Thomas Westropp Bennett

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Thomas Westropp Bennett (1 January 1867 – 1 February 1962), was an Anglo Irish Catholic politician in the Irish Free State.

Born on his father's estate in Ballymurphy, Co. Limerick he was the son of a British Army Officer and the first Catholic in an old Limerick family of Protestant gentry - an ancestor had sat in Grattan's Irish Parliament in the 1780s. He was educated at St Johns College in Kilkenny and privately but unusually did not attend Trinity College Dublin where many of his forebears had studied.

As a magistrate he was active in local government as a district and county councillor and stood for the Westminster Parliament in January 1912 as an Independent Nationalist. He came within 70 votes of winning the seat in a close fought contest.

A noted agricultural expert, he was on the board of the Irish Agricultural Organisational Society (IAOS) with the noted reformer Sir Horace Plunkett. He was elected to the Irish Free State Senate in 1922 for Cumann na nGaedhael, he was part of a parliamentary Commission to broker peace in the Irish Civil War.

He was elected as Leas Cathaoirleach to Lord Glenavy in 1925 and as Cathaoirleach (Speaker) of the Senate in 1928, he was vigorous in defending constitutionalism in Irish life during a turbulent time and was engaged in a very high profile contest with the President of the Executive Council Éamon de Valera in 1935 during the campaign to abolish the Senate, in which he was assisted by his brother George C. Bennett, a Fine Gael TD (and later Senator).

Always active in the Cumann na nGaedhael/Fine Gael parties he was instrumental in chairing talks between Eoin O'Duffy and W. T. Cosgrave in the 1930s which led to the founding of Fine Gael.

He became Chairman of the Irish Agricultural Wholesale Society in 1945 remaining at its helm until his death in February 1962 after a lifetime of public service.

He married twice; his first wife Esther Macdonald-Moreton was a Scottish aristocrat. She was the great granddaughter of the first Earl of Ducie and granddaughter of Sir Angus Macdonald-Moreton a Scottish MP. Her family home was in the baronial Largie Castle in Argyll where her father (and later brother) were the local Lairds. They married in 1898 when her dowry was £2000 a year which helped finance his campaigns. She died childless in 1920 and he later married Miss Lila Hapell who had been governess to his niece. They lived in a small estate called Summerville near Kilmallock in Co Limerick which the IRA tried to burn down in 1922 but he persuaded them to go away though he himself was unarmed.

His obituary in the Irish Times said that he was from a "prominent and popular family" in the south of Ireland who had rendered much service during the "turbulent early years" of the Irish State.

[edit] Sources

• Birth Pangs of A New Nation: Senator Thomas Westropp Bennett and the Irish Free State - History Ireland Magazine October 2003.

This page incorporates information from the Oireachtas Members Database