By Julyan G. Peard
Published in Irish Historical Studies, January 2026.
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Abstract

It was by chance that John Morrogh (1849–1901) became an imperial player. Leaving Ireland as an almost penniless young man moulded by the Catholic nationalism of the Christian Brothers, he joined the early diamond rush to Kimberley, South Africa, and returned home twenty years later a director of Cecil Rhodes’s De Beers Consolidated Diamond Mines. He joined the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and his diamond fortune eased his path to a seat in the House of Commons. As the IPP fragmented, he took the side of the anti-Parnellite, Tim Healy, until he resigned his seat and returned to Cork where he became an influential figure in business and local government. This article traces the fortunes and sensibilities of an Irish migrant who in many ways exemplifies Ireland’s ‘ambivalent heritage’ of nationalism and empire.1