Richard Barry O'Brien (7 March 1847 – 17 March 1918) was a lawyer, historian,
Irish
Irish may refer to:
Common meanings
* Someone or something of, from, or related to:
** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe
***Éire, Irish language name for the isle
** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...
journalist and prolific writer on Irish subjects.
He was born at
Kilrush
Kilrush () is a coastal town in County Clare, Ireland. It is also the name of a civil parish and an ecclesiastical parish in Roman Catholic Diocese of Killaloe. It is located near the mouth of the River Shannon in the south-west of the county. ...
,
County Clare
County Clare ( ga, Contae an Chláir) is a county in Ireland, in the Southern Region and the province of Munster, bordered on the west by the Atlantic Ocean. Clare County Council is the local authority. The county had a population of 118,817 ...
. He studied law at the Catholic University, Dublin, after which he went to London. He was a founder-member there of the
Irish Literary Society The Irish Literary Society was founded in London in 1892 by William Butler Yeats, T. W. Rolleston ,and Charles Gavan Duffy. Members of the Southwark Irish Literary Club met in Clapham Reform Club and changed the name early in the year. On 13 Febru ...
and also joined the London
Gaelic League
(; historically known in English as the Gaelic League) is a social and cultural organisation which promotes the Irish language in Ireland and worldwide. The organisation was founded in 1893 with Douglas Hyde as its first president, when it emer ...
. He became political secretary to
Patrick McMahon, a role which introduced him to senior British and Irish politicians.
He was loyal to, but not uncritical of,
Charles Stuart Parnell
Charles Stewart Parnell (27 June 1846 – 6 October 1891) was an Irish nationalist politician who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1875 to 1891, also acting as Leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882 and then Leader of the ...
, leader of the
Irish Parliamentary Party
The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP; commonly called the Irish Party or the Home Rule Party) was formed in 1874 by Isaac Butt, the leader of the Nationalist Party, replacing the Home Rule League, as official parliamentary party for Irish national ...
at Westminster. Parnell wished to make him an MP, but he declined, as he preferred to remain focused on writing. He wrote a much-discussed biography of Parnell in 1898.
O'Brien was a political insider and a committed Home Ruler and the biography throws light on the activities of Home Rule MPs and their links to the Fenian Movement.
He supported involvement in the First World War, where three of his sons fought.
[Irish Times
13 March 2018; An Irishman's Diary]
He died in London and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
Select works
* ''The Irish Land Question and English Public Opinion'' (1879)
* ''Fifty Years of Irish History'' (2 vols., 1883–85)
* ''Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland'' (1883)
* ''Biography of Parnell'' (1898)
* ''Thomas Drummond: life and letters'' (1899)
* ''The Life of Lord Russell of Killowen'' (London, 1902)
* ''A Hundred Years of Irish History'' (1902)
* ''England's Claim to Ireland'' (1905)
* ''Fontenoy'' (1907)
* ''Dublin Castle and the Irish People'' (1909)
* ''The autobiography of Theobald Wolfe Tone, 1763-1798'' (Ed., 1910)
* ''John Bright, a Monograph, with a preface by Augustine Birrell'' (London, 1910)
* ''The Home-Ruler's Manual''
* ''Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question''
* ''Irish Memories'' (1918)
References
External links
*
*
Works by Richard Barry O'Brienat
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:OBrien, Richard Barry
1847 births
1918 deaths
People from County Clare
Irish journalists
Irish writers
People from Kilrush
19th-century Irish historians
20th-century Irish historians