KEATING, Robert (1800-1893), of Garranlea House, Cashel, Co. Tipperary and Shamrock Lodge, Clapham

Keating was a Catholic merchant and banker from Garranlea, near Cashel, co. Tipperary where his father had, since 1783, leased 22,000 acres of land. The family had been dispossessed during the Cromwellian confiscations, but had re-established itself as a dynasty of prosperous sheep graziers. It was famed for the quality of its livestock, and had been influential in south-east Tipperary since the mid-eighteenth century.1J. O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers: John Sadleir M.P., 1813-56 (1999), 39, 457; Cormac O Grada, Ireland. A New Economic History 1780-1939 (1995), 31; T.P. Power, Land, Politics, and Society in eighteenth-century Tipperary (1993), 24, 113. Keating’s maternal grandfather, James Scully, was a pioneer of provincial banking in Ireland having established a bank in Tipperary Town in 1803.2G.L. Barrow, The Emergence of the Irish Banking System 1820-45 (1975), 160-3, 211. Keating is also said to have claimed kinship with the Keatings of Dromcoloher, the family of Sir Henry Singer Keating (1804-88), Liberal MP for Reading, 1852-9: Geoffrey Keating, The History of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the English Invasion (1857), xv.

A self-proclaimed ‘old Repealer’, Keating claimed to have espoused the cause ‘since first the association was founded’. He served as a collector for the O’Connell Compensation fund in 1838, and attended the repeal meeting at Thurles in September 1845.3Freeman’s Journal, 30 Jan., 19 Oct. 1838, 25 Jan. 1843, and see Tipperary Vindicator, 29 Sept. 1845 and Waterford Mail, 14 Aug. 1847. He was also an early promoter of the Great South-Western Railway and supported Father Mathew’s temperance movement. In 1847, while helping to get his cousin, Francis Scully, elected for County Tipperary, he was approached by the Waterford election committee to stand for the county. Having come forward just one day before the nomination, he was elected unopposed as a repealer and advocate of ‘constitutional agitation’.4O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers, 60-2, and see HP Commons, 1832-68: County Waterford. That autumn, he attended the meeting of Irish peers, MPs and landed gentry to discuss famine relief measures. Shortly afterwards, he spoke out in the Commons against the Irish crime and outrage bill, stating that it would ‘be a complete failure without remedial measures’, and defended the Catholic priesthood against charges that they had been parties to agrarian outrages. Keating declared himself a member of the ‘Old Ireland’ party, which adhered to the leadership of John O’Connell after the secession of Young Ireland, but still held radical views on the question of Irish grievances.5Freeman’s Journal, 12 Nov. 1847; Hansard, 6 Dec. 1847, vol. 95, cc.746-7; Stenton, Who’s Who of British MPs, i, 217; J.H. Whyte, The Independent Irish Party, 1850-9 (1958), 16. In 1849, Keating voted against the government’s transportation (for treason) bill, and in 1850 opposed the sugar duties and marriages bills. While he supported the Whigs in the motion of confidence over the Don Pacifico affair, he voted with the Conservatives to defeat the government’s bonded spirit bill that June.6Freeman’s Journal, 27 June 1849, 8 July 1850; Daily News, 8 Mar., 3 June 1850; The Era, 30 June 1850.

In February 1851, Keating voted against the ecclesiastical titles bill and that April he joined a committee of MPs to mobilise popular opposition to the measure. In August, he attended the formation of the Catholic Defence Association in Dublin. With his cousin John Sadleir, the eminently successful businessman and MP Carlow, 1847-53 and Sligo, 1853-6, he helped form the nucleus of the ‘papal’ or ‘Irish Brigade’, which was pledged to obstruct Russell’s legislation to have the ecclesiastical titles used by Catholic church dignitaries declared illegal. This faction also helped to obstruct the government’s agrarian policy, and Keating participated in their walk out during the committee stage of the titles bill in July.7Freeman’s Journal, 17 Feb., 14 Apr., 20 June, 1 July, 20 Aug. 1851; Morning Chronicle, 21 Aug. 1851; O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers, 164, 189; Whyte, Independent Irish Party, 20-3. He also voted against the ministry’s plans to continue the income tax and opposed the government in four subsequent confidence votes. He supported the motion of censure against Lord Clarendon’s administration of Ireland in February 1852, and was one of eleven Irish members ‘who turned he scale, and gave true significance’ to the confidence vote against the whig ministry on the militia bill, which precipitated Russell’s resignation.8Freeman’s Journal, 5 May 1851; Whyte, Independent Irish Party, 178-9; Belfast News-letter, 23, 25 Feb. 1852; Glasgow Herald, 27 Feb. 1852.

Keating was elected in second place for Waterford City at the general election of 1852, being pledged to an independent Irish representation in parliament based on opposition to ‘anti-Catholic legislation’ and any ministry headed by Russell.9He was described as a ‘Liberal and member of Irish (Roman Catholic) party’: Adam’s Parliamentary Handbook (1854), 271. He also advocated the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland ‘in favour of a more rational and equitable application’ of church property, and argued that provision for the destitute was ‘a sacred duty paramount to all other public obligations’. He favoured substantial extensions to the franchise, the enlargement of Irish boroughs, the ballot and shorter parliaments. Although Keating’s father had been active in the tenant right movement in 1847, and he himself had attended the tenant-right meeting at Kilmacthomas, he differed with the Repeal Association over the extension of what he considered the ill-defined system of ‘Ulster custom’ to the rest of Ireland. Instead he recommended that the land laws be ‘amended, simplified, and condensed’ to compensate improving tenants, and to extend the provision of ‘long, cheap, and valid’ leases. He was, however, pledged to support Sharman Crawford’s tenant-right bill and publicly endorsed the aims of the Tenant-Right conference of September 1852.10Freeman’s Journal, 25 Oct. 1847, 26 Jan., 20 Aug. 1849, 8 Jan. 1850, 8 May 1852, 5 Oct. 1853; O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers, 101-2. He consistently voted for the tenant-right amendments to the government’s subsequent Irish land legislation. He also supported Villiers’s resolution for the extension of free trade in November 1852.

Along with his cousins Francis Scully, MP County Tipperary, 1847-57, Vincent Scully, MP County Cork, 1852-57, 1859-65 and James Sadleir MP County Tipperary, 1852-57, Keating formed part of a family connection in the Commons led by John Sadleir.11Whyte, Independent Irish Party, 108. Like other Irish independent MPs, Keating lent qualified support to the Conservative government, but their refusal to consider the Tenant League’s land bill led him to vote with the opposition on the budget defeat which ended the Derby ministry in December 1852.12Freeman’s Journal, 15 Jul. 1852; Whyte, Independent Irish Party, 180-1; Belfast News-letter, 20 Dec. 1852. When John Sadleir joined Lord Aberdeen’s ministry in January 1853 as junior lord of the Treasury, Keating restated his support for Irish members accepting government posts, for which he was strongly denounced by some nationalists.13O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers, 341-2; The Nation, 12 Feb. 1853. Keating, like the other members of the Sadleir connection, habitually sat on the government side of the House and largely ignored the efforts of his independent colleagues to mobilise opposition to the coalition ministry on non-Irish issues. However, Keating was prepared to oppose Sadleir over the government’s plan to extend the income tax to Ireland, and he supported a proposed inquiry into Irish contributions to imperial finances.14J.B. Conacher, The Aberdeen Coalition 1852-1855 (1968), 124; O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers, 344; Freeman’s Journal, 5 Oct. 1853. Nevertheless, the ministries of Aberdeen and Palmerston were not a propitious time for the discussion of Irish grievances in Parliament, with attention being largely drawn to foreign policy crises in the Crimea and India. Keating’s position in the Commons, therefore, became somewhat ambiguous.15His is the only one of the fifty independent Irish members not to be designated as either ‘Ministerialist’ or ‘Independent Opposition’ by the Freeman’s Journal, 5 Oct 1853, and see S.R. Knowlton, Popular politics and the Irish Catholic Church: the rise and fall of the independent Irish party, 1850-1859 (1992), 273-5. He voted for the government’s Jewish disabilities bill in April 1853, but opposed Gladstone’s budget in May. He supported the grant to Irish Presbyterian ministers that July and backed the government over the enlistment of foreigners bill in December 1854. Nevertheless, he voted against the coalition ministry over its conduct of the Crimean War in January 1855 which led to its fall.16O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers, 343-4; Conacher, Aberdeen Coalition, 73-5, 105; Belfast News-letter, 23 July 1853. Keating subsequently supported the Palmerston ministry in confidence votes over the fall of Kars in April 1856, and over its China policy in March 1857, and was even said to have become a friend of the prime minister, who frequently employed him to purchase Irish Hunters (or sport horses).17B.C. MacDermot, ‘Letters of John Scully to James Duff Coghlan, 1923-27’, Irish Genealogist, 6:3 (1982), 353-69, at 356.

Keating’s parliamentary career was, however, brought to an end as a result of his business links with Sadleir, who had resigned his ministerial position in 1854 after he was implicated in a plot to imprison a depositor of the Tipperary Bank who had refused to vote for him. Keating was the manager of the National Bank of Ireland branch at Cashel and was also a director and the second largest shareholder in the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank, founded by Sadleir in 1839.18Albeit as a trustee of shares purchased by Sadleir: O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers, 372, 457, 486; Thoms Directory, 1852; The Times, 18 Aug. 1856. By February 1856, the bank was insolvent, owing to Sadleir’s overdraft of £288,000, which he had lost in a series of disastrous speculations. Unable to face the consequences, Sadleir committed suicide on Hampstead Heath on 17 February 1856, having confessed all to Keating by letter the day before.19J. O’Shea, ‘Sadleir, John (1813-1856)’, Oxford DNB [www.oxforddnb.com]. For Keating’s role in the banking fiasco, see O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers, 386-7. Sadleir’s relations paid dearly for his delinquency, and Keating was publicly criticised for having ‘weakly allowed himself to become the tool’ of his cousin. He was forced to resign from the London and County Bank, and was pursued through the courts by creditors of the Tipperary Bank. After a judgment of £4,000 was awarded against him, Keating was forced to give up his property at Garranlea. Like his three cousins, who had once formed the nucleus of the Irish Independent Party, Keating was also destroyed politically by this episode.20Ibid., 404-6; The Nation, 1 Mar. 1856; The Times, 24 May 1856. The controversy surrounding the swindles caused the Scully and Keating families to sever their relations: O’Shea, ‘Sadleir, John’. Having voted in only 33 of 198 divisions in 1856, he retired from parliament at the 1857 general election.21J.P. Gassiot & J.A. Roebuck, Third letter to J.A. Roebuck: with a full analysis of the divisions in the House of Commons during the last session of parliament (1857), 31. In England, he quickly became embroiled in another legal dispute and, along with other directors of the London General Omnibus Company, was charged with conspiring to ruin a rival bus company in November 1858. Keating subsequently moved to Dublin where he died in 1893 at the advanced age of 92.22Morning Chronicle, 12 Nov. 1858; O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers, 457.