Richard Lalor
Anyway, the whole thing turned to shit in 1890 (or it turned to shit in 1848 and just hit the fan in 1890!) because Parnell couldn't keep his dick in his pants. He had a lengthy affair with another party member's wife (he was self-proclaimed "Captain" William O'Shea, and she was Kitty O'Shea), who bore him a couple of kids.
O'Shea, in all probability, was aware of his wife and Parnell's affair, and her giving birth to Parnell's children (formally recognised as his by Parnell!). Obviously, we have no real idea, but track down and read the evidence and decide for yourselves.
Eventually O'Shea must have become more than a little tired being the joke of the London clubs, or was got at by Parnell's opponents, and sued for divorce, naming Parnell as the bloke having non-marital sex with his (O'Shea's) wife Kitty. In court, Parnell owned up to matters, and again in parliament as it passed the necessary legislation to effect the divorce. There's nothing like having a divorce system that doubles up on all the publicity attached to a failed marriage - a nice, juicy court case, then the passage of an Act of Parliament. And, further, ensures that only the wealthy classes could effect a divorce, keeping that option for ending a hateful marriage from the great undeserving middle and working classes. After the divorce, Parnell did the "right" thing by marrying Kitty and debastardising his children. But he had committed two great sins in the eyes of the judgemental members of "Society", as though rich prudes comprise the whole of society. First, he clearly should have lied about fathering children |
Richard was Peter's brother, and as we will see he accompanied Peter to Australia and ran a business there with him. However, he decided to return to Ireland.
Eventually, Richard, a strong believer in land reform (how could he come from that family and not have such a belief?), became a follower of a bloke called Charles Stewart Parnell. A protestant, Parnell was able enough to create a reform body comprising both catholics and protestants. Despite coming from a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, Parnell was a land reformer, and a leader of the Home Rule League. He became an MP in 1875, and Richard joined him in Westminster in 1880. Around 1882, Parnell served a spell in prison, following which he formed the Irish Parliamentary Party, and controlled it with an iron hand, as the first controlled democratic party in the House of Commons (the Whigs and the Tories at the time were more loose or flexible alliances of sometimes only vaguely similarly minded men). In 1879, the year before hitting the Commons, at a nationalist demonstration at Maryborough, Ireland, Richard spoke about the importance of ‘subsistence before rent’, telling tenants unable to pay their rents it was crucial not to sell their animals or food supplies to make up the rent money, or they would end up being starved out. Richard became a member of Parnell's IPP upon its formation, winning his seat for several elections with massive margins. In 1884 he won at 7 to 1, and in 1886 by even more. In that year, a fellow Irish nationalist said of him: ‘Today he is a feeble and bent man with wearied eyes and a thin voice, but his spirit is exactly the same as in his hot youth. In 1848 he had his pike and his thousands of pikemen ready for action; today, as then, he is the unconquerable and irreclaimable rebel – the Blanqui of Irish politics [Blanqui was a persistent post-Napoleonic French revolutionary ].’ For those of you who have read the Eureka stuff, there are those bloody pikes again. Boy, they proved to be a great value weapon against trained soldiers in the nineteenth century, didn't they! We wonder whether or not Lalor was influenced by the pikes of his brother's fiasco to use them in his own fiasco, at the cost of his troops and their ideals.
Anyway, was Peter one of his brother's thousands, noting that "thousands" is probably a significant overstatement of the 1848 fiascoes? If Peter was there, and there's no evidence one way or the other, it must have given him good practice at fiasco survival. with a woman married to another man. To
be caught doing this, and, blow me down, then admit to it was not just
socially insane, but forced the prudes to turn their backs whenever they
saw him coming.
But then he topped the matter off by daring to marry the object of his love, despite the fact she was clearly an immorally divorced woman who had sex with and bore the children of a man not her husband. This straw seems to have broken the camel's back. The word "camel" is apt, considering the similarities between many of those giving Parnell and his new wife a hard time and that spitting, snarling, biting, evilly tempered beast. All but a few party steadfasts deserted Parnell, and we can only hope they all felt incredibly proud of themselves when poor Parnell died the next year at the age of only forty-five. We shudder to think what happened to his wife and children, although hopefully he still had some fortune to leave them. In 1892, Richard, who had stuck by Parnell, proving himself to be a man of principle, and very good on him, was too ill to campaign and lost his seat. He died in 1893. As you can see from the photo up above, he was much closer to a reasonable age for death than Parnell |