Michael John Fitzgerald McCarthy 1862 to 1928
from McCarthy, Michael John Fitzgerald | Dictionary of Irish Biography
McCarthy, Michael John Fitzgerald political writer, was born 24 July 1862 in Midleton, Co. Cork, son of Denis McCarthy, farmer and shopkeeper, and Catherine McCarthy (née Fitzgerald). He was educated locally at the primary CBS and at Vincentian Seminary in Cork, before being transferred (1877) to the protestant school, Midleton College, because his father thought it superior. McCarthy believed receiving both systems of education gave him his habit of impartiality; however, few would term impartial the pronounced anti-clericalism of his writings. In 1880 he left Midleton College, where he was head boy, and entered TCD, graduating BA (1885). Called to the bar in 1889, he worked briefly as a barrister and as a parliamentary lobbyist for the drink trade; he was also on the staff of the Freeman's Journal, where he argued that C.S Parnell (qv) had founded the National League because he feared that the land courts' rent reductions would satisfy farmers and make them politically apathetic. He returned to this theme in his first book, Mr Balfour's rule in Ireland (1891), which was written in praise of its subject, McCarthy having moved from a tepid nationalism to frank unionism. He had personal experience of the Land League: his father had been appointed president of a Midleton branch of the league in 1879 and that year had been imprisoned for refusing to pay rent. In 1881 his cattle were seized, at which he capitulated and paid, leading to his shop being boycotted by local people. McCarthy claimed that Ireland had been more prosperous in 1860–80 before Parnell radicalised the tenant class, in whom he encouraged greed and idleness.
His attack on Parnell was the more effective because he accorded the latter his full political genius. His polemical, pithy, trenchant narrative contains interesting observations, such as the fact that there had been no fall in emigration since Parnell's emergence, and that home rule was not born of real necessity but of national vanity. However, these ideas are undeveloped. His second book, Five years in Ireland (1900), was more favourable to Parnell as the lone bulwark against the domination of the catholic church. McCarthy had now found his leitmotif: his third book, Priests and people in Ireland (1902), brought him a large audience, selling more than 60,000 copies in a few years. It is a full-scale attack on the catholic clergy, whom he accuses of seeking their own aggrandisement in alliance with an alien organisation; indoctrinating youth; interfering in every sphere of public affairs; embittering Ireland against Britain; and taking the savings of the old and weak. The book made his name; he went on to write a further fifteen or so populist books, almost all anti-clerical, and finally converted formally to protestantism. Unsurprisingly he had a large following in Ulster. A tireless lecturer, he spoke to packed houses in loyalist strongholds and his ideas were then taken up and popularised in the unionist press; the Belfast News Letter and the Dublin-based Irish Protestant in particular reported his speeches and discussed his themes. Lindsay Crawford (qv), editor of the Irish Protestant, was influenced by McCarthy to believe that a more democratic unionism might win the support of anti-clerical nationalists. Catholics meantime blamed McCarthy for poisoning protestants against the idea of home rule.
When the St Stephen's Green parliamentary division fell vacant in 1904, McCarthy stood as a unionist candidate and won support from working-class unionists and from Col. Edward Saunderson (qv). However, he had to withdraw for lack of funds, and afterwards emigrated to England, where he lived the rest of his life; he remained active in lecturing and pamphleteering before dying in London on 26 October 1928. He married (1887) Margaret, daughter of John Ronayne of Donickmore; they had two daughters and a son.
Sources
NAI: Census of Ireland, 1901; WWW (includes bibliog.); Henry Patterson, ‘Independent Orangeism and class conflict in Edwardian Belfast: a reinterpretation’, RIA Proc., lxxx C (1980), 1–27; James Loughlin, Gladstone, home rule and the Ulster question, 1882–93 (1986); Andrew Gailey, Ireland and the death of kindness (1987); Alvin Jackson, Colonel Edward Saunderson (1995); Patrick Maume, The long gestation (1999
Quotation:
I saw my father pulled out of bed in the small hours of the morning and imprisoned without trial under the Coercion Act, because he happened to be president of the local Land League.