It was another Frederick William Mullins (d. 1712), an English colonel, who established this branch of the family in Kerry, settling at Burnham House, near Dingle, in about 1666 and serving as Member for Dingle, 1692-3, and Tralee, 1695-6. His great-grandson Thomas (1736-1824), who was awarded a baronetcy in 1797, was created Baron Ventry in the Irish peerage, 31 July 1800, as a reward for his eldest son’s support for the Union in the Dublin Parliament, in which he sat briefly for Dingle that year. Ventry, one of the three major electoral patrons in Kerry, shied away from bringing forward his son Thomas, an army officer, in 1801, and thereafter usually backed the ministerialist James Crosbie*, partly in the hope of extracting a step in the peerage from Lord Liverpool’s administration.
This Member, whose father was the sixth son of the 1st baron, was described by Daniel O’Connell* in 1823 as ‘a fine young man of 19’, who was then apparently intent on making a disadvantageous marriage with a daughter of ‘black Arthur’s’ (possibly one of the several Blennerhassetts of that name).
Mullins made what one local paper considered a paltry maiden speech, unsuccessfully moving for a return of the number of Protestants in each Irish parish, 30 June 1831; although he obtained a return of the amount of vestry assessments, 25 July, his promised bill to rectify abuses in vestry taxation did not materialize that session.
By a pre-session address to ‘the people of Kerry’, 4 Dec. 1831, he called for petitions to be forthcoming against the inadequate Irish reform bill, specifically for an extension of the franchise to leaseholders, more Irish seats and a different system of registration; he raised these same points in the House on the Irish measure being presented by Smith Stanley, the Irish secretary, 19 Jan. 1832.
He divided for Ebrington’s motion for an address calling on the king to appoint only ministers who would carry the reform bill unimpaired, 10 May 1832. He voted for Buxton’s anti-slavery motion, 24 May, against excluding insolvent debtors from Parliament, 30 May, to make permanent provision for the Irish poor by a tax on absentees, 19 June, and for coroners’ inquests to be held in public, 20 June. He divided for the second reading of the Irish reform bill, 25 May, but on 18 June, when he was in the minority for his colleague’s motion to enfranchise Irish £5 freeholders, he introduced his own amendment to give the vote to £30 Irish leaseholders of at least 19 years’ standing. Passionately insisting that his aim was to give Ireland as extensive, effective and advantageous a reform as England would receive, he argued in detail for this change as the proportional equivalent of the English £10 freeholder and £50 tenant-at-will franchise. He was assisted by O’Connell, but the debate degenerated into a squabble involving the latter, and the motion, for which he was a teller, was defeated by 161-9. He divided for Sheil’s amendment against the liability of electors to pay their municipal taxes before being allowed to vote, 29 June, and vainly attempted to secure two other technical alterations to the franchise, 18 July. He objected to Smith Stanley resuming the debate on tithes when so many Irishmen were absent, but was defeated in his attempt to postpone it, 10 July. Advocating a justly distributed general land tax as the best means of securing the state’s revenues, he condemned the second report of Smith Stanley’s tithes select committee as an inadequate representation of the evidence brought before it, 13 July. Utterly opposed to the commutation of tithes, he voiced the Irish view that the intended alterations would not be sufficient to solve the problem and voted in the minority to postpone the issue to the reformed Parliament. He presented petitions for the total abolition of Irish tithes, 18, 28 July 1832.
With the endorsement of O’Connell, who wrote that ‘he has done his duty by the country and the country ought not to desert him’, Mullins, whose father died that month, was re-elected as a Liberal and a Repealer at the general election in December 1832.
On 8 Mar. 1854 De Moleyns, as he had become at the instigation of the 3rd Baron Ventry in 1841, appeared in the police court in London charged with having forged a signature to a power of attorney with a view to defrauding the Bank of England of £1,500. He indignantly pleaded his innocence, the lord mayor having made several disparaging remarks about a man of his position falling so low, but had insufficient funds to mount bail and was ordered to Newgate. He died there, suddenly, of natural causes, just over a week later.