Skilled Politician
During the 1890s he was active as organizer in the anti-Parnellite Irish National Federation in eastern Ulster. When William O’Brien founded the United Irish League (UIL) in County Mayo in 1898, Devlin founded the UIL section in Belfast which became his political machine in Ulster. He was elected unopposed as Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) Member of Parliament for Kilkenny North in the February 1902 by-election. His first political assignment came that year when the Party sent him to Irish Americas on the first of several successful fund-raising missions.
It was there that he encountered the power of the Hibernian Orders and on his return set about claiming it for constitutional nationalism, when in 1904 he became lifelong Grandmaster of the AOH in Ireland. Members of his Order, largely composed of earlier members of the Molly Maguires, a militant secret society also known as the Mollies, also became members of the Irish Party, deeply infiltrating it. Already secretary of the London based United Irish League of Great Britain Devlin became General Secretary of O’Brien’s UIL, replacing John O'Donnell, through the initiative of deputy IPP leader John Dillon MP, with whom he held a close alliance and who had fallen under his influence. This "coup" gave them nation-wide control of the 1200 UIL branches, the organisational base of the IPP, depriving O’Brien of all authority.
Devlin had risen in the ranks of the League from being a local Nationalist organiser in Belfast to becoming the only newcomer to the parliamentary party who was accepted politically, as an equal by the established leaders. He was devoted to Dillon who had helped him greatly to his rise to prominence, and Dillon in turn relied greatly on him, not alone for both his control of the UIL and the AOH, but also because he was an outstanding representative of Ulster Nationalism.
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