Daniel Desmond Sheehan, usually known as D. D. Sheehan (28 May 1873 – 28 November 1948) was an Irish nationalist, politician, labour leader, journalist, barrister and author. He served as Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland representing Mid-Cork from 1901 to 1918,Walker, Brian M. (ed.): Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1801–1922, Royal Irish Academy Press, Dublin (1978) a constituency comprising the districts of Ahadallane, Ballincollig, Ballyvourney, Blarney, Coachford, Farran, Inchigeelagh, Macroom, Millstreet and Shandangan.Guy's Cork City & County Almanac & Directory 1907, 1910, 1913, Parliamentary Electoral Division Mid-Cork: Cork City Council Library As co-founder and President of the Irish Land and Labour Association, he was credited with considerable success in land reform, labour reforms and in rural state housing. From 1909, he was General Secretary of the Central Executive of the All-for-Ireland League, favouring a policy of National reconciliation between all creeds and classes in Ireland. During World War I he served as Irish regiments officer with the 16th (Irish) Division in France, 1915–16.Who's Who 1915 and 1918; Thom's Directory 1918 He resigned his parliamentary seat in 1918 and lived in England for several years, returning to Dublin following the ending of the civil war, when he was appointed editor of the Dublin Chronicle.Cadogan, Tim & Falvey, Jeremiah: A Biographical Dictionary of Cork, Four Courts Press (2006), Cork City Council Library
Journalistic beginnings Sheehan was born in Dromtariffe, near Kanturk, County Cork, Ireland, the second eldest of three sons and one daughter of Daniel Sheehan senior and Ellen Sheehan (née Fitzgerald). His father was an old Fenian, Kinsman of Canon P. A. Sheehan and tenant farmer.The Kerryman Obituary p. 6, 11 December 1948 He was educated at the local primary school; in 1880 when he was seven years old, the family experienced eviction from the family homestead at the onset of the Irish Land League's Land War, when tenant farmers united to protest against landlords' excessive unjust rents by withholding payment.
Sheehan's family were supporters of the Fenian tradition, and his experience of discrimination made him a strong supporter of Irish nationalism. Sheehan was a continued supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell after the 'Parnell split' of 1890 in the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and became a pro-Parnellite. He always remembered his only meeting with Parnell at Tralee, when Parnell was presented with a loyal address (drafted by Sheehan) from his Killarney supporters.Maume, Patrick in: McGuire, James and Quinn, James (eds): Dictionary of Irish Biography From the Earliest Times to the Year 2002; Royal Irish Academy Vol. 8, Sheehan, D. D.: pp. 875–78; Cambridge University Press (2009)
He began his career as a schoolteacher at the age of 16, studying land law and legal procedure when time allowed. He undertook part-time journalism from 1890 and was otherwise self-educated to a high literary degree. Sheehan was correspondent for the Kerry Sentinel, and later special correspondent to the Cork Daily Herald in Killarney. After he married in 1894, he moved in pursuit of journalistic experience temporarily to Scotland where in 1896 he joined the staff of the Glasgow Observer, then becoming London editor of the Catholic News in Preston, England.Irish Independent Obituary, 29 December 1948
In 1898, with the beginning of national self-reliance under the revolutionary Local Government Act (1898), which established the enfranchment of local electors and the creation of Local County Councils for the first time, allowing the development of a new political class capable of taking local affairs into their own hands, Sheehan returned to Ireland. He worked initially on various papers in Munster including the Cork Constitution and from 1899 until 1901 as editor of The Southern Star, Skibbereen,"Cork County Southern Star" newspaper Skibbereen, Centenary Supplement (1889–1989), p.38: Turn of the century editor, Cork City Library in which role it assured for the ILLA as well as the recently founded United Irish League that their branch reports were given weekly press coverage, particularly crucial for the expansion and growth of the UIL in Cork.O’Donovan, John: Class, Conflict, and the United Irish League in Cork, 1900–1903 in SAOTHAR 37 pp. 19–29, Journal of the Irish Labour History Society p. 20, (2012)
Land and Labour leader Early in his life when appointed correspondence secretary of the Kanturk Trade and Labour Council, Sheehan began active involvement in labour and trade union affairs – "I was engaged in an attempt to lead the labourers out of the poverty and misery that encompassed them" he wrote.Sheehan, D. D.: Ireland since Parnell: 'Land and Labour' p. 171, Daniel O’Connor, London (1921)
In August 1894 the Irish Land and Labour Association (ILLA) was formed to agitate on behalf of small tenant farmers and agrarian labourers as follower organisation to the Irish Democratic Trade and Labour Federation, setting forth Michael Davitt's achievements.Sheehan, D.D.: p. 67 As ILLA chairman, Sheehan in alliance with its secretary the Clonmel, County Tipperary solicitor J. J. O'Shee (Member of Parliament for West Waterford from 1895), they campaigned for radical changes both to the Irish Land Acts and the land and labour laws, in particular the granting of smallholdings to rural labourers.Maume, Patrick in: McGuire, James and Quinn, James (eds): Dictionary of Irish Biography From the Earliest Times to the Year 2002; Royal Irish Academy Vol. 7 O’Shee, J. J.: p. 846; Cambridge University Press (2009) After Sheehan returned from a journalistic mission to England in 1898 he threw himself into organising the ILLA, at the same time convinced that social change could only be advanced by means of political and constitutional agitation, but at no times through physical force.
In the towns and in the country, labourers had to live in hovels and mud-wall cabins which bred death and disease, huddled together in indiscriminate wretchedness, landless and starving, the last word in pitiful rags and bare bones. The grant of Local Government and the extension of the franchise, enabled the labourers to eventually take a mighty stride in the assertion of their independent claims.Sheehan, D. D.: p. 176 Sheehan recorded that "Those of us who had taken up the labourer’s cause . . . went our way building up branches, extending knowledge of the labourers' claims, educating these humble folk into a sense of their civic rights and citizen responsibilities . . . It was all desperate hard, uphill work, with little to encourage and no reward beyond the consciousness that one was reaching out a helping hand to the most neglected, despised and unregarded class in the community"Sheehan, D. D.: p. 175
Under his leadership as president, the ILLA spread rapidly across Munster and later Connacht, campaigning vigorously on behalf of small tenant farmers for their tenant rights as well claiming against the pitiful plight of the rural labourers, demanding sweeping changes, as P. F. Johnson before him, to the inadequate Land Acts, duly acknowledged by government. By 1900 he had helped found and organize nearly one hundred ILLA branches, mostly in County Cork, County Tipperary, and County Limerick,Bradley, Dan: Farm Labourers: Irish struggle 1900–1976, Ch.2: Farm Labourer Organisations in Co. Cork before 1919 pp. 24–37 (1988), Athol Books which increased to 144 by 1904.Ferriter, Diarmaid: "The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000", (2004), p. 64 ()
The achievement was not without considerable middle-class hostility to the labourer movement. Farmer, shopkeeper, clerical and political party hostility originated not alone locally, ill-will was equally noticeable at a national level. The Irish Party leadership refused to consider direct Parliamentary representation to the Land and Labour Association, an indication of the middle-class determination with maintaining its hold over national politics.Lane, Pádraig G., The Land and Labour Association 1894–1914, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, Vol.98, p. 92, (1993), Cork City Council Library
Member of Parliament
Following the death of Dr C. K. D. Tanner (former Mid-Cork anti-Parnellite Nationalist MP from 1895), a United Irish League selection convention was called for 10 May 1901 in Macroom to decide between three candidates for the up-coming by-election. Standing as ILLA candidate on a solely labour platform, "D. D.", as he was popularly known, defeated the official local Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) candidate Cornelelius O'Callaghan of Millstreet after a second ballot, amidst turbulent and occasionally violent scenes following an initial attempt by Joseph Devlin (representing the UIL National Directory), to exclude a number of ILLA branches from the convention.O'Donovan, John: p. 21 Sheehan was carried triumphantly from the venue and when finally returned as MP in the by-election of 17 May, he wrote: My heart was with the neglected labourer and I stood, accordingly, as a Labour candidate, my programme being the social elevation of the masses, employment and wages. . . . .This was heralded as a tremendous triumph for the Labour movement, . . . . .Sheehan, D. D.: pp. 85, 140–41
Aged twenty-eight, he was the youngest, and one of the most outspoken, Irish nationalist party members of parliament at the House of Commons. Although admitted to the Party, his position as a labour representative, his own personal independence and not being a member of the United Irish League, made him something of an outsider. He wrote: "I was in the Party for one purpose, and one alone, of pushing the labourers' claims upon the notice of the leaders and of ventilating their grievances in the House of Commons whenever occasion offered"Sheehan, D. D.: pp. 147/8 But from the outset in 1894, those Party leaders considered the ILLA to be a dangerous deviation from the party line.Bradley, Dan: p. 27
Agrarian resurgence
Long associated with land agitation, Sheehan settled many disputes between landlord gentry and their under-privileged tenant farmers. In his capacity as honorary secretary of the Cork Advisory Committee, he was foremost in ending centuries of oppressive "landlordism" under the far reaching Irish Land Act 1903 (3 Edw. 7. c. 37).Ferriter, Diarmaid: pp. 62–63 Crafted through Parliament following the 1902 Land Conference by his Mallow compatriot, William O'Brien MP, Sheehan successfully negotiated the larger number of the 16,159 tenant land purchases in Munster that decade.O'Brien, William: An Olive Branch in Ireland pp. 388–392, University College Cork (1910), Library In his own words: "changing rack-rented farmers into peasant proprietors". The act was later extended to introduce compulsory purchase under the Birrell Land Purchase (Ireland) Act (1909).
From 1904 Sheehan was drawn to O’Brien for his willingness to agitate for a "settlement of the Irish labourers' grievances", and allied himself after O’Brien was alienated from the Irish Party for his conciliatory approach in securing the Land Act. Sheehan brought O’Brien the ally whose organisational skills and social programme secured him a County Cork base,Maume, Patrick: The Long Gestation, Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 p. 70, Gill & Macmillan (1999) his talents and ILLA branches placed at the disposal of the O'Brienite organisation in rural Munster.Maume, Patrick: p. 71 Sheehan and O'Brien established a Cork Advisory Committee which produced a higher rate of land purchase at lower prices than in any other county.Maume, Patrick: pp. 74–75