“Nothing is so bad for the Irish as Ireland alone”: William Keogh and Catholic loyalty

Abstract

William Nicholas Keogh (1817–1878) has long been remembered as the placehunting lawyer who betrayed his country and wrecked the political fortunes of Irish constitutional nationalism for a generation. As a member of the fifty-strong Irish Independent Party of the early 1850s, Keogh pledged himself to independent opposition, only to accept ministerial office in 1852 as solicitor-general for Ireland. For this act Keogh has long been represented as a man who succumbed to personal ambition at the expense of a popular cause, which he allegedly supported with the sole objective of extracting political capital. Such was the ignominy with which he came to be regarded in later years that his name became a byword for betrayal, as evidenced by the fact that members of John Redmond’s Edwardian Irish Parliamentary Party were characterised as the Keoghs and Sadleirs of their day. Keogh’s infamy was exacerbated further by the inflammatory judgment he issued when presiding over the Galway election petition of 1872, for which he would be labelled ‘villifier-in-ordinary of the Irish priests’.