Murphy, William Martin

William Martin Murphy (1844–1919), businessman, was born near Castletownbere, Co. Cork, on 29 December. Murphy inherited the family building firm after his father's death in 1863, made a fortune through railway-construction contracts, and sat on several railway boards. In 1875 he moved to Dublin, where he dominated the Dublin United Tramways Company (created in 1880 by his father-in-law James F. Lombard) and oversaw the expansion and electrification of the city's tram system. (His company later constructed tramways in Britain and Argentina.) Murphy also managed Clery's Department Store and owned the Imperial Hotel (both in O'Connell Street). Cold, austere, and dominating, proud of his entrepreneurial skills, Murphy saw himself as a paternalist who created employment in return for complete obedience, and he remained fiercely conscious that he was a Catholic arriviste in a Protestant-dominated business community.

Murphy was a Home Rule MP from 1885 to 1892. He opposed Charles Stewart Parnell in 1890 to 1892, and in the party feuds of the 1890s he financed the political and journalistic enterprises of T. M. Healy's "Bantry Band." His political experiences gave Murphy an abiding contempt for the Irish Parliamentary Party leadership as incompetent and irresponsible opportunists. In 1905 Murphy relaunched the Irish Independent (initially acquired in 1900) as a halfpenny daily, employing journalistic techniques pioneered by the Northcliffe Press. The Independent rapidly displaced the Freeman's Journal as the best-selling Irish nationalist daily newspaper; by 1914 it was selling more than 100,000 copies daily. Its criticisms of the Irish Parliamentary Party allegedly assisted the rise of Sinn Féin; however, it was criticized by Irish Irelanders for sensationalism and West Britonism. In 1907 Murphy organized the Dublin International Exhibition, with King Edward VII as patron; it was denounced by nationalists for promoting imports and "flunkeyism," but it cemented Murphy's leading role in the Dublin business community. As president of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Murphy led the Dublin employers' resistance to James Larkin's Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, culminating in the Dublin lockout of 1913 to 1914. Murphy thought the third Home Rule bill insufficient; from 1914 he openly denounced the Irish Parliamentary Party's willingness to accept partition and advocated all-Ireland dominion status.

Murphy died on 26 June 1919; his business empire was frittered away over the next half-century by less competent descendants. Murphy's historical reputation is dominated by his ruthless treatment of the 1913 strikers, by W. B. Yeats's poetic denunciations of Murphy as the archetypal Catholic bourgeois philistine, and by the Independent's calls for the execution of James Connolly after the 1916 Rising.

SEE ALSO Connolly, James; Labor Movement; Larkin, James; Literacy and Popular Culture; Lockout of 1913; Newspapers; O'Brien, William; Trade Unions

Bibliography

Callanan, Frank. T. M. Healy. 1996.

Morrissey, Thomas. William Martin Murphy. 1997.

Patrick Maume