Tim Healy(1855–1931)

Timothy Michael Healy was born at Bantry on the south-west coast of County Cork on the seventeenth of May 1855, second of the eight children of Maurice Healy, a Bantry Town Clerk who served as a town commissioner for the next forty years, and Eliza Sullivan of Bantry. He was schooled at the Christian Brothers' school at Fermoy, took clerk's work at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne railway from sixteen, and from 1878 in London worked as parliamentary correspondent for the Nation, the leading Irish-nationalist weekly. He came under the political tutelage of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1879 to 1880 in the early days of the Irish Parliamentary Party, was sent home to Ireland by Parnell as a parliamentary agent for the Wexford by-election of November 1880, and was returned to the Commons himself at the same by-election in his twenty-fifth year as the MP for Wexford.

He sat as Irish Parliamentary Party MP for the next thirty-eight years, for Wexford, then Monaghan (1883 to 1885), South Londonderry (1885 to 1886), North Longford (1887 to 1892), North Louth (1892 to 1910), and North-East Cork (1910 to 1918). He was called to the Irish Bar in 1884 and to the English Bar at Gray's Inn in 1903, took silk as Queen's Counsel in 1899, and built one of the largest commercial-and-equity practices in the Four Courts. He drafted the Healy Clause of the Land Law (Ireland) Act of 1887, the famous protection that secured to the Irish tenant the value of his own improvements as part of the fair-rent calculation under the 1881 Land Act; the clause became the Magna Carta of Irish tenant farming.

He broke with Parnell in December 1890 in the wake of the Parnell split, became one of the leading anti-Parnellite Irish Party MPs through the 1890s, and after the reunification of the Irish Party in 1900 under John Redmond remained a semi-detached independent member of the party for the next fifteen years, increasingly aligned with William O'Brien's All-for-Ireland League and increasingly critical of Redmond's pro-war policy from 1914. He lost his Cork seat in the December 1918 general election that swept Sinn Féin to power and concluded the parliamentary career.

On the establishment of the Irish Free State by the Treaty of December 1921 and the constitutional foundation of the new state in December 1922, he was nominated jointly by W. T. Cosgrave (the President of the Executive Council) and the Treaty signatories to the office of Governor-General of the Irish Free State, the office of the Crown's representative under the dominion constitution. He was appointed by George V on the sixth of December 1922 in his sixty-eighth year and held the office for five and a half years to January 1928, established the office at the Vice-Regal Lodge in the Phoenix Park (the Áras an Uachtaráin), and through his ceremonial conduct of the office set the constitutional template of an Irish head-of-state office that the 1937 Constitution would convert into the Presidency of Ireland. He died at his house at Glenaulin, Chapelizod, on the twenty-sixth of March 1931 in his seventy-sixth year. The Healy name in modern Irish constitutional history carries the weight of the Governor-Generalship of 1922 to 1928 and the Healy Clause of 1887.