Henry Harrison

Captain Henry Harrison (17 December 1867 – 20 February 1954) was an Irish politician. He served as MP in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as member of the Irish Parliamentary Party represented Mid Tipperary from 1890 to 1892. He later served as a Royal Irish Regiment officer with the New British Army in World War I, was an extensive writer, and proponent of improved relations between the United Kingdom and Ireland. Biography A Protestant nationalist, Harrison was the son of Henry Harrison of Holywood and Ardkeen, County Down and of Letitia Tennent. She was the daughter of Robert James Tennent, who had been Liberal MP for Belfast from 1847 to 1852. Later, when widowed, she married the author Hartley Withers. he was the brother of Sarah Cecilia Harrison, artist and social reformer. Harrison went to Westminster School and then to Balliol College at Oxford. While there he developed an admiration for Charles Stewart Parnell and became secretary of the Oxford University Home Rule Group. At this time, the Land War was in progress and in 1889 Harrison went to Ireland to visit the scene of the evictions in Gweedore, County Donegal. He became involved in physical confrontations with the Royal Irish Constabulary and as a result became a Nationalist celebrity overnight. The following May, Parnell offered the vacant parliamentary seat of Mid-Tipperary to Harrison, who left Oxford, still aged only 22, to take it up, unopposed. Only six months later, following the divorce case involving Katharine O'Shea, the Irish Parliamentary Party split over Parnell's leadership. Harrison strongly supported Parnell, acted as his bodyguard and aide-de-camp, and after Parnell's death devoted himself to the service of his widow Katharine. From her he heard a completely different version of the events surrounding the divorce case from that which had appeared in the press, and this was to form the seed of his later books.