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Parnell, Edmund Dwyer Gray and the Press in Ireland

This case study explores Parnell’s relationship with the press in Ireland over the period of his political ascendancy, 1875-91. Parnell was the pre-eminent Irish nationalist leader in the second half of the nineteenth century. The case study focuses in particular on the Freeman’s Journal, which was the principal daily newspaper in Dublin in Parnell’s time, and on the career of its proprietor, Edmund Dwyer Gray. Gray was an innovative newspaperman and he introduced into the Freeman and its sister newspapers many of the features of the so-called ‘New Journalism’ from as early as 1877-8. Like W.T. Stead in England, he went to prison in the cause of a newspaper’s right to expose wrong. Parnell founded two newspapers as his personal organs to rival the Freeman, the weekly United Ireland (1881) and the Irish Daily Independent (1891), and both are also considered in the case study. The Independent was established during the infamous ‘split’ in the Irish party at Westminster following the O’Shea divorce case, in which Parnell was named as the co-respondent.