died in 1899 and in 1901 he married a first cousin, Alice Johnstone, who died in her turn in 1906. An ancient stone cross taken (with permission) from the Bulgarian monastery at Banska stands over Alice's grave in the church cemetery at Ballinure in West Wicklow, Ireland.
In 1913, his son Dermot O’Mahony married Grace Hill.
Mahony was an Assistant Land Commissioner 1881-84, a magistrate in Co. Kerry and Co. Limerick, Poor Law Guardian at Listowel, a member of the Roads and Piers Commission under the Relief of Distress Act 1886, and a member of the Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls.
Read more about this topic: Pierce Charles De Lacy O'Mahony
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