William Martin Murphy

Murphy was born on 6 January 1845 in Castletownbere, County Cork, and educated at Belvedere College. It is frequently incorrectly stated (including in the cited article) that he was an 'only child' when in fact he had two brothers who died young, and a sister Margaret Cullinane, who lived to be 93, and was buried with Murphy in Glasnevin. When his father, the building contractor Denis William Murphy (1799–1863), died, he took over the family business. His enterprise and business acumen expanded the business, and he built churches, schools and bridges throughout Ireland, as well as railways and tramways in Britain, West Africa and South America.

He was invited in 1917 to take part in talks during the Irish Convention which was called to agree terms for the implementation of the suspended 1914 Home Rule Act. However he discovered that John Redmond was negotiating agreeable terms with Unionists under the Midleton Plan to avoid the partition of Ireland but at the partial loss of full Irish fiscal autonomy. This infuriated Murphy who criticised the intention in his newspaper, which severely damaged the Irish Parliamentary Party. However, the Convention remained inconclusive, and the ensuing demise of the Irish party resulted in the rise of Sinn Féin, whose separatist policies Murphy also did not agree with.

Murphy died on 26 June 1919 and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

His family controlled Independent Newspapers until the early 1970s, when the group was sold to Tony O'Reilly.

He was elected as Irish Parliamentary Party MP for Dublin St Patrick's at the 1885 general election, taking his seat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was a member of the informal grouping, the "Bantry band" – a group of politicians who hailed from the Bantry Bay area. The Bantry Band was also disparagingly dubbed the "Pope's brass band". Its most famous member was Timothy Healy MP and included Timothy Harrington MP, sometime Lord Mayor of Dublin City – however, Harrington (unlike Murphy and, later, Healy) was a Parnellite in the 1890s. (Tim Harrington MP was not the same individual as TR Harrington, who edited the Irish Independent from 1905 to 1931, though they both came from the Bantry/Schull area in West Cork.)

When the Irish Parliamentary Party split in 1890 over Charles Stewart Parnell's leadership, Murphy sided with the majority Anti-Parnellites. However, Dublin emerged as a Parnellite stronghold and in the bitter general election of 1892, Murphy lost his seat by over three to one to a Parnellite newcomer, William Field.

Murphy was the principal financial backer of the "Healyite" newspapers the National Press and the Daily Nation. His support for Healy attracted the hostility of the majority anti-Parnellite faction led by John Dillon. He made two attempts to return to Parliament, at Kerry South in 1895 and Mayo North in 1900, but both were unsuccessful because of Dillonite opposition.