William Martin Murphy

Early life

Murphy was born on 6 January 1845 in Castletownbere, County Cork, and educated at Belvedere College. When his father, the building contractor Denis William Murphy (1799-1863) died, he took over the family business. His enterprise and business acumen expanded the business, and he built churches, schools and bridges throughout Ireland, as well as railways and tramways in Britain, West Africa and South America.

Politician

He was elected as Irish Parliamentary Party MP for Dublin St Patrick's at the 1885 general election, taking his seat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was a member of the informal grouping, the "Bantry band" – a group of politicians who hailed from the Bantry Bay area. The Bantry Band was also disparagingly dubbed the "Pope's brass band". Its most famous member was Timothy Healy MP and included Timothy Harrington MP, sometime Lord Mayor of Dublin City – however, Harrington (unlike Healy and Murphy) was a Parnellite in the 1890s. (Tim Harrington MP was not the same individual as TR Harrington, who edited the Irish Independent from 1905–31, though they both came from the Bantry/Schull area in West Cork.)

When the Irish Parliamentary Party split in 1890 over Charles Stewart Parnell's leadership, Murphy sided with the majority Anti-Parnellites. However, Dublin emerged as a Parnellite stronghold and in the bitter general election of 1892, Murphy lost his seat by over three to one to a Parnellite newcomer, William Field.

Murphy was the principal financial backer of the "Healyite" newspapers the National Press and the Daily Nation. His support for Healy attracted the hostility of the majority anti-Parnellite faction led by John Dillon. He made two attempts to return to Parliament, at Kerry South in 1895 and Mayo North in 1900, but both were unsuccessful because of Dillonite opposition.

Publisher

In 1900, he bought the insolvent Irish Daily Independent from the Parnellites, merging it with the Daily Nation. In 1900 he re-launched this as a cheap mass-circulation newspaper, which rapidly displaced the Freeman's Journal as Ireland's most popular nationalist paper. In 1906, he founded the Sunday Independent newspaper.

He refused a knighthood from King Edward VII in 1907 after organising a controversial International Exhibition in Herbert Park, Dublin (it was opposed by many nationalists because it was cosmopolitan and encouraged the purchase of imported goods). In fact, the King Edward VII was in the process of knighting Murphy when he refused. Murphy appears to have been motivated by pride; he did not wish to have it said that he had angled for a title and compromised his nationalist principles.

Murphy was highly critical of the Irish Parliamentary Party; from 1914 he used the Irish Independent to oppose the partition of Ireland and advocate Dominion Home Rule involving full fiscal autonomy (which the 1914 Home Rule Act would not have granted).

Anti-trade unionist

Worried that the trade unions would destroy his Dublin tram system, he led Dublin employers against the trade unions led by James Larkin, an opposition that culminated in the Dublin Lockout of 1913. This made him extremely unpopular with many, being depicted as a vulture or a vampire in the workers' press.

After the 1916 Easter Rising he bought ruined buildings in Abbey Street as sites for his newspaper offices, however it was his viewpoints (expressed through his Irish Independent) that made him even more unpopular, by calling for the executions of Sean MacDiarmada and James Connolly at a point when the Irish public began to feel sympathy for their cause. Murphy privately disavowed the editorial, claiming it had been written and published without his knowledge.

Anti-conciliationist

He was invited in 1917 to take part in talks during the Irish Convention which was called to agree terms for the implementation of the suspended 1914 Home Rule Act. However he discovered that John Redmond was negotiating agreeable terms with Unionists under the Midleton Plan to avoid the partition of Ireland but at the partial loss of full Irish fiscal autonomy. This infuriated Murphy who criticised the intention in his newspaper, which severely damaged the Irish Parliamentary Party. However, the Convention remained inconclusive, and the ensuing demise of the Irish party resulted in the rise of Sinn Féin, whose separatist policies Murphy also did not agree with.

Murphy died on 26 June 1919. His family controlled Independent Newspapers until the early 1970s, when the group was sold to Tony O'Reilly.