Dillon, John (1851-1927)

Irish nationalist politician. He was a vigorous supporter of Charles Parnell until the O'Shea divorce affair, when he became the leader of the anti-Parnellite Irish National Federation. He supported John Redmond as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and succeeded him in 1918, but was overwhelmingly defeated by Sinn Fein in the elections that year.

The son of John Blake Dillon, he qualified as a surgeon before entering Parliament in 1880. Dillon was a militant agrarian in the 1880s, and served a number of periods of imprisonment. He split with Parnell and led the main anti-Parnellite faction of Fine Gael, before stepping aside to allow the party to re-unite under Redmond in 1900. Thereafter he worked effectively if not closely with Redmond, the latter mostly in London, while Dillon tended the party machine at home. He took part in the main negotiations during the prolonged home rule crisis after 1910, and declined to lend active support to the British war effort after 1914. He bitterly denounced the government's policies towards the rebels in Ireland in 1916 and accurately predicted the shift in Irish national sentiment towards outright separatism. In 1918, he was defeated by de Valera at East Mayo - the seat he had held since 1885 - and retired from public life.