John Patrick Hayden

Who was John Patrick Hayden?

John Patrick Hayden was an Irish nationalist politician and MP. in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as member of the Irish Parliamentary Party represented South Co. Roscommon from 1897 to 1918. He was also editor and proprietor of the Westmeath Examiner, published in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, and a member of the Irish Board of Agriculture. He was imprisoned four times by the British administration under different Coercion Acts.

He was the seventh son of Luke and Mary Hayden of Roscommon, and was educated at St Comans, Roscommon. In 1912 he married Henrietta Hill, daughter of Thomas Scott of Hannaville, Greenisland, Co. Antrim.

Hayden founded the Westmeath Examiner in 1882, when he was not yet 20. In his early days he also made valuable contributions to Irish literature. He was an active campaigner during the Land War and Plan of Campaign of the 1880s. Like his older brother Luke Hayden, MP for South Leitrim and later for South Roscommon, John Hayden supported Charles Stewart Parnell during the split in the Irish nationalist movement from 1890 over Parnell’s leadership. As a result, the Westmeath Examiner was subjected to a clerically organized boycott, and only survived commercially through a pact between Unionists and Parnellites on the Mullingar Board of Guardians, dividing advertising between pro-Parnellite and Unionist papers and excluding the clericalist Westmeath Independent.