Thomas Michael Kettle (9 February 1880 – 9 September 1916) was an Irish economist, journalist, barrister, writer, war poet, soldier and Home Rule politician. As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for East Tyrone from 1906 to 1910 at Westminster. He joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913, then on the outbreak of World War I in 1914 enlisted for service in the British Army, with which he was killed in action on the Western Front in the autumn of 1916. He was a much admired old comrade of James Joyce,Joyce and Company By David Pierce (London:2006) p152 who considered him to be his best friend in Ireland,Conor, Volume I: A Biography of Conor Cruise O'Brien: Volume I ..., Volume 2 By Donald Harman Akenson (Canada:1994) p49 as well as the likes of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Oliver St. John Gogarty and Robert Wilson Lynd.
He was regarded as one of the leading political figures of the 20th century and belonged to the generation that revitalised Irish party politics and advanced the constitutional movement for All-Ireland Home Rule. Known for his eloquence, sharp intellect, and incisive wit, his death was widely considered a significant loss to Ireland’s political and intellectual life.A Dictionary of Irish History since 1800, D. J. Hickey & J. E. Doherty, Gill & MacMillan (1980)
As G. K. Chesterton surmised, "Thomas Michael Kettle was perhaps the greatest example of that greatness of spirit which was so ill rewarded on both sides of the channel [...] He was a wit, a scholar, an orator, a man ambitious in all the arts of peace; and he fell fighting the barbarians because he was too good a European to use the barbarians against England, as England a hundred years before has used the barbarians against Ireland".Walking Like A Queen – Irish Impressions By G. K. Chesterton (2008 Tradibooks edition, France) p90.
Early life Thomas Kettle was born in MalahideTom Kettle’s birthplace is sometimes given as Artane where the family also had a holding. However, Andrew Kettle, in his memoir “Material For Victory”, states his son’s birthplace as Millview House, Malahide.; accessed 19 April 2020. or Artane, Dublin,One of several sources which give Artane as Tom Kettle's place of birth; accessed 16 June 2014. the seventh of twelve children of Andrew Kettle, a leading Irish nationalist politician, progressive farmer, agrarian agitator and founding member of the Irish Land League, and his wife, Margaret (). One of his brothers was the industrial pioneer, Laurence Kettle.
Andrew Kettle influenced his son considerably through his political activities, having been involved from an early age in the constitutional movement to achieve Home Rule. Andrew joined Michael Davitt in the foundation of the Irish Land League and was one of the signatories of the "No Rent Manifesto". He had adhered to Charles Stewart Parnell in the 1890 crisis, and stood for election as a nationalist candidate on several occasions.Cork Examiner, 25 September 1916: from Andrew Kettle's obituary (text in full in article on the latter)
Thomas was raised in comfortable rural surroundings. Like his brothers he was educated at the Christian Brothers' O'Connell School at Richmond Street, Dublin, where he excelled. In 1894 he went to study with the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, known as a wit and a good debater. He enjoyed athletics, cricket and cycling and attained honours in English and French when leaving.
Entering University College Dublin in 1897, he was regarded as a charismatic student. Surrounded by ambitious and politically minded young men he quickly established himself as a leading student politician and a brilliant scholar. He was elected to the prestigious position of auditor of the Literary and Historical Society, 1898–1899. His friends and contemporaries at UCD included Hugh Kennedy, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Oliver St. John Gogarty and James Joyce.
Tom Kettle distributed pro-Boer leaflets during the early months of the South African Second Boer War, and protested against the Irish Literary Theatre production of Yeats' The Countess Cathleen in 1899 over its irreligious story of an unlikely kind-hearted aristocrat who sells her soul to save her tenants. Due to illness he interrupted his studies in 1900, his health always being fragile. He went abroad to renew his spirits by travelling on the continent, improving his German and French. Returning to Dublin he renewed his studies, and in 1902 took a BA in mental and moral science.
Journalism He then read law after admission to the Irish Law bar in 1903, qualifying as a barrister in 1905. He practiced sporadically, devoting most of his time to political journalism. He maintained his contacts to University College and his fellow students, participating in debates, contributing to and becoming editor of the college newspaper. He helped to found the Cui Bono Club, a discussion group for recent graduates.
A vocal supporter of the Home Rule-seeking Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), Kettle strengthened his links with the constitutional movement by co-founding and becoming president of the Young Ireland Branch of the United Irish League in 1904. He attracted the attention of the Irish Party leader John Redmond. Kettle declined the offer to stand for a parliamentary seat, instead edited a newspaper, The Nationist, an unconventional weekly journal. The paper pursued an extreme pro-Irish Party line, at the same time reflecting Kettle's liberal and often controversial views on a wide range of topics, education, women's rights, the Irish Literary Revival. He resigned his editorship in 1905 on the grounds of a controversy about an allegedly anti-clerical article.
Parliamentarian After the death in 1906 of Patrick Doogan, the MP for East Tyrone, Kettle accepted the candidature for the vacant parliamentary seat at the resulting by-election. He won the seat by a narrow majority of 18 votes, becoming one of the few young men to gain admission to the aging Irish Party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Seen as a future party leader, he went to America in late 1906, participating in a number of propaganda and fund-raising meetings. In the House of Commons at Westminster he was a staunch supporter of the Irish Party and its constitutional path to Home Rule, also encouraging the provision of higher education for Irish Catholics and improving Ireland's economic condition.
He was deeply steeped in European culture. Kettle's ideal was an Ireland identified with the life of Europe. In "Ireland" he wrote,"My only programme for Ireland consists in equal parts of Home Rule and the Ten Commandments. My only counsel to Ireland is, that to become deeply Irish, she must become European."The Ways of War, Memoir p.4, Mary (Sheehy) Kettle, T. M. Kettle.
Academic career In 1908 he was the first Professor of National Economics at University College Dublin, a constituent college of the new National University of Ireland. Increasingly busy and in demand as a speaker, he had difficulty combining academic work with his work as an MP. He was a popular professor and his interest in economics was reflected in a number of publications concerning financial issues. He was friends with Thomas MacDonagh, and wrote for his magazine The Irish Review. In 1911, he helped to establish the Legal & Economic Society of the university along with his fellow professor J.G. Swift MacNeill. In September 1909 he married Mary Sheehy, a fellow graduate who had been the muse of the adolescent James Joyce and is the model for the lead female character in Joyce's story "Araby" and Miss Ivors in "The Dead", both collected in Dubliners.
He retained his East Tyrone seat in the January 1910 general election but did not contest the second election in December. Even though out of parliament he remained an active IPP member publishing a number of essays reiterating his support for attaining Home Rule by constitutional means. He enthusiastically greeted the 1912 Home Rule Bill, likewise the removal of the veto power of the Lords, this veto being the last obstacle to Home Rule. On the other hand, he brusquely dismissed Unionist fears of the bill's possible effects, giving the cause of Home Rule prevalence before all other considerations. On 12 January 1912, he gave a talk to the National Liberal Club's Political and Economic Circle.
1913–1914 During the 1913 Dublin strike and lockout, unlike other contemporary upper-class commentators, Kettle supported the locked out workers and published a series of articles which revealed the terrible living and working conditions of Dublin's poor, and was involved in the formation of a peace committee which endeavoured to negotiate a settlement between workers and employers.
In 1913 Kettle also became involved with the paramilitary Irish Volunteers, a new Irish Nationalist militia that formed in response to the creation in the north of the Ulster Volunteers by Edward Carson to oppose the creation of an all-Ireland government based in Dublin via the passage in the British Parliament in London of the Government of Ireland Act 1914. In July 1914 he left Dublin and travelled to Belgium on behalf of the Irish Volunteers seeking to purchase rifles and ammunition for the organization's armoury. While he was in Belgium World War I broke out, and, finding this more interesting than militia arms procurement, he became an on the scene war correspondent for the Daily News, reporting on the opening moves of the armies of the II Reich as they marched Westwards. Travelling throughout Flanders in August and September 1914, he became increasingly alarmed by the punitive measures that he witnessed being implemented against the Belgian civilian population by the Imperial German Army against even the lightest civil resistance to the passage of its troop columns moving through that country heading into France.German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (1999) (2001) John Horne and Alan Kramer of D.U., Yale University Press . Detailed researched account of German atrocities perpetrated on the Belgian and French civilian population in autumn 1914. Winner of the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History in 2000 Kettle perceived at this moment a threat to Europe's liberty from the nature of the II Reich, and began dispatching war reports from Brussels warning against the dire threat to Europe from Prussian militarism, depicting the conflict as "A war of Civilization vs Barbarianism".The Ways of War, "Why Ireland fought" p. 72, T. M. Kettle.
World War I With Ireland having become embroiled in the Great War Kettle returned to Dublin. On arrival back home he sided with the National Volunteers in a split within the Irish Volunteers nationalist militia's ranks between those for whom Irish independence was all, and were increasingly eyeing the possibility an armed confrontation with the British Government (with the threat of an armed insurrection against Irish Nationalism from Ulster having abated with the Ulster Volunteers having enlisted en masse into the British Army to fight in World War I), and those who followed John Redmond's constitutional lead in accepting the Government of the United Kingdom's public undertaking of a restoration of self-government to Ireland in its domestic affairs, temporarily deferred until the war's end, and who were also concerned about matters beyond Ireland's shores with Europe's future in the 20th Century now being decided.
In consequence Kettle volunteered for active service with the 7th Battalion of the Leinster Regiment,Bromyard News and Record, 28 January 1915 but was refused on the grounds of fragile health. He subsequently received a commission into the British Army with the rank of Lieutenant, restricted to garrison service at home.