Name Arthur Samuels Role Member of Parliament | Died May 11, 1925 | |
Education Trinity College, Dublin | ||
Arthur Warren Samuels (19 May 1852 – 11 May 1925) was an Irish Unionist Alliance Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom Parliament and subsequently a Judge. The Irish Unionists were the Irish wing of the Conservative Party.
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Biography
He was born in Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin, second son of Arthur Samuels senior, a solicitor. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, before being called to the Irish Bar in 1877. He became a Queen's Counsel (QC) in 1894 and was called to the English bar in 1896.
Samuels was Solicitor-General for Ireland 1917-1918 and Attorney-General for Ireland in 1918-1919. He was also made a member of the Privy Council of Ireland in 1918.
He was MP for Dublin University 1917-1919, having previously been defeated in a 1903 by-election for the same constituency.
Samuels left the House of Commons when he was appointed to the office of Justice of the King's Bench Division of the Irish High Court in 1919, an office which he held until 1924, when virtually all the judges of the old regime were required to retire. He died a year later.
Maurice Healy in The Old Munster Circuit praised his personal qualities, his erudition and his valuable book on the financial aspects of Home Rule; but as a Law Officer and judge dismissed him as "undistinguished" .
Family
He married in 1881 Emma Margaret Irwin of Howth, by whom he was the father of the barrister and writer Arthur P. I. Samuels (1886-1916). The younger Arthur was an authority on Edmund Burke and edited a collection of his correspondence and writings, which he had almost completed when his work was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. He became a captain in the Royal Irish Rifles, and was killed on the Western Front in September 1916. His father completed his book on Burke, which was published in 1923. Young Arthur had married Dorothy Young of Milltown, County Antrim, in 1913.