Richard McGhee

Background

McGhee was born in Lurgan, County Armagh in January or early February 1851, the son of a tenant farmer who later became a shopkeeper.

Education

McGhee was educated at the local school in Lurgan and then went to Glasgow to become an engineering apprentice.

Career

McGhee was a merchant with connections to industry in County Antrim. He specialised in cutlery and stationery. In the 1880s he became involved in labour and trade union causes.

He belonged to the American Knights of Labor which had set up some branches in Britain and by 1887 was one of their organisers in Cradley Heath in the Black Country of the West Midlands.

The Knights then sent McGhee to Glasgow to recruit new members. As a strong supporter of Home Rule, McGhee was engaged in political activity and sought a nomination for a Parliamentary seat.

In March 1896 he was elected the Nationalist member for South Louth in a by-election and he held the seat until 1900. His by-election platform was home rule on advanced nationalist principles, the endorsement of Catholic demands on education, the complete abolition of landlordism, and support for labourers.

After losing his seat in 1900 he returned to the House of Commons at the December 1910 general election to represent Mid Tyrone, beating the sitting Unionist Member of Parliament, Gerald Fitzgibbon Brunskill, by a majority of 723 votes.

He held the seat until it was abolished in 1918. As an Member of Parliament, McGhee was described as an orthodox Irish nationalist. In 1917 one of his meetings in Omagh was broken up by Sinn Féin supporters.

McGhee supported the Irish nationalist leader John Redmond and endorsed his decision in 1914 to support the British and Allied war effort at the outbreak of World War I and his condemnation of the Easter rising of 1916.

McGhee did not seek re-election in 1918. McGhee died at his home in Glasgow on 7 April 1930.

Achievements

• In 1889 McGhee was a co-founder of the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL) and was for a time its President. But the reaction of the British government to the rising and the suspension of the Home Rule Acting 1914 which Redmond had negotiated and which would have granted a strong measure of Home Rule, destroyed Redmond and his movement to achieve Home Rule through constitutional Parliamentary means.

Membership

26th United Kingdom Parliament. 30th United Kingdom Parliament]

A Georgist Land League and trade union activist, he was a Member of Parliament (Member of Parliament) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for more than 20 years. In 1893 McGhee resigned from the NUDL but continued to be active in related trade unionism becoming an executive council member of the International Federation of Ship, Dock and River Workers, later the International Transport Workers" Federation and he worked with the National Union of Seamen on various campaigns to improve working conditions.

Connections

follower:

Henry George