Politician
He was elected as Irish Parliamentary Party MP for St Patrick's, Dublin at the 1885 general election, taking his seat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was a member of the informal grouping, the "Bantry band" - a group of politicians who hailed from the Bantry Bay area. The Bantry Band was also disparagingly dubbed the "Pope's brass band". Its most famous member was Timothy Healy MP and included Timothy Harrington MP, sometime Lord Mayor of Dublin City - however, Harrington (unlike Healy and Murphy) was a Parnellite in the 1890s. (Tim Harrington MP was not the same individual as TR Harrington, who edited the Irish Independent from 1905–31, though they both came from the Bantry/Schull area in West Cork.)
When the Irish Parliamentary Party split in 1890 over Charles Stewart Parnell's leadership, Murphy sided with the majority Anti-Parnellites. However, Dublin emerged as a Parnellite stronghold and in the bitter general election of 1892, Murphy lost his seat by over three to one to a Parnellite newcomer, William Field.
Murphy was the principal financial backer of the "Healyite" newspapers the National Press and the Daily Nation. His support for Healy attracted the hostility of the majority anti-Parnellite faction led by John Dillon. He made two attempts to return to Parliament, at Kerry South in 1895 and Mayo North in 1900, but both were unsuccessful because of Dillonite opposition.
Read more about this topic: William Martin Murphy
Famous quotes containing the word politician:
“The mark of a true politician is that he is never at a loss for words because he is always half-expecting to be asked to make a speech.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)