Patrick Walter Shaw, a leading political figure in Mullingar in early 20th century

Fine Gael held an event to remember PW Shaw TD (1874-1940) at the Greville Arms Hotel on January 26 last; we reported on the event at the time, and here historian Ruth Illingworth explores the story of Mr Shaw in more detail.

Patrick Walter Shaw was one of the leading political figures in Mullingar in the early 20th century. He served as TD for Longford Westmeath for 10 years and was also a member of Westmeath County Council and Mullingar Town Commission for more than two decades.

PW Shaw was born in February 1874 into one of Mullingar’s leading merchant families. His mother, Lizzie Doyne, and her husband Joseph Shaw had set up a number of shops along what is now Pearse Street. The businesses included a grocery store, a drapery shop and an ironmongers. Patrick’s uncle, James Doyne, was also a leading shopkeeper in the town, running a millinery business. He was a long serving member of Mullingar Town Commission and one of the first members of Westmeath County Council.

PW Shaw was educated at Castleknock College and then went to work in the family ironmongers and hardware store, PW Shaw’s, when it was opened in 1895. That is now one of the oldest surviving businesses in Mullingar.

He married Minnie Galligan from Oldcastle and they had eight children. Minnie was very devout and was involved throughout her life with many of the town’s religious and charitable organisations.

In 1909 Patrick bought Belsize House on the Dublin Road. There he would host lavish dinner parties in what one of his grandchildren would describe as "a haven of middle-class comfort". He was well read, loved music, particularly opera, and was always elegantly dressed. Along with his wife and his siblings, PW was a member "of just about every society going" in Mullingar, and he was popular locally.

From an early age, he had a passion for outdoor sports. He loved horses, dogs, coursing and fishing. In 1901, he was all-Ireland clay pigeon shooting champion. During his life, he owned 23 horses and was regarded by his Dáil colleagues as an authority on horse racing and breeding. He presented a cup-known as the Belsize Cup to the Westmeath United Coursing Club. He was a member of the Lough Owel and Lough Ennell Fisheries Association. As he proudly informed the Dáil, he once caught 15 fish in one day on Lough Ennell. During icy weather, he is said to have gone skating on the Royal Canal.

His political career began in the early 1900s when he was elected to Mullingar Town Commission. He served on the commission for a quarter century and was chairman for five consecutive years. Another member of the commission once praised him as being "one of the ablest and best chairmen that could be found in any town".

In 1911, he was elected to the county council and would serve on it for more than 20 years. He was chairman of the County Health Board and was also a member of the boards of the County Infirmary and of the asylum.

His brothers, Thomas and Edward were also involved in local politics as members of the Town Commission and of Mullingar Rural District Council. The Shaw brothers constituted a neutral faction between the supporters of the radical Nationalist Westmeath MP, Larry Ginnell, and the supporters of the Westmeath Examiner editor, John P Hayden, MP, but were closer to Ginnell than to Hayden. They were supporters of Home Rule and contributors to the Home Rule Fund. The Shaw brothers shared a platform with Hayden and Ginnell at a parade of the Westmeath corps of the Irish Volunteers in Mullingar in August 1914.

PW served on the county committee of the Volunteers and he and his brothers contributed large sums to the Home Rule Fund. In 1912, he represented Mullingar District at a Home Rule Convention in Dublin.

When the First World War started, Patrick supported John Redmond’s call for Irishmen to join the British Army. He addressed Recruiting meetings in Mullingar and was one of the organisers, along with Minnie, of a major auction and gift sale to raise money for the Leinster Regiment Comforts Fund. From 1918 until 1936, he was chairman of the Westmeath and later the Midlands District of the British War Pensions Committee. He worked hard over many years to ensure that ex-servicemen got the pensions and grants to which they were entitled. His work took him all over Westmeath and beyond, sometimes with only one person to assist him. The pensions were paid by the British government and he once told the Dáil during a debate on the plight of the war veterans "the more pensions we can get, the better".

The 1916 Rising horrified PW Shaw and he condemned the rebellion strongly at council meetings. (He was chairman of the commission and vice-chairman of the council at the time.) In a private capacity, he wrote a letter to King George V apologising for the Rising. At an emergency meeting of the Town Commission during Easter Week, he proposed the setting up of a volunteer group to assist the authorities to maintain order in Mullingar. When an article in the Daily Mail claimed that rebels had taken over Mullingar Railway Station during the Rising, he sent a telegram to the paper stating: ‘No rebels in Mullingar. All the men we can spare are at the Front.’

His condemnation of the Rising was later remembered when, during an election campaign, opponents wrote graffiti on a wall asking ‘Where was Shaw in 1916?’. PW had a sense of humour and paid someone to write under the original graffiti ‘Fairyhouse! Where Else?’.

His political views shifted as Ireland became more radicalised in the years after the Rising. By 1920, he had moved towards Sinn Féin and he resigned his post as a Justice of the Peace. He retained his seat on the Sinn Féin dominated county council in 1920 and became vice-chairman the following year. During the War of Independence he provided refuge for Michael Collins and hid him in the pantry at Belsize House. On another occasion, when Collins was addressing a political rally in Mullingar on a wet evening, Shaw lent him a coat. Collins wrote a letter to him thanking him for his help. The letter was framed and hung in the dining room at Belsize. The coat was returned to him after Collins’s death. Like other councillors, he suffered harassment at the hands of the Black and Tans, although he was not actually arrested.

PW was delighted when the Truce came in July 1921 and named his new born daughter Olivia Truce. He welcomed the Anglo-Irish Treaty and urged local Dáil deputies to ratify the agreement. When pro- and anti-Treaty soldiers faced off against each other in Mullingar in April, PW, along with other councillors negotiated with both sides to try to prevent a full scale military confrontation. On August 5, 1922, Michael Collins visited Belsize House while he was in Mullingar to inspect troops in Columb Barracks just two weeks before he was killed. Along with other county councillors and commissioners, Shaw attended Collins’s funeral in Dublin and a memorial Mass for Collins and Arthur Griffith held in Mullingar.

In August, 1923 PW Shaw was elected to Dáil Éireann for Longford-Westmeath as a member of the newly formed Cumann na nGaedheal Party. He topped the poll in that and all future elections in which he ran. One of his most prominent supporters was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Meath, Lawrence Gaughran, who was the first person to vote in Mullingar on election day 1923 and made it clear who was getting his vote.

PW was a staunch supporter of the party Keader William Cosgrave and of his government during the difficult years in which the newly independent state was being established after a decade of war and destruction. He would never hold ministerial office but he did serve on a number of Oireachtas committees and represented the Free State government at the annual Armistice Day wreath laying ceremonies in Phoenix Park.

In the Dáil he spoke on a wide range of subjects-including broadcasting, sport, housing and health care. He opposed betting shops and entertainment taxes on horse racing. He supported government grants for house repairs and building and sought more funding to enable councils such as Westmeath to improve housing standards. Shaw was aware of the high levels of poverty and poor housing existing in Mullingar and of the connection between bad housing and bad health. He told the Dáil that ‘bad housing is one of the principal causes of many diseases’ and stated that ‘the conditions under which a very large number of people have to live in this country are nothing short of deplorable’.

During his career on the county council and Town Commission he worked hard to try to get council housing repaired or rebuilt, telling the Dáil on one occasion that ‘I got 65 houses built within two miles of my own home for £50,000’. He asked the Department of Defence on a number of occasions whether parts of Columb Barracks could be made available to the local authorities for housing and that eventually happened in 1928 when the married quarters at the barracks were secured.

Shaw was instrumental in the passage of legislation, allowing local councils to buy market rights from town landlords. He was on friendly terms with Lord Greville (he was once criticised for being too deferential towards him) and, along with other councillors, he negotiated with Greville to acquire the tolls and rents from the fairs and weekly markets in the town for the Town Commission to be spent on housing.

As a TD and as chairman of the County Health Board, he sought government help to improve hospital conditions. In 1926 a substantial private donation enabled the Health Board to provide an X-ray machine for the County Hospital and he stated in the Dáil that ‘Every hospital in the Saorstat should have a first class X-ray apparatus’. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the proposed Hospital Sweepstake system as a way to provide funding for the health services and supported amendments in the legislation to increase the share of funding to be made available to county hospitals and infirmaries. The new County Hospital which opened in Mullingar in 1936 was the first of its kind to be built with money from the Sweepstake. He wanted politics to be taken out of the running of health boards and ‘business methods applied’.

High levels of unemployment troubled him and he sought in the Dáil and the county council to get measures passed giving employment priority to older men with large families to support. In 1924, he pleaded with Westmeath county Council staff to accept cuts in wages so that the council could afford to take on extra staff. His support for wage cuts led to him being assaulted at a council meeting and an attempt was made to blow up a large monkey puzzle tree in the grounds of Belsize House.

PW supported the provision of free school meals and wanted an existing law which enabled urban district and city councils to financially support schools and charities in the work of supplying free meals to be extended to town commission areas so that the Mullingar commissioners could help the Christian Brothers and Presentation Sisters, who were trying to care for their needy pupils. Shaw told the Dáil that it was essential that every child was provided with a hot meal daily.

He also sought government support for the provision of proper equipment for local fire brigades and wanted it made obligatory for rates to be used to fund fire services in provincial towns, fearing that if that was not done, there would be a major fire disaster due to lack of apparatus one day.

His hardware shop was one of the first businesses in Mullingar to acquire a telephone and he was keen to see the phone network extended to rural areas and to support local post offices. When a post office worker lost his job because he had supported the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War, Shaw helped to get him reinstated, arguing that a man should not be denied employment because of his politics if he was competent at his job.

PW was the first person in Mullingar to own a radio and he supported the expansion of broadcasting services in Ireland, welcoming the new transmitter in Athlone (known as Radio Athlone). He spoke in the Dáil about the ‘magnificent concerts’ broadcast by the BBC and continental stations such as Königsberg, and hoped that more concerts by the Army and Garda Bands would be heard on Irish radio.

Shaw was also the first person in Mullingar to own a motor car and he sought more government grants to improve road surfaces in Longford and Westmeath as the number of cars and lorries increased. (The Mullingar Longford road was jokingly referred to as the ‘Shaw Election Road’.)

He was an enthusiastic promoter of local tourism, which he believed would bring great benefit to Westmeath and Longford, and he extolled the beauties of the Westmeath lakes and the many historic sites of the county, which he regarded as being among the great treasures of Ireland.

He was always optimistic about Ireland’s future, describing it as "the best country in the world" and a place admired across the globe. In a speech welcoming the Shannon Hydro Electric scheme, he declared: ‘This scheme is the beginning of a prophecy made by St Colmcille that, after 700 years, we would be the happiest, most prosperous people on earth.’

PW Shaw retired from the Dáil at the 1933 election. His health was failing and he wanted to concentrate more on his business. The Great Depression and the Economic War caused him great financial difficulties and the hardware shop barely survived the economic crisis.

Serious illness cast a shadow over his family at that time. His daughter Kathleen died from TB in 1931 and his son Frank, who was studying for the priesthood, was also suffering from TB and other ailments and spent the summer of 1932 recuperating at home. Another son, Vincent, would also die from TB in 1942. Fr Frank Shaw SJ (1907-1970) survived tuberculosis and went on to have a distinguished academic career at UCD.

Patrick Walter Shaw died at his home on September 14, 1940, aged 66. His wife Minnie had passed away just six months earlier. Her funeral was described as being ‘one of the largest seen in the town for many years’. Patrick’s funeral was equally large and was attended by William Cosgrave, Richard Mulcahy, Sean McEoin and other leading Fine Gael figures, as well as numerous priests and Bishop Thomas Mulvany. He was buried in the family plot in Walshestown.