D. D. Sheehan

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Daniel Desmond Sheehan, usually known as D.D. Sheehan (28 May 1873 – 28 November 1948) was an Irish journalist, labour leader, barrister, and author.

He served as Member of Parliament (MP) from 1901 to 1918 for Mid Cork, a constituency that extended from Macroom to Millstreet and Newmarket to its north, and was credited by his supporters with considerable success in land reform, labour reforms and in rural state housing.

Contents 1 Journalistic beginnings 2 Land and Labour leader 2.1 Member of Parliament 2.2 Agrarian resurgence 2.3 Sheehan's cottages 2.4 Barrister-at-law 3 All-for-Ireland League 3.1 1910 general election 3.2 Dominion Home Rule 4 Great War engagement 4.1 Front service 4.2 Stepping down 4.3 Final stand for labour 5 The closing chapter 6 Personal background 6.1 Family 6.2 Sources and reading 6.3 External links

[edit] Journalistic beginnings

Sheehan was born in Dromtariffe, Kanturk, County Cork, Ireland, the eldest of three sons and one daughter of Daniel Sheehan senior and Ellen Sheehan (née Fitzgerald). His father was a tenant farmer. He was educated at the local primary school; when he was seven years old, the family experienced eviction from the family homestead in 1880 at the onset of the Irish Land League's Land War, when tenant farmers united to protest against landlord's excessive and unjust rents by withholding payment.

Sheehan's family were supporters of the Fenian tradition, and his experience of discrimination made him a strong supporter of Irish nationalism. Sheehan was a continued supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell after the 'Parnell split' of 1892 in the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP).

He began his career as a schoolteacher at the age of 16, studying law when time allowed. He undertook part-time journalism from 1890 and was otherwise self-educated to a high literary degree. Sheehan was a correspondent to the Kerry Sentinel, and later special correspondent to the Cork Daily Herald in Killarney. After marriage in 1894, he moved to Scotland and joined the staff of the Glasgow Observer in pursuit of journalistic experience, later becoming editor of the Catholic News in Preston, England.

In 1898, at the beginning of national self-reliance under the revolutionary Local Government Act (1898), for the first time establishing Local County Councils, he returned to Ireland working on various papers in Munster including the Cork Constitution, and was editor of the Cork County Southern Star, Skibbereen from 1899 to 1901.

[edit] Land and Labour leader

Early in his life, Sheehan had been appointed correspondence secretary of the Kanturk Trade and Labour Council when he began his active involvement in labour and trade union affairs, and "was engaged to lead the labourers out of the bondage and misery that encompassed then" he wrote.

In August 1894, in alliance with the Clonmel, County Tipperary solicitor J.J. O'Shee (who was Member of Parliament for West Waterford from 1895), he co-founded the Irish Land and Labour Association (ILLA) as follower organisation to the Irish Democratic Trade and Labour Federation to agitate on behalf of small tenant farmers and agrarian labourers, setting forth Michael Davitt's achievements. He was similarly convinced that social change could only be advanced by means of political and constitutional agitation, at no times through physical force.

Under his leadership as President from 1898 the ILLA spread rapidly across Munster and later Connacht, campaigning vigorously against the pitiful plight of the small tenant farmers and landless rural labourers, as well as for their rights, duly acknowledged by government. By 1900, he had organised founding nearly one hundred ILLA branches mostly in County Cork, County Tipperary, and County Limerick.

[edit] Member of Parliament

Standing as ILLA candidate on a labour platform, D.D., as he was popularly known, defeated the Irish Party's United Irish League candidate at its pre-selection Divisional Convention, and was elected M.P. for Mid-Cork on the death of Dr. C.K.D. Tanner (former Mid-Cork anti-Parnellite Nationalist M.P. from 1895), in the by-election of 17 May 1901, a tremendous triumph for the labour movement and at twenty-eight the youngest, and one of the most outspoken Irish Nationalist Party members of parliament at the British House of Commons.

[edit] Agrarian resurgence

Associated with land agitation he settled many disputes between landed gentry - landlords and their under privileged tenant farmers. In his capacity as honorary secretary of the Cork Advisory Committee, D.D. helped end centuries of oppressive "landlordism" by most successfully negotiating the larger number of 16,159 tenant land purchases in Munster that decade, under the revolutionary Wyndham Land Purchase Act (1903), crafted through parliament by his Mallow compatriot, William O'Brien M.P., which was later followed by the Birrell Land Act (1909) introducing compulsory purchase.

From 1904 Sheehan allied himself with William O'Brien who had been alienated by the Irish Party for his conciliatory approach in the land question and from which he had resigned, the ILLA branches now becoming the base for the O'Brienite organisation in rural Munster.

In the 16 January 1906 general election, Sheehan was returned unopposed. Later that year, the Irish Party mounted a feud against him for allegedly being a "factionist", expelling him from its ranks, a measure initiated by deputy leader John Dillon, thus depriving him of party stipends - parliamentary allowances only being introduced five years later. D.D. retaliated by resigning his seat in November, challenging the IPP to stand against him. He was re-elected as Ireland's first independent Labour MP on the 31 December 1906 -- unopposed. His income from then on depended on constituent's collections at church gates on Sundays.

[edit] Sheehan's cottages

At countrywide ILLA meetings and in leading articles in the Irish People (1905-09), he strove passionately to attain social betterment for the working Irish, winning together with O'Brien, under "the Macroom programme" both the unprecedented Bryce Labourers (Ireland) Act (1906) and the Birrell Labourers (Ireland) Act (1911) provision for the erection of over 40,000 cottages each on an acre of land, 7,560 alone in county Cork, known locally as Sheehan's cottages. These dwellings provided homes for over 60,000 landless labourers with their families, comprising a rural population of a quarter of a million previously living wretchedly, mostly together with their animals, in one room stone cabins and sod hovels.

Within a few years the resulting changes heralded in an unprecedented socio-economic agrarian revolution in rural Ireland, with widespread decline of rampant tuberculosis, typhoid and scarlet fever.

Yet another important D.D. Sheehan landmark, his Model Irish Village scheme at Tower, near Blarney. He initiated, organised and furthered the completion of this remarkable co-operative development between the local ILLA branch and the Cork Rural District Council, comprising 17 cottages provided with all local amenities, designed as an example in economic reconstruction to be followed in other rural districts around the country.

His considerable achievements laid a solid foundation for the later successes of the Irish Labour Party in the province of Munster.

[edit] Barrister-at-law

While in parliament he was called to the Law Bar as barrister on 3 July 1911, having been exhibitioner and prizeman in law University College Cork (1908-09) and honoursman King's Inns Dublin (1910), practicing on the Munster circuit.

[edit] All-for-Ireland League

With D.D. Sheehan as its organising honorary secretary, William O'Brien inaugurated in Kanturk in March 1909, the All-for-Ireland League (AFIL), with the political activist Canon Sheehan of Doneraile as one of its founder members. The League was a distinctive political group whose deep conviction was that the success of a United Ireland parliament must depend on Irish Home Rule being won with the consent rather than by the compulsion of the Protestant minority. Prophetically farsighted, both Sheehan and O'Brien advocated granting Ulster every conceivable concession to overcome its fears of a Roman Catholic-dominated Dublin parliament, as otherwise an All-Ireland settlement would fail.

D.D. contributed regularly to the League's newspaper, O'Brien's Cork Free Press from 1910 to 1916. The political slogan of the AFIL was "the Three C's" -- for Conference, Conciliation and Consent as applied to Irish politics, particularly to Home Rule. He renounced Irish Party leader John Redmond's aggressive "Ulster will have to follow" approach to Home Rule.

[edit] 1910 general election

In the autumn of 1909, the UIL headquarters in Dublin summoned a Divisional Convention in Macroom with the purpose of "organising" D.D. out of Mid-Cork, intended to be the beginning of an IPP campaign to exterminate O'Brien and his followers. Arriving at the Town Hall, the UIL delegation was confronted by a gathering of Sheehan supporters who quickly forced them to take the return train home further down the line.

The AFIL opposed the Irish Party in both 1910 general elections, returning eight MPs in the December election, D.D. campaigning for the party's political policies at large meetings across counties Mayo, Limerick and Cork. He held his mid-Cork seat comfortably on the 24 January and the 12 December against the IPP candidates, also standing for Limerick-west but was not returned.

At election times broadsheets, and ballads sung to popular airs, extolling the candidates were commonplace. The following ballad was popular at the time of the January 1910 election. It was printed in the Cork County Southern Star (9 March 1968, p.5) and could still be recited and sung locally in the nineteen-seventies:

The Ballad of D.D. Sheehan

Men of Mid-Cork prepare yourself before it is too late

And prove to Josie Devlin that you will not tolerate

To be represented by a henchman of his choice

But send him back from where he came in no uncertain voice.

Say who is Billy Fallon or who heard of him before

From the village of Kilmichael to the cross at Donaghmore

Or far famed Ballingeary all over dell and glen

By the River Lee to Inniscarra where brave Mackey drilled his men.

When the sheriff and his agent and the burly peelers came

To hunt you from your homesteads in the King of England's name

Who was foremost in the struggle to stop that hellish work

But the gallant D.D. Sheehan ever member for mid-Cork.

Who negotiated purchase and secured you in your land

Free forever from the bailiff or the cruel eviction band

And brought joy and consolation to your children and your wives

Which they ever will remember to the finish of their lives.

Who obtained commodious dwellings for the hardy sons of toil

Not alone in this division but throughout the Holy Isle

For that very Act of Parliament would never see the loom

But for Mr. D.D. Sheehan and O'Brien at Macroom.

And will you now abandon him and let yourself be fooled

By that milk and water turncoat whose known as Dr. Goold

Or that sanctimonious auctioneer, that hypocrite jereen

The likes of which our county Cork had better never seen.

Shout it back to Josie Devlin and his standing committee

To the laity and the clergy of every degree

That no power can damp your gratitude that burns in your souls

When you boldly vote for Sheehan and elect him at the poles.

Epilogue

Mid-Cork sent its answer right back to the mob

To poor Billy Fallon who failed in his job

They wanted no Mollie to be their M.P.

They got what they wanted and that was D.D..

[edit] Dominion Home Rule

In 1911 the All-for-Ireland Party specifically proposed Dominion Home Rule in a letter to Prime Minister Asquith as the wisest of all solutions for Ireland. Later in the Commons, Sir Edward Carson, the Ulster Unionist Party leader, acknowledged that concessions proposed by the AFIL for Ulster to participate in Home Rule as praiseworthy, adding that had they been earlier supported rather than thwarted by the Irish Parliamentary Party, Ulster's objections might have been overcome.

During 1913-1914, D.D. was active in promoting an Imperial Federation League having as its immediate object a federal settlement of the Home Rule question. In May 1914, the AFIL resolutely resisted with all the strength at their command the violation of Ireland's national unity and as a final protest before history, abstained from voting on the final Third Home Rule Act, which had been amended to provide for the temporary exclusion of six Ulster counties.

[edit] Great War engagement

At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 when war with Germany was declared, Sheehan gave support to William O'Brien's call for Irish recruitment, regarding service to be both in the interest of the Allied cause of a Europe free from oppression as well as for an All-Ireland Home Rule settlement.

In November despite being aged 41 and father of a large family, he offered himself for enlistment, as did the National Volunteers and three other Irish nationalist MPs, two were Stephen Gwynn and Willie Redmond and former MP Tom Kettle. He trained at Buttevant barracks in County Cork and was gazetted as a lieutenant in the 9th (Service) Battalion, of the Royal Munster Fusiliers (New Army), practically raising this battalion of the newly formed 16th (Irish) Division.

Three of his sons also joined, two were killed serving with the Royal Flying Corps/Royal Air Force; his daughter, a V.A.D. front nurse, was disabled in a bombing raid. A brother serving with the Irish Guards was severely disabled and a brother-in-law killed. All Irishmen who died in the war are commemorated at the Island of Ireland Peace Park, Messines, Belgium.

[edit] Front service

In the spring and summer of 1915, he undertook the organisation and leadership of special voluntary enlistment campaigns in County Cork, County Limerick, and County Clare. While opposing any question of conscription, he said he was not asking people to do anything or take any risks he was not prepared to share himself.

Receiving a Captaincy and Company command in July 1915, he served with his battalion on the Western Front in France along the Loos salient as part of the British Expeditionary Force, contributing from early 1916 a series of widely quoted articles from the trenches to the London Daily Express and the Irish Times.

Deafness by shellfire and ill-health necessitated his transfer to the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion. His command, General Hickie, noted "he has done really well in the trenches". Sheehan applied to be decommissioned in autumn 1916 but was retained as a Lewis gun trainer. He was hospitalised often.

A renewed application to be decommissioned was accepted in late 1917, the bulletin in the London Gazette stating that he "relinquished his commission on account of ill-health contracted on active service, and is granted the honorary rank of Captain, 13 January 1918".

[edit] Stepping down

Continuing to pursue Irish interests in parliament, he vehemently condemned British mishandling of Irish affairs, during the April Conscription Crisis threatening in a dramatic anti-conscription speech in the Commons "to fight you if you enforce conscription on us".

Later that year Sheehan expressed disillusionment at Britain's and the Irish Party's failure to agree on All-Ireland Home Rule.

When he and the AFIL party saw their League's political concepts for an All-Ireland settlement displaced by the path of militant physical-force violence, they recognised the futility of contesting the December general elections. Together with his fellow MPs, he issued a manifesto stepping down in favour of Arthur Griffith's constitutional Sinn Féin movement, its Cork candidates being returned unopposed, Terence MacSwiney following Sheehan as MP for mid-Cork.

In the changed political climate, D.D. Sheehan and his family found themselves forced to abruptly abandon their Cork city home and exile to England. This assertion is questioned on the discussion/talk page.

[edit] Final stand for labour

In December 1918, he contested the general election as the Labour Party candidate for the Limehouse-Stepney division of London's East End, with a programme of "Land for fighters" aimed at returning ex-servicemen. He polled well but was unsuccessful, as over a million servicemen abroad were unable to vote. His programme was nevertheless put into effect by the government at the end of January. He paved the way for his successor in this constituency, the later Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Retiring from politics in 1920 he eked out a living in journalism after a calamitous financial engagement in an Achill Island (Mayo) mineral venture.

In 1921, he published his authoritative book, Ireland since Parnell, covering the period from Charles Stewart Parnell to Sinn Féin (book may be read online or downloaded free under the Project Gutenberg, external link below). In London, unable to practise at the bar due to impaired hearing (sustained in the war), he became publisher and editor of The Stadium, a daily newspaper for sportsmen.

[edit] The closing chapter

In 1926, after being assured that the threats made against him in Cork were now lifted, (an assertion also questioned on the discussion/talk page), he was allowed to return to Dublin. His ailing wife died soon afterwards. He became managing editor of the Irish Press and Publicity Services, in 1928 publisher and editor of the South Dublin Chronicle. His legal practice remained hindered by his hearing disabilities. In the 1930s, a renewed period of deteriorated ill-health due to the family bereavements and disruptions.

Committed to those he recruited, he helped ex-servicemen where he could, supporting Old Comrades Associations north and south of the Free State border; from 1940 he edited their annual journal.

In 1942 he proposed himself to General Richard Mulcahy as candidate for Fine Gael in South Cork, which Mulcahy declined. In 1946 Sheehan published his spirited three page poem A Tribute and a Claim, honouring the Irish National Volunteers.

[edit] Personal background

[edit] Family

On 6 February 1894, he married Mary Pauline O'Connor, daughter of Martin O'Connor, Bridge Street, Tralee, County Kerry, a victualler, publican and farm owner; they had five sons and five daughters:

• Daniel Joseph Sheehan (Lt. Royal Flying Corps) - killed on active duty during WWI
• Martin Joseph Sheehan (Lt. Royal Flying Corps) - killed on active duty during WWI
• Michael J. Sheehan (Brigadier General, OBE, CBE, Indian Army, Burma Campaign WWII)
• Patrick A. Sheehan (later known as Pádraig A. Ó Síocháin, S.C.) (Honorable Society of King's Inns)
• John F. Sheehan (Lt.-Colonel Surgeon WWII) (later Harley Street surgeon)
• Eileen (private governess)
• Pauline (died 18 months)
• Maureen (Mrs. Frank Emmerson)
• Christine (Mrs. Dr. Patrick Cremin) (1909-2002)
• Mona (Mrs. Rutland-Barsby) (1912 - ); still living

All family members settled in England, except Pádraig A. Ó Síocháin, a staunch nationalist.

D.D. Sheehan's only sister, Mary Ann (Mrs. Eugene Daly), had three sons: Charles, Daniel & Eugene; their families remain in the Kanturk area.

Sheehan died on 28 November 1948, aged 75, while visiting his daughter Mona in London, and was buried with his wife at the Glasnevin Cemetery.

[edit] Sources and reading

Who's Who & Thom's Directory (1918); Hansard Common's Parliamentary Debates (1901-1918); Irish People (1905-1909); Cork Free Press (1910-1916); Daily Express 27 Jan. 1914 & 1916(8 issues); Irish Times 11 July 1916; London Gazette 12 Jan. 1918; [Daily Sketch]] 3 Dec. 1918; Cork Examiner 29 Nov. 1948, The Times (London) 29 Nov. 1948, Cork County Southern Star 4 Dec. 1948, Kerryman 11 Dec. 1948, Irish Independent 29 Dec. 1948; Irish Times 16 Feb. 2001.

• William O'Brien: An Olive Branch in Ireland (1910)
• D. D. Sheehan: Ireland since Parnell (1921)
• Friedrich K. Schilling: William O'Brien and the All-for-Ireland League
  (thesis Trinity College, Dublin 1956)
• Joseph O'Brien: William O'Brien and the course of Irish politics (1976)
• Martin Staunton: The Royal Munster Fusiliers (1914-1919)
  (MA thesis University College Dublin 1986)
• Dan Bradley: Farm Labourers: Irish struggle (1988)
• Cork County Southern Star: Centenary issue 1889-1989
• P.A. Ó Síocháin S.C.: Ireland journey to freedom (1990)
• Terence Denmann: Ireland's unknown soldiers (1992)
• Patrick Maume: The long gestation (1999).

Compiled from personal documents, official records and publications.

[edit] External links

access by clicking D.D. Sheehan here as link.

• [1] Homepage of the Irish Labour Party
• [2] Homepage of the
  Royal Munster Fusilier's Association
• [3] Homepage of the
  Bandon War Memorial Committee
• [4] Orderpage of ManyBooks.net for hardcopy of "Ireland Since Parnell"
• [5] Homepage of Project-Gutenberg, read, download: "Ireland Since Parnell"
• Works by D.D. Sheehan at Project Gutenberg

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Charles Kearns Deane Tanner	Member of Parliament for Mid Cork 1901 – 1918	Succeeded by Terence MacSwiney