Keeping it in the family - the McEllistrims of Ballymacelligott

This is another short extract from my book on Kerry's political dynasties dealing with the McEllistrim family of Ballymacelligott, which has sent successive generations to Leinster House. The most recent deputy, who lost his seat at the 2011 election, Thomas McEllistrim is already canvassing across the new Kerry five-seater to seek to regain his Dáil seat, one which his family has held, bar a short period, since the 1920s.

In the rear foyer of Leinster House as you exit the building onto Leinster Lawn and Merrion Street, it is difficult not to notice a large framed photograph of the address by US President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the Houses of the Oireachtas which took place on 28 June 1963. The panoramic image of the Dáil chamber shows TDs and Senators packed into their seats for the historic speech, the first of any US president in an Irish parliament. Very helpfully, a detailed key or index to the picture identifies each and every one of the parliamentarians in attendance. On the government backbenches can be seen two of the founding fathers of two of the most enduring political dynasties in Irish politics. Thomas McEllistrim, the then Fianna Fail TD for Kerry North, father and grandfather of Dáil members of the same name is seated right beside Phelim Calleary, the then Fianna Fail TD for Mayo North. Calleary was also followed by his son and grandson in Dáil Éireann – Sean Calleary, his son, was the TD for Mayo East from 1973 to 1992 while Dara Calleary, Sean’s son, was first elected in 2007 and is currently a Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation. The second generations of both dynasties, Thomas McEllistrim Jnr TD and Sean Calleary TD also sat together in the Dáil for the address by President Ronald Reagan on 4 June 1984. “So I suppose if Barack Obama ever comes to talk to us, I will have to sit beside Dara Calleary to continue the tradition,” jokes Thomas McEllistrim, the most recent Fianna Fáil incumbent in Kerry North.

The three generations of the
McEllistrim dynasty with FF leader
Jack Lynch in the 1970s.

The McEllistrim dynasty is remarkable for its enduring longevity in local and national politics and is by far the oldest political dynasty in County Kerry in the post-Independence period. In it can be seen all the hallmarks of dynastic politics, the battles for local political dominance, ensuring the succession from one generation to the next – in effect, the McEllistrims provide a template for the standard successful political dynasty in Ireland. The McEllistrim family has been represented in the Dáil almost continuously since Independence, save for a ten year period towards the end of the twentieth century. Four generations of the McEllistrims have served in either local or national politics right up the present today with Tom McEllistrim the sitting Fianna Fáil TD for Kerry North and his sister Anne, a councillor for the Tralee Electoral Area, representing the current generation of the family.

The McEllistrim’s presence on local authorities can be traced back to the early 1890s when Thomas McEllistrim of Ballymacelligott was first elected to the Rural District Council. So omnipotent in Kerry politics is the name Thomas McEllistrim, that the politicians who have borne that name have been known locally as ‘Tommy Mc’. Other than the multi-generational service given by three William (or Liam) Cosgraves in Fine Gael, the McEllistrims are the only other political dynasty in Ireland to include three successive generations who have served in Leinster House and who have borne the same first and second names.[i] Over the course of three generations however, the Cosgraves represented a number of different constituencies, while in Donegal three generations of the Blaney dynasty have borne the name Neil or Niall, but they did not always serve as Fianna Fáil TDs.[ii] The McEllistrims therefore are the only family in Irish political history with three generations bearing exactly the same name to have represented the same constituency for the same political party.

Even prior to the election of the first Deputy Thomas McEllistrim in the early 1920s, the family already had a presence in local politics in Kerry. His father, also Thomas, was elected to the Board of Guardians in 1895, the local committee which oversaw the administration of poor law in Ireland and the local workhouses. Though they were only elected on a suffrage limited to powerful property-owners, the Boards of Guardians were the first representative form of local government in Ireland.[iii] Established in 1834 and only abolished in 1930, the Guardians were elected by rate-payers in each civil parish to supervise the workhouses, to collect the Poor Rate and to send reports to the Central Poor Law Commission similar to the system in England. Among McEllistrim’s duties for example, would have being looking after the running of the workhouse in Tralee.[iv] At the time of his death in 1914, the Kerry Reporter referred to McEllistrim (or McEllistrum as was sometimes used at the time) as a “consistent friend to the poor”. He represented Arabella, a townland in Ballymacelligott, the newspaper outlined, “in the old Tralee Board of Guardians and in the Rural District Council for the past 25 years being one of the oldest members of that body.”[v]

The McEllistrim family is steeped in local Republican and Fianna Fáil history. The first Thomas McEllistrim in the Dáil was born in 1894, the seventh child of eleven. He came from the old IRA tradition and he was immersed in the struggle for independence and the subsequent Civil War in the early part of the twentieth century. His obituary in The Kerryman in 1973 described him as “one of the most active IRA leaders during the War of Independence.”[vi] Active in the Irish Volunteers from 1914, McEllistrim was imprisoned for a time in a number of prisons in England and Wales for his involvement in the 1916 Rising.

Thomas McEllistrim III

His ‘flying column’ fought at many of the infamous clashes with the British forces during that time, and he was joint officer in charge at the Headford Ambush of 1921 in East Kerry, where he fought alongside future Kerry TDs, Frederick Hugh Crowley and Johnny Connor. In the view of T. Ryle Dwyer, McEllistrim played as important a role in Kerry during the War of Independence as Dan Breen or Tom Barry, even though throughout his many decades in parliament, he never spoke publically about his exploits. He and the likes of Johnny Connor, who later went on to become a Clann na Poblachta TD, felt the war period was “best left to history”.[vii] In the aftermath of the Civil War, in which he took the anti-Treaty side, McEllistrim was elected as a Republican TD for Kerry in 1923, having served on the local Rural District Council, the pre-cursor of the county council. He did not take his Dáil seat until 1927 however when he sat for the new party, Fianna Fáil.

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[i]  William T. Cosgrave (Cumann na nGaedheal) was President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1932 and served as a TD from 1919 to 1944. His son, Liam Cosgrave (Fine Gael) was Taoiseach from 1973 to 1977 and was a Dáil deputy from 1944 to 1981. His son, Liam Cosgrave (Fine Gael) served as a TD from 1981 to 1987 and was a Senator from 1987 to 2002. The Cosgraves have not been represented in the Oireachtas since 2002.

[ii]  The Blaney family of Donegal has had three generations, including the current TD, Niall Blaney who served in the Dáil but not always for Fianna Fáil. Niall is the son of Harry Blaney who was a TD for Donegal North East from 1997 to 2002 and he is a nephew of Neil T Blaney, the former Fianna Fáil Government Minister, TD and founder of Independent Fianna Fáil whom he represented as both a TD and an MEP. Niall’s grand-father, also Neil, represented  Donegal in the Dáil from June 1927 until his death in 1948. For all bar a short period from November 1995, when Neil T Blaney died, to June 1997 a member of the Blaney family has been represented in the Oireachtas since 1927. The current TD was first elected as an Independent Fianna Fáil TD for Donegal North East in 2002. He joined Fianna Fáil on July 26, 2006, ending a 35-year split between his family and their supporters and Fianna Fáil, after the organisation voted unanimously to rejoin Fianna Fáil. Niall was re-elected as a Fianna Fáil TD in 2007.

[iii] See Weeks and Quinlivan, p. 14-15 and Haslam in Callanan and Keogan, p. 22.

[iv] For more on the Boards of Guardians in Kerry and elsewhere, see O’Connor, John, The Workhouses of Ireland, (Anvil Books, 1995) and Weeks, Liam and Aodh Quinlivan, All Politics is Local, A Guide to Local Elections in Ireland, (The Collins Press, 2009).

[v] The Kerry Reporter, November 1914

[vi] The Kerryman, 7 December 1973.

[vii] Ryle Dwyer, T., Tans, Terror and Troubles – Kerry’s Real Fighting Story (Mercier Press, 2001), p, 10-11. In fact, McEllistrim wasn’t a very frequent contributor in Dáil debates on any subject and was considered to be “no speechmaker and never made pretensions of being one.” (The Kerryman, 7 December 1973)